When Roger Ebert, the film critic, reviewed the teen comedy Heather’s (1989), he opened with:
"I approach Heathers as a traveller in an unknown country, one who does not speak the language or know the customs and can judge the natives only by taking them at their word.
The movie is a morbid comedy about peer pressure in high school, about teenage suicide and about the deadliness of cliques that not only exclude but also maim and kill.
Life was simpler when I was in high school."
Roger Ebert, born 1942, was aged 47 at the time of his review, and the only clear thing to him about Heather’s was that it was a movie that made him feel old. Exposed to one beat of the movie’s black heart and he found it impossible to relate.
A client, a West Coast movie studio, once asked me to give a talk on teen audiences, and how they’ve changed over the last 20 years. Let’s take 1991, they suggested, and compare it with 2011.
Of course, when you get asked, “What’s changed in the last 20 years?”, you know up-front the answer is going to be, “A lot”. Because a lot should have changed, because we are talking 20 years.
Then... when the last 20 years rewinds us to Year Zero of the Internet Revolution, the scope of social change that follows is likely to stretch out towards some crazily far and wide horizons.
Then... within that, air-drop Teens, mostly Digital Natives, sometimes labelled Millennials, both badges meaning folk who arrived into a world where the Digital Revolution wasn’t a revolution. Rather, just life. Just their “every day”.
Long-short, for my presentation to the movie studio, I wasn’t struggling for material.
The Teen Trope
In global cinema admissions, teenagers represent a good two thirds of all tickets sold. The marketing minds coming up with how to sell movies to Teens are in their 30s and 40’s, and their very fair front-of-mind fear is that they’re just like Roger Ebert; travellers in an unknown country, out of touch and step with Digital Teen Tribes populated by some born as recently as 1998.
Now Teens are a fascinating audience. They’re trying on identities, toying and trialling personas. Personality-wise, The Teen is a work-in-progress; they’re far from fully-formed, and by way of compensation, in their “early-days” search for Identity (and Belonging), they often affiliate with strongly-flavoured cliques.
RANDY
You can't win. You know that, don't you? It doesn't matter if you whip us, you'll still be where you were before, at the bottom. And we'll still be the lucky ones at the top with all the breaks. It doesn't matter. Greasers will still be Greasers and Socs will still be Socs. It doesn't matter.
The Outsiders (1983)
Greaser, Soc, Mod, Rocker, Punk, Prep, irrespective of specific Clique Club, there’s a groove-worn cliché that runs through all...
The Teen: estranged, isolated, alienated, On-the-Outside, even to or beyond the point of social delinquency.
This at least, is the well-trodden “Teen Trope”.
The Past was Easy to Paint Black
Rebel Without a Cause (1955)
Whether Jimmy Dean depicting American Youth in moral freefall, or Billy Idol giving voice to Rebel Yell in 1983, “Rebellious” has been a well-flexed prefix to “Youth”.
Teens, almost by definition, used to be at arms-length to, well, pretty much anyone who wasn’t a Teen. They were at arms-length to Parents. To Society. To Social Mores. To Conventions. To a grown-up sense of conformity and “doing things the way things should be done”. The Teen was intimately in touch with The Roger Ebert Sensation, of feeling like a stranger in a foreign land, only where they viewed from the other side of the looking glass, into “The Land of Adult”.
In consequence, through the decades, Pop Culture has reflected the Teen Condition. Take 90’s movies like Slacker and Pump up the Volume, Clerks and Office Space. These are commentaries that reflect their time, where disaffection was close at hand.
MARK HUNTER/HARD HARRY
“You see, there's nothing to do anymore. Everything decent’s been done. All the great themes have been used up. Turned into theme parks. So I don't really find it exactly cheerful to be living in the middle of a totally, like, exhausted decade where there's nothing to look forward to and no one to look up to.”
Pump up the Volume (1990)
I mean, really? Come on? That bad? A little hard to say where the hyperbole ends and the legitimacy starts. While today, the Counter Culture vibe feels really quite retro, it’s quite imaginable that there were more than a few Hard Harry’s lost in the early 90’s, sincerely struggling to find cheer and originality.
And from the 90’s, it’s easy enough to follow the thread further back.
The Slacker was of course a throw-forward from the 80’s, a slothful, sloping, baggy-shirted archetype born of Generation X parentage.
Where Coupland populised the phrase in his ‘91 novel, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, the Gen X tag had been making the rounds through 60 years prior.
"Generation X" has always signified a group of young people, seemingly without identity, who face an uncertain, ill-defined (and perhaps hostile) future. Subsequent appearances of the term in the mid-1960s and mid-1970s narrowed the referent for "Generation X" from Capa's global generation to specific sets of primarily white, male, working class British youth sub-cultures, from the spiffy mods and their rivals the rockers, to the more overtly negationist punk subculture."
