I closed off the last day before March break with a conversation in my class on sexting & corporate consumer culture: who makes the media? What kind of media do teens make online with their current tools? What's the value of being original and having your own thoughts vs. the Disneyfied version of human relations? These were some of the talking points that opened them up to exploring the mediated reality of the 21st century. It promoted two students to say, "Sir, i was so close to shutting down my Facebook account." "Me too," says another. "But I just couldn't do it." "Me neither," says the girl beside him, and I slammed my fist on the table, and I said joyfully, "Do it! Leave Facebook behind! Free yourself! You can do it!"
We had a great close out to the week. There's nothing like watching young minds getting turned on by free thinking and start on the path of critiquing their banal parts of culture, their media stereotyping, and gaining an awareness of the physical and mental diseases that come with listening to the marketing messages of personal inadequacy and low self-esteem, that apparently only products will cure them of. The young mind does succumb to a lot of cognitive dissonance in our digital era, this human experiment on our well-being.
You know, kids sext all the time despite the many warnings, talks, and explanations of the costs of creating and distributing child pornography, which the current laws in North America define these practices as. Some kids now just make porn and produce it for the web, to share with friends, not to make money in the online pornography industry, but just as a replication of the media they consume online already. It's more than bizarre, but understandable, as some kid would make a sci fi film with their dad's Super8 camera in the 70's, only these new provacative products are much more disturbing indicators.
What's difficult as a teacher, who likes to disrupt consumer culture with fostering independent critical skills, is that before I've even got a handle on sexting's evolution I know I need to turn my brain to the De-Radicalization of the teen male psyche that sees extremism (joining ISIS & rape culture) as their only trajectory. It's a very fast paced world. Everything changes in an instant. This young Canadian male, with no real familial ties to Islam, decided to go Jihadi and give up playing street hockey, threatening his former homeland from abroad instead - simply surreal.
I try to juxtapose and contradict these sudden shifts and mental health issues with teaching kids how to practice meditation, engage in mindfulness practice and make media products that critique the world around them, to introduce their own ideas into the digital world.
I stumbled into this advice to youth piece from my favourite Russian director, Andrei Tarkovsky. While his ideas may appear quaint, there's some big truths in here about cultivating an individual, and creative way of being with oneself, stimulated by nature, and not the razzed dazzle of modern life. There's an integrity to this way of thinking.
But it's not really personal, quite. Not the same.
A few friends who were sysops back in the stoned age had these things called BBSs. Those jumping from 1200 baud modems to 2400 baud were considered the technologically privileged. They were real shooters, let me tell you. People had BBS parties at real geographic locations, likes parks and such. Thing is, I more or less look at the internet as an extension or expanse of basic technological facilitation, not so much the window like social idiom that it's become. Schools, Dept. Stores, Local Newspapers, and Post Offices are all neat and interesting places, but would you chose to live there based on what each represents to you? There is no sanctuary on the internet, just a conduit of great and many potentials. Like everywhere else, overt commercialization is pollution and ruination waiting to happen.