What Do Teenagers Learn Online Today? That Identity Is a Work in Progress – The New York Times

On April 26, 2018, a 15-year-old named Antonio Garza sat in front of her mirror in her bedroom in Austin, Tex., turned on her phone and started talking to herself as she did her makeup. She had long, curly brown hair that she wished were straight, almost no nails at all and a red, irritated upper lip she didnt really know why her lip was red, it just was and she displayed all this for the camera.

Im dying finally! Antonio said, and for the next 20 minutes she oscillated like the teenager that she is, a kind of excited electron, bouncing between one shell of identity and the next: pimply high school freshman, femme glam diva, vulnerable diarist, camera-ready ham. Throughout, she flicked across her face dozens of makeup brushes and powders, creating cut-creases on her eyelids and contours on her cheekbones and nose, then applying fake eyelashes fluffy as kittens. As she did all this, she monologued about how she thought she was going to do a makeup channel but decided she didnt want to do a makeup channel. I need to not be annoying, and Im not doing a good job at that, Antonio said, cheerfully. I also look ugly, and Im really depressed!

Forty-five minutes later, tender, glittering and shellacked in cosmetics, she was ready for school.

A year earlier, in eighth grade, Antonio spent most of her time playing oboe and Fortnite, hanging out alone in her room and making mistakes with her eyebrows. This sounds as if it would be lame, and it was, in fact, lame. But being a depressed kid alone in your room is not what it used to be. Its one thing to be depressed and listen to the Smiths in your oversize Champion sweatshirt and write in your journal and then hide that journal away and come out and pretend you have your act together. Its another thing to be a depressed kid alone in your room in your oversize Champion sweatshirt and then make some videos that toggle back and forth, back and forth, between Im not thriving at all right now and Actually I just slayed; between using Final Cut Pro to distort your face into the shape of a waterlogged Mr. Potato Head and creating a military-grade defense shield of foundation and bronzer. That is to say, to be a gender-bending kid alone in your room making videos that capture exactly what it feels like to be a teenager right now, the whole multipolar mess of humanity deep inside your own brain, and then post those videos to YouTube even though what youve just expressed to your smartphone you probably would not say to your mother in the kitchen and definitely would not say to your classmates, all of whom (you believe, wrongly) think youre really weird.

Later that afternoon, her hair now up in a ponytail, Antonio returned to her room and apologized to her 30 YouTube subscribers for being such a failure because shed forgotten to vlog at school. Or really, she said, she hadnt forgotten to vlog at school. She just hadnt wanted to vlog at school because in every situation in her seven-hour school day, she felt uncomfortable. Also, she said, staring at the floor, she looked terrible. Which maybe you couldnt tell in this lighting. But if you could tell and you were thinking of writing Youre ugly in the comments below

Antonio paused and stared into the camera, open as a wound. Dont, she said. Please.

She titled the video Ninth Grade Makeup Transformation and uploaded it to YouTube.

Then nothing happened. Or at least nothing happened for a few days. Then right before finals week of her freshman year, Antonios phone start blowing up with notifications. On Sunday, May 13, 2018, Antonio reached 10,000 YouTube subscribers. By May 22, she had more than 100,000, and by May 31, 300,000. Kids started sending her screenshots of her face on their YouTube recommendation pages, saying: What the heck! I had no idea! Congrats!

By then, thank God, school was out for summer vacation. Antonio hung out in her room making even more videos digitally widening her brow and narrowing her chin until she looked like the alien E.T.; installing over her dark irises a pair of light blue contacts; slowing down her voice to lower it three octaves; taking mortifying trips to Target, where everybody stared at her; sharing how to get un-ugly tutorials that include so many steps you might want to die; saying: Im funny, Im not funny at all. So thats funny. Its actually Im funny though. By the time school reopened for Antonios sophomore year, she had a million YouTube subscribers, and it was basically impossible for her to attend. Because you cant be a YouTuber and go to a big public school. You just cant. Emma Chamberlain, who is 18 and who some say created the jumpy editing style Antonio now does better, dropped out. The Dolan twins, who are now 19 and who after five years of filming every aspect of their lives, including wisdom-teeth extractions, just announced that they were going to stop uploading weekly for the sake of their mental health, dropped out before her. As Antonio explained to me, to high schoolers YouTubers are the equivalent of mainstream celebrities. Each morning when she walked on campus, the same kids who ignored her for years suddenly wanted to take selfies with her in the courtyard. And the same kids shed known forever, kids who had been in her gym class or played with her in middle-school band, were like, Do you remember me? You probably dont remember me.

