Teenagers in the News

Teenagers in the News

"Teaching Teens about Harassment" by Stephanie Clifford

This article is about how three teenage girls in Greensburg, PA got were charged with disseminating child porn. All three of them had sent nude pictures of themselves via text to their boyfriends who were all charged with possession of child pornography. According to the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, about twenty percent of teens have either posted or sent nude pictures of themselves through cell phones. The Family Violence Prevention Fund has labeled the sending of nude photos as a form of digital dating violence. Because of some highly publicized cases, parents are just becoming aware of how much teens can access through all the technology available to them in this day and age.

Teens shouldn't be taking nude photos of themselves and sending them to anyone. By doing this they are putting themselves at risk. These pictures can be shown or sent to anyone and teens at this age can't be trusted to keep these photos to themselves.

I don't necessarily agree that the teens involved in this article should have been charged with porn, but I believe they are using them as guinea pigs to make an example and to try and stop this behavior from happening.

"Teenagers' Internet Socializing Not a bad Thing" by Tamar Lewin

The study in this article was done by the MacArthur Foundation and basically says that parents shouldn't be worrying so much about what their teenagers are doing online for so long because they are learning technological skills and literacy that's going to help them succeed in the world. The main reason teens go online is to socialize with their friends, not to get into trouble. Teens say the Internet and technology is an addiction and you can't live without it. Today's youth have more motivation to learn from their peers than they are to learn from adults.

This article mostly makes me think of the Marc Prensky article "Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants," because technology is so much a part of teens lives and previous generations don't really understand the need and obsession with it because they didn't grow up with all these fun technologies.

Something I didn't really like was how the article stated that predators and stranger danger have been overblown. There are many incidents of teens talking online to strangers and eventually meeting up with them and they end up disappearing or being found murdered.

"What's the Buzz? Rowdy Teenagers Don't Want to Hear It" by Sarah Lyall

This article was completely absurd. Howard Stapleton from Barry, Whales came up with a plan to keep rowdy teens from hanging outside stores and causing trouble. He invented a device (called the Mosquito) that emits a high-frequency pulsing sound that can be heard by most people under the age of 20 and almost no one over the age of 30. This sound is designed to irritate young people and after a few moments it irritates them so much that they end up leaving. Howard Stapleton was quoted saying "It's very difficult to shoplift, when you have your fingers in your ears."

I don't really agree with this tactic at all. I think this device is a little inhumane. It's basically treating the teens like animals. This device is pretty much a dog whistle for humans. Reading this made me think of Thomas Hine's "The Rise and Fall of the American Teenager" because teens are being viewed as pests and being driven away by a machine called the mosquito. The teens aren't being understood by the shop owners in this article and they don't really know how to handle it so instead they drive them away.

"FastForward" by Lauren Greenfield

"Fastforward" by Lauren Greenfield



I thought that Lauren Greenfield's web page was amazing! She captured teens in today's society perfectly in all of her photos from FastForward. It's very interesting to me how you can see the difference in the social class and way of life and almost see someones personality from just a photo that only captures a moment of that persons life.



"The young and privileged in Shanghai don’t care about politics or communism but are obsessed with MTV, Fashion TV, Gucci, and L.V. (Louis Vuitton). Milanese youth don cutting edge hip-hop fashion originated by the inner city and perfected by haute couture designers. Fourteen-year old Italian girls wear thongs deliberately hiked up over their low-riding pants and rip revealing holes in their jeans. They go out to discos on school nights and dance to American hip-hop and electronica until dawn." This was one of the parts of Lauren Greenfield's statement that really stood out to me. I didn't realize how much other countries youth's are obsessed with the same things that teens in the U.S. are. My favorite photo is of the little girl phoebe lying on the couch in her tutu at the opening of Barneys in front of all the shoes. It's just a very ironic photo.

The photos that most disturb me are of ashleigh (13) weighting herself on a scale in her bathroom with her family watching her. She's thirteen she first of all doesn't need to weighing herself at that age and what really annoys me is that her family is in the backround; which leads me to believe that they are curious of her weight and are encouraging her to worry about what she weighs, it's ridiculous. The other photo that really disturbed me was of adam (also 13) at a bar mitzvah at a whisky Go Go Bar with one of the dancers all up in his face. I'm just wondering Why a bar mitzvah is being held at a whisky? really?

All the teens in these photos are very dominant and seem as if they are the ones in control and ruling the world in a way. I think Thomas Hine might have a hard time with some of these photos because in his book teens are lost and trying to fit in. To me all the teens in these photos are giving off a very authoritative vibe and seem like they know who they are. I think Tricia Rose may have more to say about how hip hop and the images and stereotypes it creates are seen in some of these photos and how much socitey and the teens in it have changed over time.

"Prep"

"Prep" by Curits Sittenfield

I really enjoyed how the author started this novel off in chapter one with Lee (the main character) in class and having to present on a topic she wasn't supposed to do, right after someone else had just presented on the same exact topic. Lee completely panics and has a meltdown and ends up running out of class after just starting to present. You can totally relate to those feelings of panic and all the thoughts running through her mind. I think the author's point is to show how a teenager's mind works and all the problems they have with fitting in, sexual orientation, and making friends. One thing that kind of stuck out to me was that this private boarding school cost $20,000 to attend, they lived in dorms, and the expectations of the students was very high; it seems more like a college to me than a high school.
"I did not scream or hug anyone. In fact, as the noise gained momentum, I felt its opposite, a draining of excitement. But not a draining of tension -my body was still stiff and alert, and the impulse I had, strangely, was to weep. Not because I was sad but because I was not happy, and yet, like my classmates, I'd experienced an emotional surge, I too felt the need for expression. This phenomenon-being gripped by an overwhelming wave of feeling that was clearly not the feeling of the people around me had also happened at a pep rally: It made me uncomfortable, because I didn't want anyone to notice that I wasn't jumping up and down or cheering, and it also thrilled me, because it made the world seem full of possibilities that could make my heart pound. I think, looking back, that this was the single best thing about Ault, the sense of possibility. We lived together so closely, but because it was a place of decorum and restraint and because on top of that we were teenagers, we hid so much. And then, in dorms and classes and on teams and at formal dinner and in adviser groups, we got shuffled and thrust together and shuffled again, and there was always the chance that you might find out one of the pieces of hidden information" (pg 42). This was a part of this novel that really stuck out to me and describes a teenager's roller coaster of emotions.

Something that was a little strange to me was almost all the names of people were very different and I've never heard of most of them. I read these two chapters of the novel on the computer, which made it seem very dragged out and almost harder to read, I should have printed it out before I read it. This novel can relate basically to anything we've learned so far because it all relates to teenagers and their life growing up and how they deal with problems differently and adapt to situations they're not accustomed to.