Kids of Today - Make some observations about teenagers of 2004

Goth point OTM, at the expense of the Metal Kids.

Other than that ... not much.

Kids today play a lotta video games and are very influenced by anime/j-pop/manga culture.

Homophobia will always loom large on the teenscape, but I don't know if "gay" as a pejorative means it's worse now. The same-sex couple at the prom is hardly an an anomaly anymore.

but the 'gay' thing: it was around in the 80s, and came back.

I fear that they are actually stupid; it is no act. In other ways, unlike more rebellious forebears, they are frightening concventional and uncritical. They really do respond in Pavlovian fashion to marketing prompts.

Or at least that's how it seems to my crumbley old 30 YO ass.

The only generalization I'd bother floating is that they seem (a) less politicized, and (b) I dunno, just very blithe about nearly everything, a trait that I fear may lead them toward conservatism very quickly. I’m still trying to figure out how to pinpoint or describe that blitheness, and I can only come up with two good ways of discussing it. The first is that they’ve grown up in an era that was all about shrugging off all of the serious, furrowed-brow social thought of the 70s and 80s, an era where “political correctness” was the butt of all jokes and the whole “boys will be ibid.” / “men behaving badly” thing came rushing back. I think for teen culture in general that attitude has very much taken, and while a lot of these kids are very very earnest—in the same way that like nu-metal is earnest—they’re also very, well, blithe about anything bigger than themselves. And just as a weird vague indicator of this, check out the progression of The Real World since early on. Admittedly I don’t really see the show any more, but I recall seeing some of the Las Vegas episodes and thinking: Jesus, this is the new teenage era. I mean, I recall the San Francisco one being sort of the quintessential presentation of the 90s: the location, the age of the people, AIDS activism, the very Gen X-y friend-of-Eggers cartoonist guy, etc. And now it’s melted into the sort of reality-TV world that I think modern teenagers are really honestly coming from, which I don’t mean as a criticism but just as a description: this sort of blithe idealized carefree-beautiful-people world has become the central animating thing for both those teens who aspire to it and those who don’t, and it’s pretty fascinating.

If anything, actually, it reminds me of my young sense of how teen culture was in the early to mid-80s, the last period where there was a big enough demographic glut of teenagers to create a true widespread “teen culture.” I get the feeling people in my age group grew up on the hand-me-down teen culture of that period, which probably made us a little older and more serious than we otherwise might have been—we always had to consume the culture of people slightly ahead of us—whereas kids today have the whole thing geared right at them, and in a lot of cases slightly younger. I imagine this explains the blitheness, too. But Jesus, give it a few years and fraternities are gonna be fucking frightening.

as noted above, i felt so out of touch with "my generation" as a teenager that i feel very unsafe making any general comments about how teenagers today differ from those i grew up with. i guess the flippancy regarding and familiarity with porn is part of it--i think las vegas ties in there somewhere.

also, anti-intellectualism isnt a new thing. its been around for a long, long time. but the whole traditional gender roles is a new thing. i blame nick and jessica.

i suppose none of this is new is it though?!

Dunno about the blithe thing - as an individual, I can see it a lot in my conversations with other ppl my age, but I think it's there partly because we were confronted w/ that attitude from childhood on (and this is only getting worse - just LOOK at today's kid's TV shows, the unending pop cult quotin' self-aware ha ha this is only a cartoon and u suck if it means something to you hell of it all); it's seen very much as a hand-me-down from the Gen Xers, actually (or some imagined Gen Xers that never really existed, anyway.) It really worries me sometimes, because it feels like my generation has no identity of its own; other times I think that this blitheness is just an integral part of teenagerdom itself (there's certainly enough kulcher backing that viewpoint up) and that every generation just accuses the next one of having taken it too far.

(I dunno how much of that last paragraph holds any sort of truth.)