And Antonio was like, Um, Ive known you since we were 6.

One day this past spring, I entered my home office to find that my 14-year-old had written ANTONIO GARZA on my whiteboard in small red letters. I texted her at school to ask why.

I thought it would be funny for u to watch one of her videos, she wrote back. Cuz ur old. (She added, jk, I love you. Nice.)

My daughters entertainment philosophy not incorrect was, and still is, that TV is primarily made by old people for old people and thus is irrelevant to her. YouTube, on the other hand, at least the part of it she sees, is made by teenagers for teenagers. And not just that, its made by teenagers talking to themselves in private, broadcasting their boredom-laced secret diaries, promising (and at moments, delivering) remote intimacy. This made watching those videos low-key compelling, good background for texting your friends or doing homework (if you were not inclined just to cue up a four-hour video of a person studying, which is now a thing). My daughter also found Antonio relatable, a huge buzzword among teenage YouTubers these days.

Is this what your brain feels like? I asked.

She said yes. Then she added, more knowingly than I might have liked: You dont think in one constant line of thought. She meant both me specifically and humans in general. My brain could never.

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Meme accounts have taken over Instagram. According to Instagram, meme content is shared seven times more than nonmeme content on the service. The pages have grown so widespread that Instagram is hiring a meme-account liaison to work with such accounts. In 2016, Samir Mezrahi founded @KaleSalad, a tremendously popular meme account with more than 3.4 million followers. If youre looking to start an account of your own, he has a few tips.

1. No interest is too niche.

Youll be more successful if you make memes that are related to your interests. That could be your high school, your high school teams, cars, travel, you can focus on a movie, or show, or character like Shrek.

2. Straightforward handles are best.

You can have your interest and add memes at the end of the handle; try to keep it as clear as possible. A lot of accounts have the words zar, plug, memes: You can add variations if your original name isnt available. Kale Salad was a meme in itself back when I got it. Now its an old meme and kind of a dead meme, but it still works.

3. Fake tweets and viral images are eternal.

A good genre of meme is when you tap into whatever the viral image of the moment is and make it your thing. One genre of meme uses the tweet format. Thats caption on the top and one or two images below; sometimes theres text on the images. People digest that format well.

4. Be shameless.

After you post your first meme, you have to promote it. Every time you post, you should share it to your Instagram Stories. You need to tell people to follow you and check out your account. You can use some hashtags to start. Try to get anyone in your existing network to check out your account. And be consistent. A lot of people dont post enough; you can post a few times a day.

5. Go private.

Going private is a fun growth hack. You set your account to private because D.M.s are a popular thing on Instagram. Friends D.M. each other memes, and when your account is set to private, the person you send it to cant see them, so it forces them to follow you to see the meme.''

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Later in the summer, this same child introduced me to JoJo Siwa, another 16-year-old denizen of the internet. JoJo achieved some fame as a star on the reality-TV show Dance Moms but became a megastar online, just as herself. Or really an avatar of herself. Her persona is deliriously, dementedly plastic and flat, a 6-year-old beauty-pageant princess rolled out in a pasta machine. While Antonio circumscribes vast swaths of the human experience pinballing around her six-dimensional universe guileless/sophisticated; earnest/glib; confident/troubled; boyish/girlish; accomplished/bumbling; thriving/morose JoJo seems to emerge from a deep youth internet mind-set that were all Bitmoji-ed, filtered and served up on tiny screens anyway, so why even bother pretending youre warmblooded and whole? The result is horrifying to just about everybody who is not a child or a teenager, including Justin Bieber (who in the not-so-distant past committed his own teenage culture crimes). Last December, JoJo posted on Instagram an image of herself with a new car: a white BMW with a custom paint job that featured rainbows, sparkles, hearts and a gigantic airbrushed photo of her face. Bieber commented, Burn it. (Later, he apologized, and JoJo asked him to play at her 16th-birthday party; he didnt.)

