It’s a drum that’s been pounded until the sticks break and the skin tears. It’s not so much a cliché anymore as it is absolute dogma, like gravity or inertia. So much has been written about it that any writer who dares do so again is doomed to sit, motionless in front of the computer screen, for days at a stretch, tormented by the thick, foul breath of redundancy.
And yet we have to go on talking about it because it just keeps shaping and reshaping our lives and the lives of our kids. It’s change, and it just keeps changing.
Two specific areas of change have been chasing each other through my head lately. The first is our sometimes too-fluid perception of what’s real and what’s not—which significantly affects the way kids (and adults too) think about the world they walk around in and think in.
My daughter recently came home from her church youth group talking about a friend who spent the night chatting about a trip she hadn’t actually taken—as if she had actually gone. (And her group’s leaders, according to the report I got, smiled and nodded and encouraged her to go on.) Now, there can be lots of reasons for why she said what she did. But isn’t it somewhat understandable the amount of trouble some tweens and teens have with their renditions of reality when they’re grown up watching “reality” on TV without ever really knowing what’s the truth and what’s a lie? Without having been taught a solid baseline from which to judge things?
A recent example: Talk show host Wendy Williams says the supposedly spontaneous behind-the-scenes clips of contestants preparing for their performance each week on Dancing With the Stars are actually carefully scripted. “They also script what they want you to say,” Wendy says in a today.com feature. “I know this as a participant, OK. I’m reading, I’m like, ‘Wait, this is not how I’m feeling today, and I wouldn’t say that. I’m not going to say that,’ I would tell the camera.” As for the “character” that the popular reality dancing competition created for her, she said if she’d had “a little bit more sassafras,” she likely would have been more likable and not have been eliminated in the second week: “That’s how they were writing my script, to be Angry Black Woman.”
I’ve also been brooding a lot about what it’s like for kids to grow up online like they do now. It’s hard enough for us adults to figure out which way the curve ball is breaking before it smacks us in the face. How much harder is it for kids?
In the Daily Mail, Andrew Halls, head of the prestigious King’s College School, Wimbledon, a school for 7- to 18-year-old students in London, writes:
Social networking sites require every 21st-century teenager to live his or her life under the eye of an electronic adjudicator far more cruel and censorious than any examiner, school teacher, or parent. … No previous generation has spent so long online, ‘liking’ and being ‘liked’, or devastatingly ignored, in the OCD world of never-ending updates, status change, Instagram, AskFM, Little Gossip and Facebook. No wonder that every teenager can feel like the hopelessly inadequate star of his own second-rate biopic.
If they have any sense that any of it is actually real and matters, that is. Or maybe they feel like all of it is far too real and matters far too much for words.
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