John Ulrich, author
“Without identity... facing an uncertain, ill-defined, hostile future.”
Pretty bleak stuff - but not all bad if you happened to be an Ad Guy in the 80’s, sitting on a brief to position a certain computer manufacturer as a challenger brand. Even Dystopia can have a silver-lining; can make for rich fruity pickings.
Consider Apple’s entry into the Best Ad of All Time category, “1984”.
On January 24th, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. And you'll see why 1984 won't be like "1984."
“1984”, by Apple Computers. Dir: Ridley Scott. Agency: Chiat/Day (1984)
Back in 1984, Apple struck a chord because on some level to many people (and not just Teens), 1984 did feel as if Orwell’s vision had subtly come good, that there was something ever-so-slightly-controlling in the air. To some small degree, perhaps everyone’s Inner Jimmy or Billy identified with the hot blonde runner hurling a sledgehammer at a bleached blue face of State Control?
Time trek back to the Here & Now and “1984” is still a great ad, but it does feel like it’s one from the vaults, a comment on a different time and place, conceived and calling out to a very different set of hearts and minds.
Goths Denied their Isolated Dystopia
Courtesy of Easy-Access Social Media, I believe the traditional Teen Trope has had a reboot, is now grooving to a rather different beat.
In a Digital Age of Facebook and Twitter and Tuenti and a list that rolls on and on, an “Always On” society can reach out, connect, find voice, understanding, even kinship.
You like polishing your collection of monkey skulls and storing them in your sock drawer? By conventional tastes, you’re really very creepy, but little doubt there’s an online chat room out there for you, that may even have suggestion on the different types of polish to use.
Park monkey skull-polishers, broaden it out to a more palatable sub-group like Teenagers, or a Teen Sub-Group therein, say “Goths”, and the same principle applies.
“The Goth subculture remains a visual shortcut through which young persons of a certain damp emotional climate can broadcast to the other members of their tribe who they are. Goth is a look that simultaneously expresses and cures its own sense of alienation.”
The New York Yimes, Sep 17, 2008
Teen Alienation is a whole heap easier to side-step these digital days.
Twenty years ago, being "the only Goth in the village" (or whatever other teen-clique psyche-attire you were trying on for size) would typically lead to introspective and/or outward cries of, "No one understands me", "I'm all alone in the world", "No one can imagine what it's like to be me!"
Bemoaning would be part-cure, as would listening to a lot of The Cure.
Boys Don’t Cry (1980), The Cure
Social Media has largely vaccinated against this particular strand of estrangement. Now, "the only Goth in the village" can log-on and link to a "Global Goth Community" of the Like-Minded and Similarly Attired. "No one understands me", replaced with check-out my blog, "My Life as a Goth".
Without getting too carried away, too overly cheerful and utopian, I think we might just be standing on the doorstep of something Really Rather Good.
There’s a New Idealism in play. Not a movement that’s sweepingly political or grandly idealistic. More so, the kind of idealism that’s immediately accessible and in limitless supply to all teens: the Ideal of Self Expression and Micro-Group Identification.
Rather than Raging against the Machine, Teenage Time is taken up with digital articulation and social outreach.
From Disaffected to Affected
Disaffected has always to me sounded a bit too phonetically close to “disinfected”, uncharitably implying a significant number of teenagers need a good wash. Teen hygiene aside, the notion of disaffection is starting to feel rather dated.
Teenagers used to partly define themselves based upon “what they were not” and what they didn’t want. Now they (like everyone else), can focus instead “on a positive”, on definition of self, based on wants, on “what they wish to be”, and the instantly accessible groups to which they wish to affiliate.
To this end, I’m not convinced teenagers, in particular Western Teenagers, are Outsiders any more. They’re Insiders. They’re able to reach out and sound off to the thin-sliced social set of their choosing.
Society has gone multi-micro, meaning there’s someone there for everyone, leaving nothing left to feel on the outside of. And most crucially, this makes it harder to be “against” a society or system.
Put another way, this is bigger than just making Goth’s feel happy.
Teens are “Avatar-ing” themselves all over the internet, are re-articulating self-reliance as self-invention. “Being Teen” is becoming the pluralisation of self, of creating multiple and carefully brushed digital personas, heroic within vivid and highly documented “Life Factions” We’re seeing Teen Affectation in overdrive.
“Teens” was once an optional short-hand for “Anti-establishment”, because The Establishment didn't speak for them, wasn't them. Curiously, The Establishment once stood for something long-standing, something old and established.