My 17-year-old daughter, in contrast, watched Jeffree Star, a sort of adult male goth drag version of JoJo who joined YouTube in 2006 and currently sells $100 million worth of his cosmetics annually, and whose own identity is such a deliberately plastic work of self-creation that he has had injections, surgery and other procedures on his lips, forehead, nose, teeth and hair. She even watched videos of a fellow YouTube megacelebrity, Shane Dawson, interviewing Jeffree Star while made up and dressed up as Jeffree Star, the two of them in platinum blond wigs and matching $1,850 Gucci tracksuits.

I found this vertigo-inducing unless I viewed it as campy, Escher-inspired video art. But to my daughter it was a relief: Dawson and Star offered their fans the knowledge that you could put on just about any persona you wanted with little or no risk, as with a costume change and some cosmetics-removing wipes, you could simply make that persona go away. You could test out look after look after look, possibility after possibility. One minute your inner diva; the next, your inner nerd. You could treat the whole exercise as ironic. Or experiment with radical sincerity, knowing you could retreat into the safe waters of cynicism if the embarrassment grew too hot. My daughter found this comforting, even counterintuitively stabilizing. Every morning I go in the bathroom at school, and everybody is putting on makeup, and everybody is changing out of the clothes they wore for their mom, she told me. Like literally every morning. And everyone is saying, This is the ugliest Ive ever been, or, I look like Im in a punk-rock band, or, I look like Im an e-boy. Its just like cognitive dissonance.

It is also just like the human experience. Especially at age 16.

Antonio always knew a few things about herself. She knew she wanted to have long, straight hair, and she knew she wanted to wear so much makeup and just be like, essentially, perfect. She didnt want to look like her mom she loves her mom, and her mom is beautiful, but no, absolutely not, she told me. But neither did she want to be like her dad or her older brother. When she was younger, she was into princess dresses, art and eye shadow, and she knew she expressed herself differently from really, like, everybody I went to school with. She didnt cohere in one tidy prefab identity package. And she didnt really care.

Antonio also always knew she wanted to be a YouTuber and do makeup tutorials. But when she actually started doing them, she also realized she wanted to do makeup tutorials and not talk about makeup. By 2018, this was a viable, scrutable social enterprise, in the same way that it became a viable enterprise for Jon Stewart to make comedy shows that were no longer focused on comedy. People will look at this and say, Oh, this is beauty content like, the purpose of this content is for people to learn beauty tips, Kevin Allocca, YouTubes head of culture and trends, told me. But the truth is, once people who grew up watching makeup tutorials began creating their own makeup tutorials, the form started to morph. You peel back a layer, and the beauty stuff becomes this convention that allows you to have another set of interactions and discussions.

In response to her sudden fame, Antonio gave up a little on looks, on life and started wearing almost no makeup to school except fake eyelashes (and yes, she knows some people think its a big deal to wear lashes to school, but they take her only three minutes and they make her look more presentable, so). Her grades also fell into the dumpster. At that point, her mother relented and let her enroll in online school.

Holed up in her room for even more hours a day, Antonio kept making videos. In them, her mother occasionally reaches an arm into Antonios bedroom and deposits a mug of tea on her bureau. Or Antonio orders Taco Bell. Or Antonio rotates through Wagners entire Ring Cycle of emotions while dying her hair pink. The dramas are grand, banal, earnest and unapologetically boring. Antonio then edits them with frantic cuts, subtitles introducing bald sincerity (I am not O.K.), X-ray filters, horror genre music and satirical product placement that is also product placement. Im like, Oh, this is what happens when someone is raised on the internet, one 23-year-old friend said to me when I asked him to explain, like this person grew up thinking in GIFs.

The result is sui generis relatable and a relief, yes, to the young, but also panic-inducing. We all know were disjointed schizoid selves deep inside, yet arent we supposed to leave these selves in the bathroom mirror?

Antonio insists that shes the same in person as she is online, and its true. On a Thursday morning this fall when she opened the front door to her very decorated-for-Halloween house, she was dressed in an oversize T-shirt that covered her shorts, and we sat and talked in her bedroom while she did her makeup.

