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| Paris Brown: an (a)typical teenager revealing her worst true self? | Paris Brown: an (a)typical teenager revealing her worst true self? |
| (6 months later) | |
| Another week, another ill-conceived bout of social media diarrhoea. This time, it's 17-year-old Paris Brown, whose £15,000-a-year post as "adviser on youth" to Kent police commissioner Ann Barnes was put in jeopardy when the media discovered her various tweets about drinking, drugs and sex, as well as her use of derogatory terms such as "fag" and "pikey". Brown has apologised for her "inappropriate" comments: "All teenagers make mistakes," she told the BBC. "It's an age thing." Despite calls for her to be sacked, she has so far survived, partly because the tweets were made before her job appointment, and partly because Barnes insisted that she "wanted someone for the job who was a typical teenager". | Another week, another ill-conceived bout of social media diarrhoea. This time, it's 17-year-old Paris Brown, whose £15,000-a-year post as "adviser on youth" to Kent police commissioner Ann Barnes was put in jeopardy when the media discovered her various tweets about drinking, drugs and sex, as well as her use of derogatory terms such as "fag" and "pikey". Brown has apologised for her "inappropriate" comments: "All teenagers make mistakes," she told the BBC. "It's an age thing." Despite calls for her to be sacked, she has so far survived, partly because the tweets were made before her job appointment, and partly because Barnes insisted that she "wanted someone for the job who was a typical teenager". |
| Disregarding the fact that 15 grand a year and a high-profile job are both factors which render your teenage self somewhat atypical, there is a point to be made about social media here. "I think that if everyone's future was determined by what they wrote on social networking sites between 14 and 16 we'd live in a very odd world," said the police commissioner. Well, quite. There's some lovesick poetry I wrote on the now-defunct Teen Open Diary which, were it ever to have seen the light of day, would probably put paid to my writing for the Guardian, and that's before you even start to consider my MySpace page. | Disregarding the fact that 15 grand a year and a high-profile job are both factors which render your teenage self somewhat atypical, there is a point to be made about social media here. "I think that if everyone's future was determined by what they wrote on social networking sites between 14 and 16 we'd live in a very odd world," said the police commissioner. Well, quite. There's some lovesick poetry I wrote on the now-defunct Teen Open Diary which, were it ever to have seen the light of day, would probably put paid to my writing for the Guardian, and that's before you even start to consider my MySpace page. |
| My generation was the first to grow up online. I built my first website when I was 12 (though dominated as it was by garish, flashing gifs, I doubt it would win any design awards). Throughout my teens I would spend hours chatting on MSN Messenger, flirting with boys who would never dream of talking to me IRL (in real life) and sometimes helping to co-ordinate "takedowns" of weaker members of the year via the perilous group chat function. Meanwhile, Mum was upstairs, none the wiser. | My generation was the first to grow up online. I built my first website when I was 12 (though dominated as it was by garish, flashing gifs, I doubt it would win any design awards). Throughout my teens I would spend hours chatting on MSN Messenger, flirting with boys who would never dream of talking to me IRL (in real life) and sometimes helping to co-ordinate "takedowns" of weaker members of the year via the perilous group chat function. Meanwhile, Mum was upstairs, none the wiser. |
| In those pre-Facebook days, your carefully chosen online moniker signified your most profound, concocted personal traits, your digitally enhanced "best self". We were the first young people to mediate our social relationships through digital technology in this way. But now Brown's generation has taken it a step further. | In those pre-Facebook days, your carefully chosen online moniker signified your most profound, concocted personal traits, your digitally enhanced "best self". We were the first young people to mediate our social relationships through digital technology in this way. But now Brown's generation has taken it a step further. |
| Teenagers today see the internet as their actual lived experience, rather than simply a means for documenting a version of it. Just as MSN started to become my social life, the things teenagers now post on Facebook and Twitter are just that: things people say. Thoughts. Unmediated thoughts, thrown out to the world with as little premeditation as the impulses they describe. Just look at the youth adviser's tweets: hunger, anger, horniness. Basic, base. Your worst, true self. If we Photoshopped out our warts, then this lot are putting them back in. | Teenagers today see the internet as their actual lived experience, rather than simply a means for documenting a version of it. Just as MSN started to become my social life, the things teenagers now post on Facebook and Twitter are just that: things people say. Thoughts. Unmediated thoughts, thrown out to the world with as little premeditation as the impulses they describe. Just look at the youth adviser's tweets: hunger, anger, horniness. Basic, base. Your worst, true self. If we Photoshopped out our warts, then this lot are putting them back in. |
| So many commentators, particularly those who are a tad older (and I don't mean that disrespectfully), do not seem to understand this when they talk about social media. The internet is making teenage life much more public than it would have been in the school corridor. If your language on Twitter is offensive, then it's probably offensive "in real life", too. That old distinction, one that was in its dying throes as I negotiated between my two separate social lives, no longer really exists. Now is a strange, in-between time, as offline and online merge. | So many commentators, particularly those who are a tad older (and I don't mean that disrespectfully), do not seem to understand this when they talk about social media. The internet is making teenage life much more public than it would have been in the school corridor. If your language on Twitter is offensive, then it's probably offensive "in real life", too. That old distinction, one that was in its dying throes as I negotiated between my two separate social lives, no longer really exists. Now is a strange, in-between time, as offline and online merge. |
| When Brown admitted "I have been guilty of showing off in the past", I must admit I sympathised. Her generation is collateral damage. But social media is not a lesser form of communication; it is as worthy of a disciplinary hearing as anything said out loud. I can't remember the last time I saw the letters "IRL" typed on a screen. We used to say it all the time. Now, it's practically extinct. | When Brown admitted "I have been guilty of showing off in the past", I must admit I sympathised. Her generation is collateral damage. But social media is not a lesser form of communication; it is as worthy of a disciplinary hearing as anything said out loud. I can't remember the last time I saw the letters "IRL" typed on a screen. We used to say it all the time. Now, it's practically extinct. |
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