The Problem with Modern Day Teenagers in a Digital World, Searching for Corporate Identity

By Christopher Barr │POSTED ON JANUARY 23, 2015 - EDITED DECEMBER 26, 2021

Guilty pleasures, selling out and integrity have all but vanished from the ‘Like’ generations interface.  There is no longer anything to feel guilty about so the concept of selling out would be lost on most teens.  This digital age has ushered in with it a new type of pseudo-post-human person, an actual post-human isn't a human at all, more Alien-like with no attachment to this earth at all.  It also has extended the idea of the teenager beyond a decade of turning 20.  This Like generation has the same insecurities as teenagers did 30 years ago but now the differences are that most of them exist digitally, isolated and compacted for the young person to upload synaptically at an unprecedented rate.

The teenager is a 20th-century phenomenon, really just over half a century old.  Prior to that, children grew into adulthood without the teen-angst buffer.  It really wasn’t until after World War 2 that the teenager emerged.  Before that, a child got old enough to work and help out the family before they were 10 because that's what had to be done.  There was no time for lover’s lane, dinner, and a movie or sharing strawberry milkshakes while listening to Elvis Presley on the radio at the local soda shop, like what was enjoyed in the 1950s.

Then the 1960s kicked in and with it a whole New World Order that germinated in the ’50s, overtly surfaced.  Teenagers had parents earning money for their educations and for their after-school activities.  Some protested the war in Vietnam while others jumped on the acid train singing songs around campfires about freedom and rebellion.  Teenagers at this point, to their parents and to the established order, were somewhat of an annoyance, at least the ones that weren’t being fitted for corporate or government white-collar positions.  Many of the teenagers that had nothing really to offer to established-order were essentially sent off to Vietnam to be killed.  

The disillusionment of the 1970s kicked in where some young people checked out, smoking marijuana, growing their hair long to defy the establishment, listening to The Beatles, Pink Floyd, Supertramp, and Led Zepplin, and keeping their heads down in the grass.  The war in Vietnam ended, Richard Nixon resigned his presidency, and just before most people wanted to crash their cars into a brick wall a little-known movie called Star Wars (1977) was released.  At the time not many people knew but this space movie was about to change the whole culture.  

When Reagan’s 1980s kicked in with a promise to raise profits on Wall Street and create a more secure and safe place to invest, teenagers, for the most part, stopped with the protesting and complaining about how poorly the system was being operated and just played alone.  The 1980s was a juvenile time in the culture where songs became more light-hearted and magical rather than the philosophical fare from the ’60s and ’70s.  Movies were about teenagers going off on big adventures like in The Goonies and Back to the Future.  This was to keep them doing their homework and moving towards becoming more productive members of corporate society.  All their fantasies for freedom all unfolded on the movie screen rather than the streets of any major American city while being smacked down by massive men in riot gear.

The 1990s ushered in a new revolution in the culture where the youth were fighting back again.  With the first Gulf War underway and the media playing a central role in everyone’s lives, teenagers turned to grunge music to escape this new wave of technology and government control.  Where the death of John Lennon killed the possibility of hope for a less guarded society in 1980, Kurt Cobain’s death in 1994 would end the grunge movement and the hope it inspired.  Just after this moment, we entered a true fault line in culture with Microsoft introducing Windows 95 and the World Wide Web spreading around the world and changing pretty well every way we communicate as a species.  At the time this was new technology and most could not see the tsunami thrusting us all, like it or not, into a new age of technology and corporate and political control over the population.

Those that tried to hold onto what grunge had started did so in the movie theater.  Music owned the first half of the ’90s and movies most defiantly owned the second half.  A film like 1995’s Seven was a deep line in the existential sand as corporations were stumbling over themselves, racing to buy up as much real estate on the internet as their greedy little hands could grab.  Toward the end of the ’90s, cinema had created a massive bastion of films that forced light on the subject of the nature of reality itself.  These films reimagined age-old philosophical questions, fusing them in modern-day life and technology itself, the so-called new savior of humanity.   The Matrix, The Truman Show, eXistenZ, Being John Malkovich, Dark City, Fight Club, and The Thirteenth Floor, to name a few.