Im like, Oh, this is what happens when someone is raised on the internet.

Antonio was feeling a little overwhelmed. She was behind in physics, and behind in calculus, and she knew she needed to grind so she did not fail her classes and get kicked out of online school. But at the same time she needed to post to Instagram. This was a professional, not emotional, need: That day she was releasing merch, big black cotton sweatshirts with a single small orange pumpkin embroidered on the front. But posting on Instagram was stressful, like really so stressful, because if a post didnt receive that many likes which for Antonio was between zero and 600,000 then Antonio felt bad about it and wanted to delete it. But deleting a post also looked bad, because it revealed that you cared a pathetic amount about what other people thought. (If a post receives between 650,000 and 900,000 likes, Antonio will keep it up; she can always tell within 10 minutes, honestly five minutes, how a post is going to perform.)

So after Antonio finished her look pink half cut-creases around her eyes, glinting contours on her cheeks, nose and upper lip and misted her face with setting spray, she moved over to her unmade bed to Facetune her photos. I know some YouTubers who will post pictures of themselves taken straight from their phones, and theyre doing fine, Antonio said. Theyre probably mentally doing amazing. But she has a process: First, she gets rid of her acne. Then she color-corrects her neck, removes flyaway hairs, narrows her jawline, straightens her nose, plumps her lips digital, as opposed to analog, cosmetics, essentially. Then she moves the image over to the VSCO app to use its filters. Im not a VSCO girl, she said. Well, maybe I am.

Part of the terror of the internet, for the olds, is that this technology exploits flaws in our thinking. Pre-internet, the prevailing belief was that we had real selves and fake selves, and we cast judgment on the fakes. We took for granted that we should at least try to present ourselves to the world as coherent people with unified personalities. An avatar could only mean trouble (and often did): an alter ego, an outlet, for the excised bits; a convenient, nearly irresistible portal for the parts of ourselves we had repressed.

This foundational (maybe Puritan?) belief in the integrated self has been helpful, even necessary, in real life, because in real life we need to deal with one another in time and space. Thus its nice if our fellow humans are predictable, and you have some idea of what youll be dealing with when a person shows up. There are whole branches of psychology dedicated to trying to help us keep ourselves together. And, of course, rafts of diagnoses bipolar, schizophrenia, multiple personality, borderline personality for those of us who fail to do this well.

And yet, at the same time, we know its a ruse. We are, all of us, deeply, inalienably contradictory and chaotic. In the practical world, we pretend its not true. But in art, if people capture this multidimensionality beautifully enough Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself we herald their genius and praise them for it.

This chaos this cubism, this unleashing of our multiple selves is a feature, not a bug, of the online world. Its arguably its defining characteristic for those who grew up there. You could attribute all the jump cuts, all the endlessly iterating memes, to a destroyed attention span. But its also evidence of something deeper, a mind-set people are just trying to name. The Dutch cultural theorists Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker settled on the term metamodernism, a cultural position they claim is defined by neither modernisms essential optimism nor postmodernisms irony and mistrust, but as an oscillation, an unsuccessful negotiation, between two opposite poles. The sensibility is, as Luke Turner, a British artist and the author of The Metamodernist Manifesto, puts it, a kind of informed navet, a pragmatic idealism, a moderate fanaticism, oscillating between sincerity and irony, deconstruction and construction, apathy and affect, attempting to attain some sort of transcendent position, as if such a thing were within our grasp. It is nostalgic and cynical, knowing and nave; manipulative, manipulated and spontaneous. Arguably it is the dominant postapocalyptic vision of our digital times, the internets McLuhan moment, brought to us by teenagers who, as such, spend their days feeling like 10 different people at once and believe they can, and should, express them all. We all contain multitudes. The kids seem to know thats all right.

Elizabeth Weil is a writer at large for the magazine. She last wrote a profile of Venus Williams. Maurizio Cattelan is an Italian artist whose work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions, including at the Guggenheim Museum in New York and the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. Pierpaolo Ferrari is an Italian photographer and, along with Cattelan, is a founder of the magazine Toiletpaper, known for its surreal and humorous imagery.

Additional design and development by Jacky Myint.

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What Do Teenagers Learn Online Today? That Identity Is a Work in Progress - The New York Times