To be fair, all that stuff has been promoted by the consumer industry since (at least) the 1950s (though you could make an argument that it goes back to the 20s and 30s, with the jazz age).
I don’t think it’s new so much as it’s just seemingly more pervasive, and more deceptively “democratic” in nature, thanks to social media (where “anyone” can be a celebrity, but can they really).
That goes without saying. But the focus on such ‘values’ were magnified exponentially in the television era, and then exponentially again with the advent of smartphones and social media. Kids today don’t even socialize with each other now without their screens on full time. Many spend more of their day online than in the real world; this as far as I know is new to the human experience.
Well said. And correlating to the amount of time people reside online as well.
I’m online right now!
Guilty as charged. All the more reason for me to go outside now to tend my real garden with real vegetables and make a real salad…
Our moral panic has never been more panicky!
I think young adults have always spent an incredible amount of time trying to impress, and I don’t think the overall stakes have changed. There have always been horror stories and casualties in the pursuit of “status”, a word not invented this century.
I don’t think that’s entirely true. I’ve seen plenty of cases where they are socializing while on their phones. They’ve also grown up in the age of helicopter parents, so there’s that as well. Many kids socialize online because they’ve gone out less, thanks to many Gen X parents being raised with the steady drum beat of stranger danger/satanic panic, plus many of us had divorced parents, and we’ve wanted to spend more time with our kids as a result.
Hm. I guess this is a philosophical question of what is the “real world”, though? Are we not having a “real” interaction, since it’s not face to face? Couldn’t we say much the same about the rise of mall, for exampleor the car, both of which were seen as deeply problematic and even downright dangerous at the time? Pretty much since teenagers came into existence (the postwar period), people have been worrying that they’re not doing… whatever… correctly, and they’re going to end up screwed up. I don’t think that they’ll be any more screwed up then we were, and in some ways, these kids (Gen Z) seem to have some stuff on the ball.
And he internet is a fundamental means of connection and communication, now, and that’s not the world that they built, but one they have to learn to navigate now. Unless things change, they’ll likely do much of their future labor online, too, so getting familiar with how that works is not just about escaping reality, but about becoming familiar with it and understanding it.
And last, I’m going to go out on a limb and say that kids who don’t fit into their IRL community likely find the internet and the ability to reach out to a community that might understand them is a godsend and maybe even a life saver for some of them.
Don’t get me wrong, I think that I’m concerned about some of this as well and there are lots of issues that we can wrestle with, but I also think that the kids will be alright in the long run. Like any other technology, the internet has it’s good and bad aspects, and most kids are doing just fine navigating this new landscape.
Absolutely, and I wish this concept wouldn’t hold so much currency in our culture. This article reminded me of a friend who is a university prof and directly recommends this approach to people (though she herself is actually reasonably competent). She, like Caroline ( “Women spend too much time apologizing for promoting their work,”), dresses it up as feminism, which is just insulting to feminism. And it’s not a viable long term plan. You’ll always feel insecure and fake, because it’s based on an assumption that everyone fakes their way through. And as anyone who has worked with someone like this, they piss off everyone around them who are close enough to eventually see through the fakery.
How snide! Does that go for civil disagreement where you come from? Ironic that you use a quote attributed to Marshall McLuhan, when I thought “the media is the message” was far more apt for this thread.
I noticed you used “always” twice; that’s kind of a tell. Your argument is logical fallacy namely ‘appeal to tradition’.
Do you have kids of your own? Oops I just re-read and it appears that you do. I have a 13 and a 17 year old. Best things that ever happened to me. If you read my first sentence you will see that I said kids rarely socialize without their phones on now, not that they weren’t socializing with each at the same time, if you get my drift. But again, I would argue that you can’t do either very well in that case. Look I’m not interested in much of a debate over this one. I remembered right after I hit send there that one of the taboos of the internet is to be seen as any sort of Luddite. And I don’t find your arguments on this one as compelling as is your norm. Although I do as a rule find your thoughts on most issues engaging and original. Cheers.
Did I? (I didn’t quote anybody, so I really have no idea what you meant to say here…)
I never said anything promoting any tradition, or claiming that there aren’t or shouldn’t be any changes or not because of any “tradition”. But worrying about the endangered state of the next generation of youth isn’t a tradition, it’s a perennial part of human nature, I think.
You don’t think young people were worried about social status in generations past? And did stupid things in an effort to achieve it? And that their actions didn’t cause older generations to wring their hands in public alarm? I feel like that must have happened before, and I find it hard to agree with you that young people’s concern about social status in their social groups could magnify “exponentially”. People used to start heroin or join armies to “fit in” with peers, so like I said, I don’t think the stakes have changed that much, just the network and local expressions.
