Teenage Skin

30 March 2008

I assume that most of you are familiar with the Channel 4 program ‘Skins’; it’s a slightly edgy portrayal of modern teenage life based in Bristol and features copious amounts of sex, drug use and debauchery. It’s highly stylised and you can’t help but assume that it’s widely inaccurate – being a teenager was nothing like that when I was one (which wasn’t that long ago) so it can’t have changed that much.

It has.

On Friday I attended a ‘prom’ for The Teenagers and it was like walking into an episode of Skins. The kids were crazy and all of them had dressed up to the ’80s prom’ theme; they were smoking in the halls, they were sneaking in booze and they were generally going nuts. It was actually pretty scary – the amount of energy they had was just amazing, and not exactly helped by the free Red Bull that was being given out…

Now without wanting to sound old it really wasn’t like that ‘in my day’ (sigh) and I can’t help but wonder if the internet – and social networks in particular – are to blame for this shift in teenager behaviour. Sure, we used to go out and get drunk but there seems to be a significant shift in the confidence that they display; they’re happy being them, and seem to have a much more defined sense of identity.

Thinking back to when I was their age, something like the gig I went to would have been a huge pain to organise. It was posted on the bands website, myspace and sent out to a couple of mailing lists and that was all that was needed – it was doubly oversubscribed and people had to be turned away on the night. The best we could hope for was hearing about something by pure word of mouth, or maybe picking up a flyer neither of which lend themselves to the slightly anarchic banding together of groups of like minded people facilitated by the internet that make up a main part of modern teenage life.

From: Articles

30 March 2008