A little slice of the cake

[matrixmann]

Who still wants to get on TV? It's nothing special anymore, it has become devoid of essence of content or message, if it ever had one, fame doesn't grant you prosperity, and your time as a personality being worth to be looked at is very fast moving.
If your desire was just to be seen once or to wave your friends, it's not worth the effort anymore as it's the institution no more that everyone looks up to and craves to know what's going on with it.

Comments

[mandarinsun.livejournal.com]

It's getting to the point that everyone has, or at least could have, their own channel anyway.

[matrixmann]

Through the various possibilities that the net offers, it sure becomes doable.
Which actually is like the TV in these days.

[mandarinsun.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I was just thinking about You Tube. If someone's whole goal in life was to have a You Tube channel, I'm sure they could do it. Also, I go from high school to high school and teenagers are incredibly predictable in what they like and don't like. It would be very easy, if it wasn't just obnoxious, to figure out what things you could put on a You Tube channel that would draw viewers. You wouldn't make money, but you'd have a tv channel.

To take that and try to go further, I guess you'd then have to figure out how to sell something from that platform. It would probably have to be like a scam or a pyramid scheme. You'd tell people to use Pay Pal to purchase something and you'd send something that isn't nothing, but is cheap and disappointing.

I'm just following through with this as a thought experiment, not advocating that someone do it.

There are teenagers that I've seen, that look like they are becoming mentally ill, that seem to have been focusing their personalities on getting as many followers, as in Twitter followers, as they can. I remember one junior high girl I had last year that was sort of trying to make the classroom into an audience for her jokes and I said that she wasn't funny and she looked destroyed.

That being said, it is still very uncommon for a teenager to be very loud and attention seeking in the classrooms I go to. If anything, it seems like constant access to the internet and social media has made teenagers a lot more passive and they really crave authority figures to tell them what to do or to praise them.

I remember ten years ago when I'd substitute high schools some teenager boys would call me a faggot and there'd be a lot of anger.

I was going to make more generalizations, but to be honest I work very hard, spend a lot of time, making sure I end up only at schools where I've been successful at in the past.

I went to one that I wasn't successful at this past week and the teenagers were talking really loudly and ignoring me. So, it wasn't like they were aggressive.

I would say that generally social media seems to sedate teenagers and make them regress and be more and more childish.

One problem though is that if eventually they have really expensive tastes but an inability to make money, they'll snap and be violent. But, that is how they'd be violent. It is nothing like it was ten years ago when every high school classroom had male students that would call me faggot and seem very angry all the time.

[matrixmann]

Admittedly, it's very self-centered. Like a lot of them try for the big Kardashian show, but even not one example of this kin is actually really exciting.

I don't know if it's just the burden of the age or something else that adds to it - teens like to think they're very individual and no-one else is like them. They do play and they need to play an exceptional role in life.
But in fact they don't - and telling them how much they bore you and how much you say "yeah, heard that a thousand times before", how much you recognize what trends, brands and mass preferences they call "their own ones", it's gonna end you in a spiteful storm. It's like you hit someone with a bat on his head - something completely unthinkable.

These days teens and young adults do a lot of this trending for fame and making it into mass media. Maybe two decades earlier, even adults could still be thrilled and won for this. This has vastly vanished, and those ones which are still there are those which didn't make it earlier or which constantly struggle of remaining being discussed.

[mandarinsun.livejournal.com]

A term that I started hearing on the news describing young people being offended too easily on social media is microaggressions.

[matrixmann]

Now came cross it in a news article in my first language. Maybe it was picked up from where it appeared overseas.
Didn't pay much attention to the word, as these days they invent a lot to describe all kinds of nonsense which in the end turns out to be not worth much time.
So this term means those people which easily show up offensed in social media and reality and quickly claim vengeance for their "hurt" feelings... And while claiming and executing it, they fuck up everything in culture and everything in mindsets, sometimes more racist and sexistic than what they allegedly want to fight.

Well, maybe that's a method to cause attention to oneself which you originally wouldn't get it if you stayed regular in society. Maybe that can be even blamed on the US-culture-driven mannerism that this country has flooded the world with.
At least there can be said, you notice in the US-blogosphere (even here) that there are often repeatedly reoccurring discussions and debates about someone pouring out a mindset which is even from the day before yesterday. A lot of people make a fuzz about it how you can be such an asshole.
Barely a day passes where you don't have anything like that.
And even while partly this outrage may be justified, but it reflects how sensible the people in the US are about certain topics and how they react like a seismograph.
I wouldn't consider this mannerism, as it now also appears in Europe and throughout other parts of the world, as "traditionally part of their culture". It is a thing typical of the cultural circle of the US, with all its propagated individualism, regard to the individual, even if he socially does crap, and all its cirlcing around strong emotions.