- Kids today. They have no sense of shame. They have no sense of privacy. They are show-offs, fame whores, pornographic little loons who post their diaries, their phone numbers, their stupid poetry—for God’s sake, their dirty photos!—online. They have virtual friends instead of real ones. They talk in illiterate instant messages. They are interested only in attention—and yet they have zero attention span, flitting like hummingbirds from one virtual stage to another.
Last nights party.com. Haven't heard that site in a while.
For another "How Time's Have Changed" article, check out 2006 - Addition of FB Newsfeed results in backlash
This is SOOO much more your generation than mine insom, even if it was written 7 years ago. That said, I don't think we need to worry. When I was thirteen years old there was a fifteen year old girl living next door to me. She had just moved in and she was a "bad girl" by my mother standards which made her irresistible to me. Seriously, she was perfect; tall, dark hair pulled back under a bandana, ripped jeans showing off her sexy legs, cut-off guns and roses shirt showing her stomach. -I can't explain to you how she was hot without using a modern day description; if any of you are familiar with Sucide Girls you'll know the look. She was definitely a bad girl, but there was also that hint of mid-west sweetheart in there. Anyways, she had her room in the basement of their home and had one of those basement windows that is about the size of a cinderblock, but I would spend hours outside pretending to practice my free-throws in the driveway just waiting for a glimpse of her in her room. One day, she saw me looking. Erin: "Hey, Steve." Me: "Um..." Erin: "Yeah.. come over here. Her head sticking out of the window. Dark eyeliner. Definitely bad. bad. So hot though. Me: "Okay" I walked over to her window and she backed away from it, then looked back up at me. Erin: "I'm going to try on some clothes and I want you to tell me if they look good." Me: "Yeah sure" Pretty sure I jizzed in my pants right then. Erin: "Okay, hold on." For the next half hour, Erin proceeded to try on everything from stockings, to bra's and really everything and anything she owned that was underwear or lingerie. Finally towards the end she asked me: Erin: "Do you like this braw?" And thirteen year old Steve had the gumption to say this: Me: "I don't know, I think I'd have to feel that one." I cupped her breast through the window. I would also work my way down through the window, in to her room and do more... though not as much as I'd had liked. Erin never granted me such access again even though I shot a ridiculous amount of free throws in my driveway that year. My point is, I think girls and boys have been liberal with their sexuality for as long as there have been windows. The internet is a new window and it has different rules. People would be wise to recognize the difference but all the naysayers would be wise to see the similarities too. This is nothing new.
The amount of disdain for millennials and (big scare quotes) "the internet" seems to be related to 'golden age syndrome'. There's always been this kind of complaining about 'kids these' days, albeit it's much heavier for this generation. I don't think it's what the generation is doing, but the fact that's it's so in their face, and they probably wouldn't have a problem with that outside the fact that it forces them to remember themselves doing the exact same thing in secrecy when they were young. Because let's be honest, people have always been pornographic little perverts since the beginning of humanity. People have fucked out of marriage and before they were adults, created porn and sex toys, and have written downright filthy things since literally before we developed writing (except the dirty stories. That was just oral history at that point). Perhaps that embarrasses them, but I think it has more to do with some odd, older generation idea of doing whatever you want, as long as it's behind closed doors, or the Catholic standard of it not being a sin so long as in public you're repentant and prudish in your presentation. Either way, I think people are flat out lying when they say their concern is for kids' privacy. Sure, it's an important thing to look out for, and there are dangers about posting some of the things people post, but that's not what they honestly care about.
"Youth were never more sawcie, yea never more savagely saucie . . . the ancient are scorned, the honourable are contemned, the magistrate is not dreaded," writes Thomas Barnes in 1624. I'll tell you what shocked me; I believe it was from the most recent You Are Not So Smart podcast dealing with 'The Future; a tiny thing, it was, but it engendered both repulsion and resolve to continuing evolution, as I had become fat and comfortable in my view of the world. It was the observation of the death of the concept of selling out. I'm a child of the 70's/80's but with something of an affinity for the 60's. I occupied disused cinemas in London with acid dropping, stand-in-a-circle-and-summon-the-spirit-of-King-Arthur types, in order to provide community theatre for the bemused locals. The developers who wanted to turn this church of the image into a shopping centre and block of luxury apartments was clearly satanic. We had always fought the capitalist oppressor! That was the paradigm of the world! Yet in a short section on the podcast, young twenty-somethings struggled to define my understanding of the phrasal verb "selling out" in the same was I might infuriate a 20's flapper who asked me to define a strike breaker. The suggestion is that, far from being something worthy of derision, garnering the attention and support of a faceless corporation is not merely laudable but a validation of one's success. It's something to which one aspires. Obviously this won't be applicable to entire generation any more than any other general observation but the world rolls on and suddenly there's a real danger of finding myself standing before a herd of hairless apes much like me but whose cuckoo eyes are very alien and blink at me with utter lack of affinity as I bleat about The Man and wave my irrelevant finger, distracting them for a moment before they return to their sponsored social interactions. Also, you know, seven years is like 1000 internets ago. Kids these days may be Snapchatting filthy, unencrypted strands of their own RNA to each other for all I know.