Welp, Calloway has launched her rejoinder:
“Natalie is inextricable from my writing…”
Ah yes, young people today are definitely worse than they’ve been at any point during history, and of course I myself was never as inexperienced and naive as this when I was twenty four. /s
Come on, the only difference is that now people can make mistakes on a much bigger stage than we had access to when we were that age.
My thoughts too. It is hard for me to have much interest in either of these highly privileged women, who do not appear to have done anything much at this point in their lives. I felt bad for them both, but that’s about it.
I have a 16 year old, and teach history on the college level, so often work with older teens (and this semester, I have a dual enrollment class of 11th graders). So I’m around teens a good deal.
I did see that. But as teenagers we socialized along with technology as well. I noted the car above, for example. TV and movies were prime ways of socializing. Sharing tapes, listening to music together, mixed CDs, etc. And we heard pretty much the same kind of concerns then as we do now, I’d argue.
People said the same thing about the kinds of technology we were interested in as youths, that how we socialized with each other was in some way deficient to how they socialized. This is not to say that there aren’t problems with this relationship between technology and socialization, but I don’t think it’s as big a social problem as some have suggested. The problems teens have now are likely not much different from what they were in the past, they are just being filtered in new ways. They are still dealing with identify formation, sexuality, gender, race, class, bullying, etc. The internet can both help them figure out a productive path forward (give them tools we might not have had, in fact) and act as a means of magnifying their problems. I think (as parents, or people guiding young people in other ways), as long as we give them the tools they need to navigate pitfalls, they’ll likely turn out okay.
I’m not saying you’re a luddite, nor am I saying that technology is not problem-free. I’m coming at it from a different perspective than others, I suspect, since I study the history of youth subcultures quite a bit. Rather than seeing the technology as the cause of social change in and of itself, I’m arguing that social changes that have been unfolding since the age of mass media began is shaping how we’re using this particular technology. Capitalism in the age of consumerism is the pivot for me, rather than the technologies themselves… because capitalism dictates how these technologies are employed in our lives. That obvious comes with problems that we need to address. I personally would love to see society as a whole be more thoughtful in the sorts of technologies we develop, but that’s a whole different ball of wax.
But, I’m also arguing for far more continuity with the past, that how our kids are experiencing their youth is much more similar to ours and our parents than with people a hundred years ago, because they are living in the same sort of society that we grew up in (generally speaking). We are still seeing the unfolding of the consumer economy, true globalization, and the age of mass media, and I see the internet and how we use it as just an extension of that. If we’re going to worry about it’s effects, we shouldn’t just be worrying about kids, but all of society, because if you look around, how many of us use these technologies are rather similar across all different social brackets.
That is my take, informed by 10 years of reading history books on issues either tangentially or directly related to young people and technology/consumerism, FWIW!
Yeah, but to be fair, at… what age is she? 20-something?.. likely a great deal of us probably thought we were much deeper and more interesting than we actually were. Then we grew up! 
Maybe you only think that because you believe in these “books”, that are well known to also turn kids into brain-dead anti-social zombies, as concerned and prescient parents thought in earlier centuries?
“Who is this Werther fellow, and why can’t I even see my child’s face at the breakfast table?”
(You know all this, I’m just sharing. Books are great!)
I helped “refine” a logo and we designed a website for one of those. No idea how her business is going, but the name of it is questionable, so I can’t imagine it’s going swell. Her actual skills weren’t horrible, but very filter drenched to my eye. But everyone has to start off somewhere. At least she has a goal.
This is an interesting story so far, and I’d never heard of her. But I’m not her target audience. So. No shock there.
Maybe social media gives the impression that “success” doesn’t require a basic set of tools? Hell, life is random anyway.
“Moral panic”…if you’re going to throw idioms around so flippantly you might consider researching their original meaning first…
You’re reading it too literally, and there you go again with “perennial”…Your main argument is a logical fallacy, as in not logical; it’s as simple as that. And now you’re just moving the goalposts. If we can’t agree on the basic rules of logic I can see no reason to continue. Peace.
Stanley Cohen? I wasn’t quoting McLuhan, who didn’t use it in the way it’s mostly understood now. (Is that flippant?)
And now you’re just moving the goalposts.
If we can’t agree on the basic rules of logic I can see no reason to continue.
What a perfectly ironic response considering the subject matter…when snide ‘burns’, lazy suppositions and snarky memes take the place of substantive discussion…what could possibly go wrong?
