Teens Are Fickle: Should I Care?
November 01, 2006
According to the Washington Post, there is good reason to believe that the fantastically popular teen networking site MySpace is headed for obscurity. MySpace “functions like a cross between a diary, e-mail program and photo album where content can be shared with friends, whose pictures appear on a member’s profile.” Since inception two-and-a-half years ago, MySpace has attracted 124 million profiles, was acquired by News Corp. for $580 million, and entered into a $900 million deal with Google primarily allowing Google to advertise on the site.
Despite this striking success, the Post finds reason for pessimism. First, a reporter found area teens saying that “they’re over MySpace.”
“I think it’s definitely going down – a lot of my friends have deleted their MySpaces and are more into [MySpace rival] Facebook now,” said Birnbaum, a junior [at Falls Church High School] who spends more time on her Facebook profile, where she messages and shares photos with other students in her network.
From the other side of the classroom, E.J. Kim chimes in that in the past three months, she’s gone from slaving over her MySpace profile up to four hours a day – decorating it, posting notes and pictures to her friends’ pages – to deleting the whole thing.
“I’ve grown out of it,” Kim said. “I thought it was kind of pointless.”
The second reason for pessimism is that the popularity of MySpace predecessors has proven ephemeral.
One key measure of a site’s popularity is the amount of time a user stays on the site. . . . Take Xanga, the hot social networking site before MySpace: In October 2002, the typical Xanga user spent an average of 1 hour and 39 minutes a month on the site, a figure that declined steadily, reaching only 11 minutes last month . . . . Friendster, another older site, hit its first usage peak of 1 hour and 51 minutes in October 2003, and then hit another peak of 3 hours and 3 minutes in February 2006. But last month, the average user was on Friendster for a mere 7 minutes.
During the last 12 months, MySpace usage has fallen from a high of 2 hours and 25 minutes to about 2 hours.
Perhaps we are startled and disheartened by the sheer narcissism reflected in kids’ spending hours documenting their lives instead of living them. But none of us is surprised by further evidence of fickle behavior by American teens, right? What would be newsworthy is finding someone genuinely surprised by this phenomenon. After all, American culture – not just its teen culture – is exemplified by “the quest for novelty.”
The quest for novelty is not simply a search for new distractions; it involves the notion that a new thing will be better than the old one. Advertisers rely on and cultivate this sensibility . . . .
Kenneth A. Myers, All God’s Children and Blue Suede Shoes: Christians & Popular Culture 64-65.
Have you ever thought about why the quest for novelty became the norm in our culture? By asking why, I’m not asking how. I’m not inviting you to lay blame at the feet of advertisers, in particular, or the capitalist system, in general. I’m suggesting we look a little deeper.
To that end, Ken Myers appropriately suggests that we consider C.S. Lewis’ thoughts when he contemplated this question: “How has it come about that we use the highly emotive word ‘stagnation,’ with all its malodorous and malarial overtones, for what other ages would have called ‘permanence’?” Lewis proposes that this condition is the result of the cultural dominance of the machine having altered our imagination and given us a “new archetypal image.”
It is the image of old machines being superseded by new and better ones. For in the world of machines the new most often really is better and the primitive really is the clumsy. And this image, potent in all our minds, reigns almost without rival in the minds of the uneducated. For to them, after their marriage and the births of their children, the very milestones of life are technical advances. From the old push-bike and thence to the little car; from gramophone to radio and from radio to television; from the range to the stove; these are the very stages of their pilgrimage. (Myers at 65-66).
The stages continue today: from desktop to laptop; from cell phone to Blackberry; from email to instant messaging; from journaling to blogging. Lewis describes this “unconscious conviction that the new is therefore better” as the greatest difference between premodern and modern men and women. It would “shock and bewilder” our predmodern ancestors to learn that “the attainment of goods we have never yet had, rather than the defence and conservation of those we have already, is the cardinal business of life . . . .”
Lewis proposes an interesting theory, but why should I, as a Christian, care about the normalization of the quest for novelty? Why should I care that teen fickleness could spell the doom of MySpace, Facebook and whatever will be hot next?
If our desire for the new were limited to machines, it would not be a great tragedy. But a thirst for novelty, once ingrained, is not so easily quenched. We look for new in everything (id. at 66).
We look for new in our possessions and careers, our friendships and love interests. I think Myers is right:
The constant quest for novelty can be extremely addictive, and it can easily obscure reflection on eternal realities and claims. But of course . . . that is part of its purpose. If it is too painful to set your mind on the higher things, the allure of novelty makes distraction that much easier (id. at 67).
Viewed in this light, remaining vigilant of the pervasiveness of the quest for novelty and its ability to distract us from matters of eternal consequence is an important step in our maturation as Christians. And the next step, beyond guarding against being swept away by the desire for novelty, is to cultivate in ourselves and our children a cultural sensibility that values the transcendent and permanent, not just the new and the now. We need to embrace and instill in our children “the idea that enjoying cultural activity usually takes some work, but that the results are much more rewarding than those offered by instant entertainment” (id. at 184). The belief and hope is that, having learned to savor the work demanded by the subtlety and complexity of a great book, play or painting – rather than just the flashing, pounding excitement that is spoon-fed by every five-minute television segment – we and our children will be more willing and able to grapple, intellectually and spiritually, with the deep questions of life (who am I, why am I here, etc.).
My wife, without doubt, has taken the lead in our family’s cultural walk. For years, she has taken our girls to theatrical performances, such as Cats, Sound of Music and Beauty and the Beast, and exposed them to classic musicals, including The King and I and Mary Poppins and later this year, Peter Pan. She takes them on nature walks and to museums, teaches them about artists, and continually leads them in a variety of art projects. She has read them her favorite childhood books, like The Secret Garden, and we now have shared with them the Chronicles of Narnia and the Lord of the Rings Trilogy. The girls’ grandmothers have provided extensive instruction in how to paint, decoupage, sew and make jewelry. My primary contributions: giving away our big television last year, limiting the DirecTV feed to a single 13-inch set, and leading enforcement of our no-TV-on-school-days ban. As I reflect on our walk, I am encouraged by the progress and reminded that we, particularly I, could do more. Most obviously to me, we could make better use of the vast historical resources readily available to northern Virginian residents, from Jamestown to Gettysburg and in between; there may be no better way to teach the virtues of courage, honor, sacrifice and civic duty than to explore earnestly these places together.
How about you and your family? Are you cultivating a cultural sensibility that values the transcendent and permanent? If so, how? If not, why not?