Cell phones finally developed enough for many to have one of their own.  Teenagers were growing up during this massive shift, not only in culture but in government foreign policy pertaining to war practices, and how corporations were finding new ways to sell their products to all the unsuspecting, impressionable teenagers screaming for an identity while the century closes on a massive Y2K scare.

With the birth of a new century came an end to movies inspiring people to think outside the box of their computer screens.  Music dropped all the tough making-people-think bands and instead dumbed down their catalog to something that can only be described as a fusion of a child’s lullaby and hyper-circus music.  The September 11, 2001 attacks would create such a fear in the mass body of the population that doing anything outside of what corporations and the government instructed borderline on treason.  At this point, a new shift in society came about where the teenage culture became the culture.  Pretty well everything across the board was the lowest common denominator.  We were no longer a society that nurtured imagination and creativity.  Instead, we became a full-blown consumer society where a person’s interests could only be found at the click-of-a-button online shopping market or playing a virtual larger-than-life character in the gaming world.  Variety has become isolated which has led most to strengthen their confirmation bias, avoiding such societal malediction as depression - due to an apathetic population, all desperately fishing for constant validation but more often than falling into the sad pool of victimhood culture. 

With Facebook going online and the first touchscreen iPhone becoming available, teenagers were not only representing the culture through social media but soon they would inadvertently be running it. Mainstream movies in the 2000s were pretty much superhero or young adult-oriented.  Music continued down the path of simplicity while most shied away from the reality of the massive war in the Middle East.

Up until the present, from the 2000s on, most adults in their 20’s, 30’s, and even the Star Wars generation in their 40’s, still wanting to go to a galaxy far far away, were adults that have been absorbed into the culture and have thus unknowingly arrested their personal development.  Their mentors have become teenagers and not philosophers or older people with true wisdom; their reading material has been reduced to the 140 characters allowed on Twitter rather than books about history and art.  

Living with reality is a very large part of the human experience.  Unfortunately, we now live in a society where most adults, read, think, and behave at a preteen level while they build upon their digital citizenship.  This is all acceptable because the majority have been hypnotized by the mass media by being fed entertainment through multiple television channels, through the disconnectivity of cellphone communications and from the government, which keeps them scared of a foreign boogeyman that could kill them, taking away their freedom to shop for more stuff and to ‘Like’ more trivial cute animal posts on Facebook.

Teenagers of today develop their interpersonal relationships for the most part by chasing ‘Likes’ on Facebook, ‘Subscribes’ on YouTube, and ‘Retweets’ on Twitter, because this, in our technopoly, is where self-worth is fabricated.  These affirmations have become their currency and for many their only concern.  We are marketing ourselves as online celebrities because we want to win, we want to be recognized as someone special in a world that is becoming increasingly empty and lonely.  This system allows people to advertise for corporate products through their personal devices, while those same products are being force-fed back to them in this odd digital cycle of insecurities, fusing with corporate agendas in this idiosyncratic pursuit for some form of happiness. Corporations have disguised what they truly want from people and they have done this in such a masterful way so that a person actually disguises it from themselves.

The purpose here is not to say that all teenagers have become spending drones for corporations or that all young and middle-aged adults are afraid of growing up, there are still some people out there, young and old, that have seen behind the curtain and don't like what they're looking at.  What I’m saying is there is a trend that is flourishing in the culture where teenagers are being robbed of their ability to live a life, free of control.  It would be nice to see teenagers in a position to truly understand the choices they are making, rather than corporate 'think-groups' in offices that look like daycare centers, dream up ways to manipulate them into caring about their stupid products.  Like most culture shifts, these things come and go.  Maybe teenagers of the future won’t rely on text messaging to convey their feelings to another person elsewhere in the world.  Maybe talking to people will become a new trend again. Maybe the robots do everything for us while we jack into a Matrix-type world of our choosing and never really have to live a day in the real world again.