Ever notice the amount of kids with more technological toys than you?
I’m talking about the kids with the most recent iPads, pods, phones, tunes, MacBooks (fucking macbooks) and you’re rocking a 1st to 3rd generation iPod, a basic phone and the simple desktop set-up. These kids are kids; Twelve to fifteen and they don’t know what the fuck they are doing with these things. They’re on social media, chatting away to their friends using phrases like, ‘c u l8ter xoxox’ and ‘your so cuute’, doubling up vowels, using the crappy text talk like it’s still useful and generally just aggravating your older, wiser and superior mind.
This is what we have to look forward to. We can look forward to a generation that has grown up on Facebook, grown up with the iPhone/pad/pod/tunes and will use these things and whatever replaces them for the majority of their lives. The big question is, should we look forward to it or should we try to crush it now?
I looked at it for a little while and thought, ‘What possible use do they have for these things? I didn’t need ‘em and to be honest I still don’t. What the fuck could they talk about anyway? Who has the coolest light-up shoes? What are they listening to? Beiber? The latest bloody Gaga or Adele song? The latest Skrillex bullshit? Are they discussing crappy games like MW3 and terrible shows like Jersey Shore?’.
Problem is that is exactly the kind of thing these kids are likely to use tech for. That and the endless conversations of who has a crush on who and who is cool. Terrible right? Not the kind of thing people who are 16+ use Facebook for. Not the kind music real people listen to. Not the kind of games real people play. Not the kinds of show real people watch and talk about.
Nope. Never. That’s totally not what we intelligent, sophisticated, superior, self-assured, responsible and forward thinking young adults use these technological devices for.
Not at all.
So, these kids that we look at with contempt, bewilderment and scorn are really no better than us. Maybe they’re naive and stupid but aren’t we all? Are their tastes really worse than ours? Are these kids really spoiled and ruined already?
Or are they just ahead of the curve? Catching up to us?
Fact is these kids are just more obvious versions of ourselves. They talk about the same crap, more or less, and often in the same way. They just don’t rationalise it or make it more complicated than what it is. They’re straight up idiots. They don’t hide it away like we all do.
So, before you condemn the kids of iPods/pads/phones and tunes, think about what you do with these things. Think about what you do on Facebook, Tumblr or Twitter.
Is it so different from what they do?
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That’s probably the only way I can think of my lack of tumblr posts. I just stopped using this site a while ago because I felt anything and everything I discuss on this blog like thing is ultimately a futile gesture. What do I hope to change? What can I hope to do with it?
Answer is nothing. However, what I did end up doing is what a fair few people wind up doing: impressing themselves with their own self-importance. I’d see something and take a superior glance at the issue and think, ‘Yes. I can write a post on that. I can attack the issue! I can make a witty statement,’ and what I actually did was just rant about it on the internet.
Not very exciting stuff.
Despite the fact that some people enjoyed it, it just became more and more about pissing off other people and seeing how much I could confront them with. The problem was I would write a post on a topic and get the exact opposite reaction I had hoped for. I’d write about feminism and look at the gender equality issue only to encounter the crap I had just written. I’d discuss theism and suffer the same sort of attitudes I had just highlighted. I’d yell about One Direction and get told by some naive teen girl that I, ‘… just don’t understand what the boys mean to us…’.
At that point they had one song and were as generic as a Steven Segal film.
It reached a point where I spotted an anti-atheism lecture at my uni and I just threw my arms up in the air and said, ‘Fuck it. They can do what they want. Doesn’t matter what I do anyway,’. I wrote about and people gave me the same basic crap.
I was getting the opposite of what I wanted. I wanted people to discuss the ideas I had written about and I wanted them to assess what it was they believed. Whether that was religion, feminism or a strange taste in music, I just wanted them to think.
And I failed horribly at it.
Turns out I changed more people’s minds about the myths surrounding Marilyn Monroe in five minutes on facebook than I had changed people’s minds on tumblr total. I sat down, ranted to a friend, we did some research, I put a status which called people out, they commented back and then my friend and I just backed each other’s replies and gave the real information. At the end of the post/thread’s active time, we had swayed about five people to at least pretend they had re-thought that belief.
So, yeah.
I look at tumblr as place where I fed my ego and propped up my self-importance. Eventually, you realise that it’s worthless for the purpose of changing people’s minds and that the only real purpose for it is mindless entertainment.