One last note: this is very probably down to the backwardness of the place where I live, but I can name enough netfriends who share the same view, so I might as well throw it in there - Nirvana is still shockingly popular amongst da y00f. Nu Metal fans look at Kurt Cobain in the way that clued in Rolling Stones fans used to look at Muddy Waters.

That's a fear, though, not a prediction.

I'm unconvinced that everyone, or even most of the ppl, adhering to the Generation X mindset saw it that way, really: certainly the popcult it produced frequently leaves out that part, or deals with it in such a hokey way that you can't help but see it as false.

I dunno if traditional values need the help of blitheness to make a comeback in this generation, btw: as I said, 9/11.

xpost this is a really great point nabisco, tho possibly very american-centered (which I realise you said your view was from the get-go); what I've seen in European y00fs is running the exact opposite way (i.e. having big opinions on big issues is considered quite essential: unfortunately these opinions are usually extremist or just plain ignorant. The "overload of complexities" doesn't seem to be an issue at all.)

(I still feel very weird discussing this, because every sentence feels like a childish over-generalization. When I was in my early teens I thought that the concept of the "generation" was dead, ya know.)

The other reason, by the way, that I connect this blitheness to conservatism is that it’s even a component of the most traditionalistic, conservative parts of the country and its teen culture; I feel like you see some of these same traits in, say, the earnest and earnestly-patriotic kid from Indiana who’s joining the Marines. In fact, I think some of the source of this particular blithe attitude is in emulating these sort of mid-American conservative types. This ties into Momus’s whole trucker-hat theory, maybe, though not at all in the way he meant it. In any case, I don’t see the maybe more-urban blitheness and the maybe more-rural earnestness as at all incompatible: I think they’re two parts of the same thing, and I feel like I see a lot more of each with today’s teenagers—often wrapped up in the same person—than I did with people when I was that age.

Jeremy, re: race, I get a very firm sense that young people’s idea of beauty and cool and self-identification, even, has moved slightly beyond just-white and focused in on various ethnically-vague brown people. (A top-level example: the two biggest movie action heroes going are Vin Diesel and the Rock.) I don’t know what any of this means, if anything, though surely on some level it’s a reflection of race in America sort of browning out in the same way. Richard Rodriquez wrote a book called Brown: An Erotic History of the Americas that tries to develop “brown” as a term of mixture, both racial and otherwise, hence the invocation.

i'm uncomfortable with the idea of "generations"--obviously in a strict sense it has limited but real value, since there are obvious spikes in birth rates that eventually mean a large group of people of roughly the same age who had many shared experiences growing up. but beyond that, well, i tend to think of a collection of micro-trends and counter-trends that don't really add up to anything that can be easily summarized (or, as far as the future goes, predicted).

when i read biographies that say "so-and-so was part of a generation restless for independence" or some such thing, i immediately sort of set the observation aside as a useless banality. i trust more, observations that arrive at such generalizations (though hopefully more concrete than that example) through (a) actual quantifiable novelties [i.e. first generation to use cell phones from a young age] (b) actualy research-backed conclusions on the impact of those novelties. everything else... i dunno...

xpost

nabisco to the rescue as always! will check back soon.

OTM. And they tend as a result to be more politically conservative.

this sounds like the same thing people have been saying about the "younger generation" for much of the 20th century.

Actually I'd say a sort of goth-fashion is making a mini-comeback among teeny-punks/mall emo kids influenced by bands like Alkaline Trio and AFI. Alot of those cheesy screamo/hardcore/pop-punk bands are using a lot of gothy imagery. Emo's self-absorption, obsession with pain and sadness, etc. sort of bleed into goth anyway.

Evanescence might have a few things to say about that.

With a gradual shift from the former to the latter, I'd say, which might not be a coincidence (or it might be, perhaps I'm throwing in a total red hering.)

-- Whiskeytown Littlecock (░▒▓█▌...) (webmail), July 26th, 2004 1:04 PM. (ex machina) (later) (link)