Sunday, April 21, 2013

Talking Point 11: Teens Talk Back


So I loved this video, not only for the Dr. Who reference but a lot of the stuff I watched in my hour of Teens Talk Back had to do with "understanding teenage girls"... and more importantly, not understanding them.  I think it was worth interesting that the more time I spent watching videos and searching websites the more I found the quote:
"NO ONE UNDERSTANDS ME!!!!"
Which I totally remember thinking when I was in middle school and high school, that my problems were so different from everyone else's that there was no one on the face of the Earth that could possibly understand what I was going through (Leaving all the brain tumor stuff aside).  When teens create this rift and their own classification, they are in essence following our course assumption that: Youth is a culturally constructed category.

When I continued to look for teens representing themselves I stumbled upon videos like these:




By the end of them, I feel like I lost brain cells, was I really like this as a teenager?  I'm not sure if I'm more annoyed at the teens or the people who were educating them.  Which is when I started finding more of the positive things that teenagers are doing and learning rather than the two videos above.  The first of which, is an inspiring story about teenagers and what they can do when they put their minds to work, creating android apps to solve problems in their everyday lives.




3 comments:

  1. Great post, Noelle! I like your use of videos (and I, too, appreciate Doctor Who references; Doctor Who references are cool). I think it's very interesting that you found the pattern of "no one understands me" in the material you looked at. I kind of got a sense of that myself, but more in a "society doesn't understand me and treats me both as a child and an adult, placing extreme pressures on me" way. Very interesting, indeed!

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  2. I didn't write about it in my blog, but I also tried to find websites that showed the positive things teens are doing, like the Android apps. I think that shows resistance because most people probably don't expect teens to be doing things that like that actually matter.

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  3. I agree with you that it was very frustrating and indeed disappointing that teens were just feeding into the stereotypes out there of them, instead of making it a point not to fit into them.

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