"Established" doesn't take so long these days. Potentially, can be uploaded, made real, gain following, over a weekend.
The digital age can instigate change overnight, build new “virtual” edifices that are as real as any forms made of bricks-and-mortar. No shopper has ever physically walked through the door of Amazon, but we visit Amazon all the time. Amazon is just as trusted and real as Waterstones or Dillons or Foyles, and given square-foot overheads, is likely to be around a lot longer.
No longer in the same way, nor same number, do Teens still want to tear down the place and rebel yell at the walls of conformity, at The System, as created time in memoriam, inherited and upheld by each generation of "grown-ups".
We don't need no education
We don’t need no thought control
No dark sarcasm in the classroom
Teachers leave them kids alone
Hey! Teachers! Leave them kids alone!
All in all it's just another brick in the wall.
All in all you're just another brick in the wall.
Another Brick in the Wall Part 2,
Pink Floyd (1979)
Contrast Pink Floyd’s take on institutional learning with Spinebreakers, Penguin's endeavour to embrace the Digital Age, involve Teens, and show how publishing can be a future-proofed business.
Launched in September 2007, Spinebreakers.co.uk was the UK’s first online book community for teenagers. Its editorial team is run by Teens, aged 13 through 18, and it makes an open invitation to Teens everywhere, to join in, contribute, to say something.
As they put it...
The truth is, if you have a voice, you don’t find the same compunction to yell (the way Billy Idol once did). If you have the means to channel your anger, you never boil over. Perhaps “Digital media” partly stifles the Rebel Yell because so many now get to yell so freely, as often as they want, as fast as their fingers can cover a keyboard? Now there are outlets like Facebook, perhaps fewer Teens feel compelled to feel like Che Guevara?
The Kids Have Taken Over the Place
To complement our Open-Access Age, these are currently Open-Minded Times. Gen X... became Gen Y... became Gen Why Not? (Maybe I’ve engineered that one a bit, but I think it holds.)
The prevailing mood today isn’t an exhausted one. Today, twenty-something’s can become billionaires. Teens have Role Model proof points that encourage their self-belief.
Mark Zuckerberg
I think if your clients want to sit on my shoulders and call themselves tall, they have the right to give it a try - but there's no requirement that I enjoy sitting here listening to people lie. You have part of my attention - you have the minimum amount. The rest of my attention is back at the offices of Facebook, where my colleagues and I are doing things that no one in this room, including and especially your clients, are intellectually or creatively capable of doing.
The Social Network (2010)
Forbes pegged Mark Zuckerberg’s fortune at £6.7bn in 2011, placing him 14th in their list of the 400 richest Americans.
The Final Word from John Hughes
In 1991, the Internet was effectively “switched on”, made available for unrestricted commercial use. The number of computers that connected across “The Net” numbered (wait for it) 1 million.
By 2020, “mobile internet” is trended to top 10 billion, meaning that the internet is there for everyone. The “PC”, the Personal Computer, has in reality become The Phone In Our Pocket.
Coca Cola's fabled Vision-Mission “to have a Coke within arm's reach of everyone on the planet”, is likely to always be just that, a fable. For analogue brands, the world’s just too damn big. For digital brands, for social media brands, they can fulfil Coca Cola’s vision without breaking sweat. And what this really means is that anyone can “feel” at arm’s reach of everyone else. And where does that then leave Teen Alienation?
Potentially, obsolete, is where.
So times have changed, but then, they always will. It’s what they do.
Have Teens changed that radically over the last 20 years? Of course not. What we’re witnessing is simply New Ways of meeting Old (read: Fundamental) Needs. This is all about Change within the Frame.
Being a Teen will always be about reconciling inner conflicts born of self-defining and self-discovery. Of wanting to stand out and fit in. Of needing to rebel against something or someone in order to slowly accept who you might be and might become.
In spite of the massive cultural and technological swells that have figured over the last 20 years, a teen’s Rites of Passage remains set to a fixed bearing. Filmmaker John Hughes knew well of the journey of Self-Esteem & Belonging that all Teens have to sail.
Brian Johnson
Dear Mr. Vernon, we accept the fact that we had to sacrifice a whole Saturday in detention for whatever it was we did wrong...but we think you're crazy to make us write an essay telling you who we think we are. You see us as you want to see us... in the simplest terms and the most convenient definitions. But what we found out is that each one of us is a brain... and an athlete...and a basket case... a princess... and a criminal. Does that answer your question? Sincerely yours, the Breakfast Club.
The Breakfast Club (1985)
Whether you left High School 30 years ago, 20, or you’re still walking through the door, the bottom line remains the bottom line. It is... and always will be...about the air punch.
Only these days, there are more ways to do it.
SP.
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