Emily Nussbaum in New York Magazine writes about kids, the Internet and the End of Privacy, characterising one perception of today’s kids as:
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.
Ouch. It’s certainly harsh but is it accurate?
2 comments ↓
Poor Emmy is not just unoriginal in the conventional sense, but unoriginal in a grand, historical sense. The older generation has always, always, always complained about the superficiality, the moral laxity, the intellectual corruption, the flitting triviality of the younger generation. This, with the same nauseating, historically ignorant repetition, is inevitably juxtaposed against the fictional, glorious, golden age of the older generation’s youth – a time of moral unrightness, of intellectual high standards, of earnest discussion about truly important matters, etc.
Emmy, with her false-frothing rant in tow, is merely the latest in a long, barren line of whiners who are less motivated by any supposed erosion of social foundations than by something more base: a terrifying realisation that she is no longer “it;” that she has been passed by, superceded, rendered (gasp) old. It is only natural that the less self-conscious like Emmy would lash out at the young in the most vicious (and ultimately disingenuous) manner, for it is this new generation that tauntingly symbolises all those forlorn , ragged and blackened visions of her own youth that shall never again grace a cracked mirror.
Ouch indeed! I think everyone is reluctant to agree with Emily after E. Mariyani’s comment lol But I say these words having been once a teenager not too long ago, so my intentions and concerns are firmly rooted in the erosion of social foundations *scouts honour*
Now, what Emily has described sounds more like teenagers than “kids” Who are, lets face it “Everything that is bad about children meets everything that is bad about adults” (David Quantick) hehe
The problem is a lot of kids, mainly teenagers, do not put weight to their words, they say anything and everything that comes into their head, sometimes they mean it, other times they do not. So we’re left with a tongue that has declared independence from its mind most of the time. They believe their youth affords them opinion without consequence, they are too lazy to talk/type properly, and so everything becomes a half job to them, including their opinions.
She does have a point regarding wanting attention/zero attention span. What interests me is in a lot of cases, it’s not because the child isn’t loved at home (or isn’t hugged), but because they’ve become so egoistic, that this love is not enough. And with all this technology around them, they’re able to feed/discover/give into their narcissism.
Well, it’s a good thing we can’t understand half the things they say.
In all fairness, attention whores (what she described above) come in all shapes and ages, its more related to the prominence of net communication than age, we see it more with the younger generation because they’ve warmed to technology a lot quicker than the rest of us.
Leave a Comment