Youth, gender, and digitally policed corporate credibility: The ballad of "Abby Farle"

Responses to Chick-Fil-A’s statement affirming their condemnation of gay marriage has been widely variable, with many, including Jim Hensen’s Muppets, chastising the company for intolerance. But this is not the stance of Facebook’s “Abby Farle.” Farle expressed her support of Chick-Fil-A’s adherence to “Biblical principles” in comment threads on the company’s Facebook page, and asserted that the restaurant’s distancing from Muppets products had nothing to do with the recent fall-out. “Abby” quoted a Bible passage in her defense of the company, and threw in the common kid web-slang “derr” to punctuate and contextualize her statement.

Other commenters replied by called out “Abby Farle” as being a front for Chick-Fil-A public relations, noting that “her” account was set up minutes before “her” posting, and that “her” picture was from shutterstock.com, a company that sells stock photos. “Abby” has since discontinued her account. Though run by men, it appears that some believe Chick-fil-A's public relations office have taken a bit too literal of an approach to their name in social media forums this time around.

The impressions of people considered experts are given considerable clout when gauging the quality of information. These peoples’ thoughts on subjects can be seen as particularly insightful, important, and meaningful. They bring unique and hard-to-challenge knowledge and perspective to a discussion. The "expert" takes on many forms, with some being book smart, some street smart. Others are knowing in other ways.

While females are rarely considered experts in media, when we're talking virtue and goodness, they are historically summoned to symbolize and to police societal propriety, tradition, and family. This is particularly the case for white girls, who can be interchangeably used as symbols of purity and of corruption. In new media, white girls are regularly used to paint pictures of social ineptitude, weakness, stupidity, and vacuous waste, taking this cultural work away from the "dumb blonde." They are also forwarded as gold standard experts when it comes to representing virginal wholesomeness.

In this case, a fast food restaurant hoping to appear "aw shucks" down-homey and family-minded might be well-served and highly strategic choosing to channel its messaging through the image of someone who embodies wholesomeness and family-mindedness. While age, education, and a lack of buy-in to the smarmy get-ahead ethos that bounds public relations and many other spaces within the adult world will keep them out of Chick-fil-A spokesperson positions, the white girl doesn't need to take these jobs to be spoken through online. Lacking sentience and subjectivity, she can be compiled entirely of stock photos and short sentences and glib slang. She does not have or need agency. She is a tool owned by others. She can work for them. She can exist for them. Objectification enters the digital era.

I wonder if "Abby Farle"'s messages would have been read as springing as much from traditional values and purity if they had been offered by a boy? By a black girl? By a Latino male? By an Asian woman? A white southern Baptist preacher? I don't think so. As any PR maven knows, the messaging matters. How you present an idea has even more sway than what you say in it (see Reagan campaign, 1984, Bernays, Herman & Chomsky, Stuart Hall's Encoding/Decoding, and more). Comment boards and gaming forums are rife with names nodding to certain identities, and thus socially signaling much more than what they simply write and do. A young white girl summoning Biblical verses in defense of "traditional" beliefs holds certain clout that the others just don't have. Why? Because of how we raise our kids in our culture. Because of how we think of kids in our culture. Because how we understand girls in our culture. Because of how race matters in our culture.

While the ability for cloaked messaging -- or "sock puppeting" -- through social media raises some serious credibility and trust issues that impact information quality in the digital age, this instance again reminds us that race, age, and gender matter a whole heck of a lot in understanding technology as part of new media and society. Information offered in online spaces is disembodied and distanced from the social identity of its source, but it is not neutral. Rather, it commonly relies on familiar analog identity heuristics for framing and contextualization, as well as for spiking it with cultural codes and meaning.

Following up on Lisa Nakamura's badass work, the adage still holds; while nobody knows you're a dog online, if you post as a dog, readers will be more likely to trust your views on topics related to bones.

Messaging matters. Though girls are commonly considered socially impotent in US society, in new media spaces where anonymity is the norm, the "white girl," as cultural message, can be very productive indeed.

Anti-anonymous algorithms?

From Slashdot:

mbstone writes "Arvind Narayana writes: What if authors can be identified based on nothing but a comparison of the content they publish to other web content they have previously authored? Naryanan has a new paper to be presented at the 33rd IEEE Symposium on Security & Privacy. Just as individual telegraphers could be identified by other telegraphers from their 'fists,' Naryanan posits that an author's habitual choices of words, such as, for example, the frequency with which the author uses 'since' as opposed to 'because,' can be processed through an algorithm to identify the author's writing. Fortunately, and for now, manually altering one's writing style is effective as a countermeasure."

In this exploration the algorithm's first choice was correct 20% of the time, with the poster being in the top 20 guesses 35% of the time. Not amazing, but: "We find that we can improve precision from 20% to over 80% with only a halving of recall. In plain English, what these numbers mean is: the algorithm does not always attempt to identify an author, but when it does, it finds the right author 80% of the time. Overall, it identifies 10% (half of 20%) of authors correctly, i.e., 10,000 out of the 100,000 authors in our dataset. Strong as these numbers are, it is important to keep in mind that in a real-life deanonymization attack on a specific target, it is likely that confidence can be greatly improved through methods discussed above — topic, manual inspection, etc."

On assumptions and adolescence

How are young people understood in American society? Why are they understood that way?

Biological bases for adolescence have strongly shaped how young people are considered. G. Stanley Hall's coining of adolescence cited biological immaturity as the reason for young people to struggle through periods of "storm and stress and to act like "pigmoid savages." Despite any biological backing, Hall's work laid the groundwork for understanding post-Industrial youth as irrational, emotional, and needing of protection due to biologically-based hormonal imbalances and wiring. Because they were born that way.

This biological explanation has been picked up by many to explain away adolescent concerns. It has influenced the DSM, and informed basic assumptions of researchers and psychologists. And this has influenced how young people are discussed and known.

Focus on the Family's James Dobson draws upon psychological research to counsel parents that that their children are so hard to understand because their hormones render them biologically (thus necessarily) irrational and entirely out of touch. "For several years," he writes to his followers in a forum titled Solid Answers, "a teenager may not interpret his world accurately." Biological changes in adolescence leads not only to young people's skewed perspective on the world, but to other things too. Their son thinks differently than their daughter because he is "wired neurologically" and because of the "influence of certain hormones". He also brushes off the validity of young females' emotions by letting parents know that they are fleeting by-products of "glandular upheaval" that should be tracked and, if at all possible, avoided. In other words, concerns and will expressed by young women are merely the unpleasant side-effect of a hormonal phase they are going through. They don't mean anything to the kid. They will pass.

Of course, certain hormones have specific types of influence over emotions and behaviors. But an influence is not a cause. Attention to biological determinants to behavior lacks attention to identities being inherently produced as a product of expectations and actions. It lacks understandings of how identities are socially produced.

NPR recently ran a piece on young professions in the workplace fully equipped with "helicopter parents" who swoop in to provide counsel and to buffer blows. Referring repeatedly to college- and full-employment-aged young people as "kid" and "child," this media portrayal further shapes young people beyond the teenage years -- which coincides with the extension of the period of adolescence -- as immature, irresponsible non-adults.


Critical scholars such as Larry Grossberg, Nancy Lesko, and Mike Males challenge these framings, and raise question about the assumptions a held on youth that lead to older and older citizens being treated as minors. I'll be drawing upon their work to look at young people's social media use as a form of resistance against the extended marginality of adolescence.

Because how we treat something has everything to do with how we understand it.