Actor and NYT contributor Ben Stein notes in passing:
…Adolescents dominate movies and television because they are the main consumers of mass culture. But far more than that, and partly because of mass culture, adolescents, with their short attention spans, their demand for a painless life, their need to blame everyone else for their problems, and their perpetual sense of victimization despite having just been given new Beemers, are the model for the whole society right now.
If you do believe that teens’ unpleasant characteristics are partly due to their unusually high consumption of and influence over mass culture, as Stein seems to say, I have good news: The process of moving down the Long Tail from mass culture to more sophisticated niche culture is accelerating in the lives of teenagers thanks to the internet.
Pre-college teens needn’t settle for what popular culture or popular media, warts and all, serves them. If they want, they can develop a much richer cultural palette.
If you surveyed teenagers 20 years ago on their favorite books and music, I would guess the answers across certain demographics would be similar. After all, you had to take what was given to you on the finite number of TV and radio stations and books at your local library or bookstore.
Now college students can fulfill the “drive to differentiate” in technology-enabled ways which would substantially diversify the results of such a survey if conducted today. It’s now easier to maintain exotic interests, to listen to music bands no one has heard of, to read the first-time novelist’s novel, to download a British sitcom out of the mainstream.
So, if you agree with Stein that some of teenagers’ less attractive behaviors stem from consuming a mass culture that glorifies materialism, hedonism, and any other bad-sounding -ism you can think of — and that the less attractive behavior is compounded when consumed en masse, i.e, the shared consumption experience provides social proof for the resulting behavior — then there’s reason to be hopeful: the internet empowers people at a younger age to begin to move down that long tail earlier, carve out their own little niche, use Wikipedia to satisfy curiosities, learn about foreign cultures, select from millions of books, and so forth.
Teens today have the luxury of not having to watch Jon Stewart or Oprah or read Danielle Steele (or follow any other modern-day cultural influence) to be considered in-the-know from a culture perspective, because they can find and develop their own communities around their own interests and revere the niche-community’s own influences. Personally speaking, I will graduate adolescence knowing less than some about “popular culture,” but this hasn’t left me out of a conversation. I just joined a smaller, more individualized one (this blog, among others). Is this an option my parents’ generation had? I doubt it.
Slowly but surely, the stranglehold of mass culture on everybody (and especially teens, as its largest customer) is decreasing. This should make people like Ben Stein happy.
This might be one of the most compelling reasons to support Net Neutrality…
Just because the opportunity to learn different things more easily now exists doesn’t mean youngsters will take advantage of it. The Internet might reinforce conformity for most, even when it makes differentiation possible for some. Cell phones certainly do reinforce the herd instinct. Is reflective aloneness becoming more and more difficult to achieve? Turning off one’s cell phone may have become the ultimate anti-social act, no doubt harshly punished in the teenage world.
Where are all these unpleasant teens that Ben Stein and many conservative pundits harp about?
They must be denizens of all those swank gated communities where teens actually get BMW’s.
The teens I encounter are no less or more decent than the average run of humanity I encounter daily.
It gets me when people like the myopic Stein, the priggish George Will, and the bilious Cal Thomas bemoan the efforts of some in education to build self-esteem in their young charges.
The cultural elite write as if they they think that all children are bloated egoists who grow up in the pampered circumstances of those kids whose families are part of the richest ten per cent of the population in this country.
Surely an economist like Ben Stein knows better.
The conservative Jeremiahs pretend they don’t know that hundreds of thousands of kids grow up never having heard the words “I love you”, and that hundreds of thousands more have witnessed and been the victims of unspeakable violence in their own families.
These children desperately need some ‘self-esteem’ building, because the only terms of endearment many of them ever may have heard are “stupid idiot”.
Too bad Stein, the former poverty lawyer, devotes more energy to assassinating the character of this country’s youth than he does helping them.
I echo Vince’s comments that teens seem to get a bad rap, even though it may be a small (wealthy) minority who exhibit such undesirable behaviors.
I agree with Ben in saying that the internet has opened the flood gates for people of all ages to obtain entertainment forms that may have remained “off the radar”. British sitcoms and obscure novels are pleasures I’ve enjoyed quite frequently since discovering Amazon.com and even i-Tunes TV downloads.
As for mass culture, I agree that consumerism can contribute to feelings of inadequacy; but one must always remember that it’s possibly to turn-off such messages and quickly realize that you’re life isn’t over if you don’t have a pair of $200.00 jeans.
When I read Ben Stein’s article, I found he was using the teen metaphor to highlight imprudent investors who run madly after junk bonds/other high return instruments without visualizing the attendant risks and whine when it fails them. The others who can sober it up for them, he refers as adults. So I don’t think it was much on teens in general.
Yeah — he only mentioned it in passing….it wasn’t about teens or culture.