Rebels without a Clue

I want to talk to my students about their phones, at this beginning of the school year, but I may not have the right tools.

When I was their age, there was no hope of me ever fitting in, so given that this wasn’t an option I went for my own…style is maybe too grand a word, but style is what comes to mind. I didn’t have style, and in my own way I followed along as much as the popular kids did — thrift store shopping, annoying music passed around by cassette tape, lefty politics — and had no idea of having my own thing. I sincerely don’t think I was rebellious as such, just lost. I went from living with my mother in her strange, druggie world to living with my dad in his strange, über intellectual world, and I didn’t even know I needed help, or even what help I should have asked for.

I don’t have a lot of regrets, but I wish I’d let myself worry less and create more. I wish when things got me down, I’d had my “thing”. Today I let myself just get interested in things without the pressure of becoming good at them, only with the idea that they give me pleasure. I plink plunk around on my ukulele, badly, but it’s good for my fingers. I try to learn German and some Swiss German, but it’s not likely that I’ll ever have the ease that I do in French after nearly thirty years living in a French speaking area. I write, both here on the blog and the novel I’ve finished (which I need to get around to self-publishing because no one is going to help me that, unfortunately. I also want to finish the sequel one pretty badly).

I want to appeal to my teenagers by talking about the idea of enshittification. This is how the wiki page defines it and what I plan on showing them:

New voc: enshittification also known as platform decay, is a process in which two sided-online products and services decline in quality over time

1. vendors create high-quality offerings to attract users. 
2. Over time, they degrade those offerings to better serve business customers. 
3. Ultimately, they degrade their services to both users and business customers to maximise short-term profits for shareholders

My plan is to tell them this, actually write and say this:

–> I can’t compete with your social media streams. It’s like a constant supply of sugar and we’re all diabetics. 

–> Reading teaches empathy. It’s the only way we can recognize (or not recognize) ourselves in the thoughts of others. Folks look for so called “authenticity” from their influencers, but most characters in well-written novels are a hundred times more authentic and they’re not even real. Or no more real than the influencers are.

–> I can’t make you like reading. I can try to make it interesting. I will try my very, very best not to waste your time here in class.

–> Or you can be a pawn, an idiot, a follower, a useless twit whose only interest in the world is helping billionaires become even more filthy rich. Up to you.

But what does it mean to “fit in” today? Our culture is not as homogenized as it was when I was kid, but when these kids have parties, they all seem to know the words to the most popular songs so those must get shared around somewhere and somehow. It’s not on the radio for Pete’s sake. There is a common culture (unknown to adults).

There is likely a way of fitting in more than the unpopular kids manage. They’re not all rebels. There are the versions of the cheerleader/American football players/head girls and boys among them. What does it mean to “fit in” today, and how can I use that to appeal to them to limit their use of social media? I truly do not know.

Into the great wide open
Under them skies of blue
Into the great wide open
A rebel without a clue – Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers