Teen Culture is (un)Dead!

Teen Culture is (un)Dead!

Cast your mind back to any decade in recent history, and we think about trends and fashions worn by the younger generations. Sometimes there were many, but they were always iconic. The '60s conjure up images such as mods and rockers and hippies, the '90s conjour much more grungy and preppy fashion ideas.

But now consider the past decade, and try to place what the fashion of that was. Remember when wearing a necktie as a belt was in? Beaded wire chokers? UGG boots? Whilst we can all remember a few trends, there is no definitive "fashion era" that we can use to define what teenagers were wearing.

And just like with pastimes, the '50s made the hula hoop majorly popular, and in the early '60s the skateboard became a huge thing, we have no definitive pastime for the last decade.

Instead, we watch year after year of fashion trends bringing back older fashion trends - I mean is there anything that hasn't been "brought back" yet from the past century, and teenagers championing the same brands that their parents did before them.

And that is because teenage culture is dead.

Imagine a clique, an underground niche where some teenagers were acting a certain way - inventing dubstep, for example (I am not suggesting that there are no trends, I'm saying that nothing continues to be definitive of a generation). Instead of those people doing that, by the time they've been going for any long term period of time, someone will have taken a picture of it, posted it on twitter and boom! It's out there and by the end of the month it is scrawled out over the Daily Mail.

The mass sharing of information via the internet has changed the days when something grassroots could grow up to be popular; it grabs the grass, handfuls at a time and one by one it explodes it onto the media, one trend at a time.

We choked teenage culture to death using a computer lead.

Trends pass too quickly to be definitive, each year we see a different set of clothes, a different set of music artists, a different set of toys, a different set of teenagers, and so nothing is memorable. And all because of the internet.

But is hope lost? No. Because it is within the very thing that we used to kill teenage culture, that we have nursed back to life via the internet. Think about it this way - if everyone is using the internet to expose their own culture trends, then eventually due to sheer mass of people, some begin to drown. The internet is becoming the platform that once the real world was - secluded and difficult to get your voice heard immediately. And from that, an entirely new generation of teenage culture is spawning.

Vloggers and Youtubers document their lives via cameras to audiences of potentially millions, bloggers jabber their opinions into the void until they gain an audience. And slowly, over the past few years, this has grown into a massive underground culture. They sport "random" tshirts with nonsensical designs, they write music on ukuleles and accordions and they sing songs about everything from loving yourself to internet trolls.

Then there are the fangirls of Tumblr. who talk about the things and people they love and write slightly scary fanfiction, create Photoshop fan art and mostly create interesting and insightful content.

And overlying that, there is the far more mainstream internet culture, that of internet memes and viral videos, so that you get an entire hierarchy of people.

When adults call us "the internet generation", it is usually meant to put us down - imply that we were raised, not by people but by Facebook and Twitter. But they couldn't be more right. Just like there have been punks and grunges and hippies and skaters and goths, now we have the internet subculture.

Pretty much the most interesting thing about this, is that despite the fact that mainstream media has picked up on this underground media and have tried to get in on it, this culture has largely rejected the outside world. They don't want their music to emerge with Simon Cowell's dirty fingerprints all over it, and they don't want their vlogging to be picked up and broadcast over a prime time show. And that is what sets this cyberculture up to be the definitive trend of the past decade.

Every other trend has been a media creation, created by adults who analysed products and decided what to flog at teenagers. Internet culture is as grassroots as the punk culture that preceded it.

We are, Buffy the Vampire Slayer style, bringing back teenage culture, using the same weapon we used to kill it. Ironic, huh.