By Barney Langford. First published at On Line Opinion ,  Monday, 17 August 2009

I’ve spent most of my life working with young people as teacher, artist, mentor and administrator. The most remarkable aspect of my nearly 40 years working with young people is the consistency with which each ensuing generation is labelled by their elders as moronic, indolent, uncaring and barely able to put a coherent thought/sentence/idea together. Because of their various outrageous behaviours it seems that young people will inevitably be the cause of the decline and ultimate demise of cultured society.

I guess we should view Rob Denehy’s article (On Line Opinion, August 5, 2009) as just the latest in a succession of these kinds of dire warnings: the end of civilisation as we know it because of the failings of the current youth generation. We’ll all be “rooned”, says Denehy, before the year is out.

As do most of these latter day Cassandras, Denehy singles out today’s youth as not up to the standards of previous generations. Today’s youth have been waylaid, and seduced by technology which denies them the time for contemplation. What we end up with are young people occupying a “chaotic place full of bits of data that are not firmly grounded in anything”.

What is most interesting about the criticism is the consistency of that criticism across the more than 40 years that young people have occupied the generational role of the bête noir. The following is from Denehy’s article:

… they seem to be more observers of reality than participants … [as they respond to] Incoming texts, IMs, Internet forums to check in on, TV to watch, phone calls to return, and sometimes socialising face-to-face. And now online social networking such as Facebook and “tweeting” …

Another aspect of this media bombardment is the lack of time or value given to contemplation … Contemplation requires leisure - and quiet surroundings …

When communications, or at least input, comes too quickly, there is not enough time to digest, interpret, and retain the information. … The logical extrapolation of this phenomenon is that the next generation will be less able to react rationally to changes in the world around them because they will lack the context in which to interpret events. A lack of depth will have them searching around the Internet for the site with the answer …

The trivial seems to take up all of their attention, with nothing left over to contribute to the world around them. There seems no sense among these people that what they do matters, they feel a lack of control over their environment that does not bode well for political involvement. The overload issue combines and contributes to a lack of received knowledge from education.

Compare Denehy’s article with that of John Aldridge (in “In The Country of The Young”, Harpers Magazine, NY 1970) criticising the newly emerging baby boomer youth demographic:

One is struck by how philistine the young are in their idealism. The young are remarkable … for their evident determination to barbarize; for their preoccupation with style and their boundless appetite for banality; ... for their disinterest in ideas; for their individual inarticulateness and limpness of manner.

In ordinary circumstances, when they are not operating like a tartar horde, the great majority of the young seem to be creatures of remarkably flaccid personality.

They have not needed to learn how to express themselves in language because the group has learned how to communicate without resorting to language... they are just as bland, vacant and structureless as the drek culture with which they can identify.

I wonder how Denehy would react to Aldridge’s critique of the baby boomers. Or as Mark Davis has pointed out in his book Gangland, are the boomers off limits to criticism?

Over the more than 50 years since the emergence of a clearly defined “yoof” generation there have been some outrageous claims:

In 1956 Elvis was only allowed to appear on the Ed Sullivan Show from the waist up so as not to show his suggestively gyrating hips.

A study in Turkey showed that prolonged exposure to rock music caused mice to change their sexual orientation and become homosexual.

Heavy Metal music played backwards:

1. is a blatant invitation to partake in satanic rituals;
2. causes young people to commit suicide; or
3. both 1 and 2.

Young people’s brains have been frazzled by, or their moral compass has been sent haywire by, in chronological order:

• black music;
• television;
• punk music;
• television;
• heavy metal music;
• heavy metal music played backwards;
• video games;
• television;
• the Internet;
• mobile phones;
• television.

What has been most remarkable about the last 40 years is how unaffected young people are by this onslaught of criticism. Because their world is occupied, like the rest of us, with making sense of their day to day lives. And the constant criticism acts like a kind of rite of passage to adulthood: being a young person means getting blamed. It goes with the territory.

For what it’s worth, I think that the current youth generation provides us with cause for great optimism. Consider the following:

The current youth generation collectively are by far the greatest users of text to communicate in human history.

The current youth generation communicate individually and collectively with more people than any previous generation.

Unlike their parents or grandparents they have an entirely open and flexible attitude to technology. This causes them to see the world differently. Whereas a baby boomer could see technology as a threat, a young person sees opportunity. They intuitively ask different questions.

For example, not “how do I do this?” but “how best can I use this, what are the possibilities I can explore?” Not “is my texting grammatically correct?” but “what do I want to say?” Not “I need to allocate time to contemplate this” but “what are the synergies and links between information that I am accessing from a number of sources?”

One of the more interesting experiences of my adolescence was sitting with my father watching a television broadcast of a Bob Dylan concert. At the conclusion he said something like, “You call that singing?”

He didn’t get it. And nothing that I said or did would ever make him get it. Dylan, and my musical experience, was beyond his comprehension. For many adults it is not just the past that is a foreign country. The country of young people is also foreign and strange and menacing.

So rather than denigrate, let’s celebrate young people.

Let’s encourage them to continue communicating.

And if it’s true, as the well known philosophical collective Mike and the Mechanics have argued, that “every generation blames the one before”, let’s remember that the corollary of this truism is that every generation is suspicious of, fearful for, and feels threatened by the one that follows.

Barney Langford is the Coordinator of the Loft Youth Arts & Cultural Centre in Newcastle. He was the Founding Artistic Director of 2 Til 5 Youth Theatre (Now Tantrum Theatre).

This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons License.