In recent months, I published a book about adolescents who let me hang out with them in the waning years of the first decade of this century. For most of these teens, I had done the same thing with their parents two decades earlier and their grandparents more than three decades ago. Teens of the 21st century were a special case.
They laughed at the idea that I was actually writing a book! They argued that I should “just blog” or maybe “tweet,” since “nobody reads books.” Rebecca, one of the young people in the book, pointed out the contradiction that while I was studying young people engaged in every possible way with internet technologies, the very processes I was studying would not be those through which people would get to know about her and her friends. When I told Bernardo, another teen featured in the book, that book publishers would not include photographs (“too expensive”), he asked, “So what’s the point? Everyone needs pictures.” His special interest is organic gardens, chemicals, and water distribution. He relies on the internet to keep in touch with other young people creating community gardens and hoping to own small organic farms someday. Rebecca wants to combine art and science in her future, and the internet keeps her current with what’s happening with other teens who want to go into science while also keeping their hand in the arts.
Today’s aspiring musicians, artists, scientists, pilots, physicians, and entrepreneurs read, write, and perform for, through, and with internet technologies. They make the internet work for them and their interests and passions. They look for performances on YouTube or vimeo. They chase sources and references they hear about, hoping to find “good stuff” that include combinations of written text, photographs, charts, videos, and cross-references to other sites and sources. These teens supplement what they collect through internet sources by talking to their friends, emailing experts, and checking out websites of experts to see where else they can see in action the person, group, product, or program currently at the top of their interest list.
Teens today read, watch, talk, and experiment or perform when they want to know or do something. Their parents, in contrast, watched, talked, and relished trial and error. They read, particularly special-interest magazines, such as Popular Mechanics and Seventeen. Books drew less of their attention, because content quickly became outdated.
In spite of today’s teens’ discouraging words about books, I did publish Words at work and play: Three decades in family and community life (2012). As I explained to the young 21st century pioneers, they would very soon be history, and history would, for at least the next few decades, need to be recorded in writing – particularly in books. Within the next decade, what they as today’s teens were doing as they read, wrote, watched, and performed with IT would be outdated. Facebook would evolve or even dwindle as MySpace had done, and new social networking means would emerge with more efficient and effective ways of connecting people, places, actions, and ideas on the internet.
The depressing idea that they and their ways would soon be history made sense to teenagers only when we talked about how toys and play had changed during their short life span. Today their younger siblings have no toys made of wood, dolls without a capacity for action, or pretend phones. Instead, younger siblings played with plastic toys, action figures and vehicles, and real mobile phones and iPads.
Most of today’s teens were quick to admit that they knew little of the work involved in maintaining either the family car or the family home’s electrical system, appliances, heating system, and yard or garden. “Work” for them came in “working out” to stay in shape, getting a job at a fastfood restaurant, or finding a paid summer internship or job. Their parents as teenagers had helped repair the family automobile, knew something about the work needed to maintain the family home, and found employment within the small businesses owned by their parents or friends of their parents.
Indeed across just the two generations represented by them and their parents, work and play, along with ways of talking, regarding written sources of information, and expressing ideas to others had changed right in front of their eyes. Uneasy with being confronted with the speed of change that now makes history, the teens gradually came to relish taking part in the research that went into my book. They digitally recorded their conversations with friends and sessions when friends worked together to create a film or research games on the internet. They learned to count parts of speech, tense changes, and hypotheticals in transcripts of their own talk and to compare these numbers with those from similar recordings their parents had made when they were teenagers. While their parents used past, present, and future tense in their everyday conversations, the teens of today tended to stick with the present tense, making it extend backwards and forwards through vocal emphasis, gesture, and facial expression. Their parents had lacked the fondness for adverbs that today’s teens found in their talk; when they listened to their own recordings, they heard actually, really, totally over and over. While their parents had occasionally used like to introduce a segment of a narrative, today’s teens found this word in their conversations “like everywhere.”
In short, Words at work and play eventually managed to work its way into the hearts and minds of the teens of today who populate the book. When their parents and grandparents read the book, they find much to celebrate about their own youth and more to lament about today’s teenagers. Yet the elders realize that such has for centuries been the pattern of transgenerational assessments. Harder for them to take is the realization that in past decades responses to economic changes lay largely within the control and conscious choice-making of individuals and families. Such is not the case today. The global economy exerts pressures that reach into nearly every aspect of life at the local level. Consumerism, entertainment, and material accumulation have overtaken saving, doing, and knowing. Past values of being spare and frugal, as well as to spending without borrowing have disappeared.
Thus, in spite of protestations from today’s teens, Words at work and play: Three decades in family and community life presents their everyday talk and behaviors and those of the two generations before them between the pages of a book. In the words of one teen, this collection of stories is “too big to be on the internet.” Conjoined compliment and complaint, this description fits the book well. The volume’s narrative takes in thirty years of economic changes and ripples in parenting, working, playing, and talking. Families and communities now figure in the lives of children and young people in ways that only faintly resemble those of a decade ago. Learning “on my own” has become the mantra for many of the young today, making them demand that skills and knowledge from school and family socialization be “relevant” and “realistic.” Where this kind of demand comes from and where the innovations that may result will take us constitute the essence of Words at work and play across three decades of family and community life.