Boyd says that today our online identities more closely reflect who we are in real life, the personas are tied together unlike the way users would “type themselves into being” in the beginning days of the Internet. It’s true to an extent, but Boyd has failed to consider the use of social media to legitimize yourself to yourself and to your real life peers.

“The stories we tell ourselves about ourselves make us who we are” (Kurt Vonnegut maybe). As a 15-17 year old girl on social media, my entire identity revolved around making myself seem as beautiful, mysterious, and desirable as possible. This was especially palpable through my Instagram and Twitter. I never bought followers, but I did my thirsty best to gain them through skanky hashtags and red-lipsticked photos. Once I hashtagged “like4bjs”. It’s laughable now but I’m not ashamed to admit it. During the time in adolescence where popularity and beauty seem like the two most important things in life, the crushing, Lolita-esque desire to feel love is manifested online. The affection you feel is artificial and fleeting, your heart pumping adrenaline as you refresh your photo again and again to see how many likes you have. The amount of followers, likes, reblogs and retweets you get makes you feel like some sort of goddess. Best of all, you know your school friends are jealous of your thousands of Instagram followers. Instagram and Tumblr “fame” have replaced playground popularity. Even if you’re the biggest outcast in your high school, getting love on social media creates an allure around you that fools your IRL peers into thinking you are actually cooler than them.

Then, last month Instagram deleted spam accounts, including fake profiles who have never posted a photo but follow hundreds of thousands. The penny-a-follow people. It was a glorious day. The people who had previously seemed like Instagram forces to be reckoned with were reduced to naked bundles of shame. The carefully manufactured online existence was shattered as people were forced to admit they were not as cool as pretended to be. It was the online equivalent of a queen bee takedown, akin to the stabbing of Ceasar or the fall of Regina George.

Imagine the Molly Ringwald Teen Queen Trilogy (Breakfast Club, 16 Candles, Pretty In Pink). Now imagine the same thing with the internet. In Pretty In Pink, Molly would own a successful Etsy shop, selling her own wares, defining the “it” aesthetic and rocketing herself out of wrong-side of the tracks poverty. In Breakfast Club, she would be a secret Tumblr bulimic, an active member of the Emo/ Thinspo community where she would vent the feelings she couldn’t express in life (everyone in the Breakfast Club would be hardcore Tumblr addicts). The luddite rejects new technology, but if we had had this tool 20 years ago you can bet teens would use it for the same thing. Online personas are simply another story we tell ourselves about the people we think we are and the people we want to be.