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garoteWhen I was a kid, our community was abuzz - at least at the kid level - with urban legends like needles in Halloween candy, murderers in vans waiting in the school parking lot, vengeful teens deliberately giving each other HIV, heavy metal music subliminally compelling kids to murder their families (for Satan! Remember that guy?), and a whole parade of insipid ghost stories and cautionary tales (almost always involving teenage sex and/or drinking and/or drugs) that we would share about the abandoned areas scattered around Santa Cruz county.
I sometimes wonder, how would these stories be changed, if my generation had grown up with smartphones?
Would we gravitate to the same stories online, just because they fit our local environment? Or would there be a cross-pollinating effect, with ghouls and bogeymen from far distant places getting transplanted into our suburban setting? Would the sharing happen almost entirely online, and would parents be more or less likely to observe it? Would the secret places - concealed clearings in the woods, abandoned railway tunnels, old warehouses - become markers on a digital map, subject to the filtering and influence of media companies, or local law enforcement?
Would we still sneak off to abandoned places, or would we just sneak off to encrypted apps?
And that leads to another thought:
I think there must be a conflict, between our modern communication tools, and the independence from meddling by parents and authority figures that we often craved as kids. Database-driven chat and message systems can let kids talk in private, but they are also subject to surveillance and influence by other entities at the same time. Those entities are not their parents, which from a kid's point of view is all that matters, but that doesn't mean those entities are benign.
I remember being a teenager and feeling appalled at the crap I saw on television and in magazines that was created by corporations, for consumption by people my age. It was designed to prey on our fears and uncritical needs, and it had no concern for our self-esteem, health, or bodily integrity -- just our money. It was deliberately designed to look harmless to adults, or to look so hysterically subversive that teenagers would instinctively purchase it and keep it hidden from adults. E.g. Barbie on the one hand, Garbage Pail Kids on the other. (If you were to ask me which of those two did more "damage", I'd pick the first.)
Are modern chat apps just the same old manipulation, with an extra step thrown in to disguise it?
How easy is it to data-mine a hundred thousand teenage conversations, even anonymized, and figure out exactly how to market some useless piece of production-line detritus to walk right past a teenager's critical faculties and reach into their wallet? It's not very hard for adults, ... so how hard is it for kids?
To tie these two thoughts together: Perhaps if my generation had grown up with the smartphone, then instead of meeting in abandoned places to share gossip and do stupid stuff, we'd be meeting in the comments in a YouTube channel, occasionally pressing buttons to order the products we'd need to recreate the experiences we see in the videos ... believing we're free from parental oversight, but being even more intently victimized and exploited than before.
I sometimes wonder, how would these stories be changed, if my generation had grown up with smartphones?
Would we gravitate to the same stories online, just because they fit our local environment? Or would there be a cross-pollinating effect, with ghouls and bogeymen from far distant places getting transplanted into our suburban setting? Would the sharing happen almost entirely online, and would parents be more or less likely to observe it? Would the secret places - concealed clearings in the woods, abandoned railway tunnels, old warehouses - become markers on a digital map, subject to the filtering and influence of media companies, or local law enforcement?
Would we still sneak off to abandoned places, or would we just sneak off to encrypted apps?
And that leads to another thought:
I think there must be a conflict, between our modern communication tools, and the independence from meddling by parents and authority figures that we often craved as kids. Database-driven chat and message systems can let kids talk in private, but they are also subject to surveillance and influence by other entities at the same time. Those entities are not their parents, which from a kid's point of view is all that matters, but that doesn't mean those entities are benign.
I remember being a teenager and feeling appalled at the crap I saw on television and in magazines that was created by corporations, for consumption by people my age. It was designed to prey on our fears and uncritical needs, and it had no concern for our self-esteem, health, or bodily integrity -- just our money. It was deliberately designed to look harmless to adults, or to look so hysterically subversive that teenagers would instinctively purchase it and keep it hidden from adults. E.g. Barbie on the one hand, Garbage Pail Kids on the other. (If you were to ask me which of those two did more "damage", I'd pick the first.)
Are modern chat apps just the same old manipulation, with an extra step thrown in to disguise it?
How easy is it to data-mine a hundred thousand teenage conversations, even anonymized, and figure out exactly how to market some useless piece of production-line detritus to walk right past a teenager's critical faculties and reach into their wallet? It's not very hard for adults, ... so how hard is it for kids?
To tie these two thoughts together: Perhaps if my generation had grown up with the smartphone, then instead of meeting in abandoned places to share gossip and do stupid stuff, we'd be meeting in the comments in a YouTube channel, occasionally pressing buttons to order the products we'd need to recreate the experiences we see in the videos ... believing we're free from parental oversight, but being even more intently victimized and exploited than before.
