AP PHOTO/KARLY DOMB SADOF
BEHIND THE SCREEN
where it seemed all their shared
plans were being made.
“She wasn’t in the group chat,
so we stopped being friends with
her,” Casey says. “Not because we
didn’t like her, but we just weren’t
in contact with her.”
On a recent Thursday, Casey
and her friends are up texting on
iMessage until midnight, then
they pick up again around 7 a.m.,
when they wake for school. By 4
p.m. that day, the group has exchanged more than 56 messages,
not including those sent in the
private, one-on-one chats Casey
also kept going during the day.
“That’s not even a lot. That’s
small. And we were in school the
whole day also,” Casey says.
Early that morning, they kicked
off their conversation polling each
other on what they’d wear to school.
“Shorts?” someone wrote, followed by, “Should I?”
“I’m not.”
“What are you wearing?”
“Leggings.”
“Would it be weird if I wore my
Hunters [rainboots]?”
“Is the bus there?”
Later, the girls cast votes on
which picture each should share for
“TBT” (short for Throwback Thursday), a weekly Instagram tradition,
HUFFINGTON
07.14.13
“If you don’t get 100 ‘likes,’ you
make other people share it so you
get 100. Or else you just get upset.
Everyone wants to get the most
‘likes.’ It’s like a popularity contest.”
where people post childhood photos. The typical teen girl will send
and receive 165 text messages in a
day, according to a 2012 report by
the Pew Research Center. Casey’s
texting continues even when she