Killer Culture
Is it just me or do children seem to
be growing up far too quickly nowadays? Is it something about the
clothes they wear, the things they say, or something you can’t quite
put your finger on? And it’s not just how they are growing up, but
what they are growing up into. As with the Pied Piper of old, it
seems so many of today’s youth are being enticed down a very dark
path indeed.
I don’t think I’m the only one who’s concerned
about the situation, but maybe too many are so busy having a good
time and ‘partying it up’ that they’re not thinking about what lies
at the end of the trip.
Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing
“They
want to be cool. They are impressionable and they have the cash.
They are corporate America’s $150 billion dream.” So begins TV
documentary ‘The Merchants of Cool’, a head-turning exposé on the
corporate world’s infiltration – and exploitation – of today’s youth
market. It’s common strategy in the marketing world to use various
techniques to survey and ‘plug in’ to one’s chosen market, to get a
feel of what potential buyers want and are willing to pay for. Of
course, many such marketing companies operate well within accepted
business practice and ethical behaviour.
Sadly, however, there
comes a point when marketing strategies clearly overstep ethical
boundaries – and sometimes even threaten important social values.
Journalist, Patricia Hersch, documented these corporate attempts
to crack the youth market in her recent exposé: ‘A Tribe Apart: A
Journey into the Heart of American Adolescence’. According to
Hersch, marketers play on the deepest-felt psychological needs and
vulnerabilities of youth to get the ‘low down’ on what’s happening
in youth circles, the essence of ‘what’s hot and what’s not’.
The problem is, in order to get the attention of the youth
element, the products being marketed (whether music, movies or
accessories) have got to be ‘bigger and badder’ than that which has
gone before. Some have compared the ‘cornering of the teen market’
to Imperialism where every effort is made at personal financial gain
– with little regard for the welfare of the inhabitants of the
conquered nations.
Marketers of evil
One such marketing technique is to send
spies into youth clubs and social settings to gather as much
information on youth trends and the ‘youth vibe’ as possible.
Another is to monitor internet chat forums – with or without the
knowledge of those being monitored – something that seriously
infringes our right to privacy and also threatens the emerging
internet culture.
Influencing the culture
It’s easy to say that the big
corporations are merely plugging into a culture that’s already there
and not influencing it in any way. According to editor and author,
David Kupelian, however, many of today’s marketers do not merely
copy, but actually influence the movement and flow of the often
impressionable youth culture. They are not simply following and
observing it, but ‘they are leading – downward’.
After a while,
the whole ‘chicken or the egg’ concept starts to blur, and it is not
clear whether the marketers are merely copying youth culture – or if
youth culture is copying what the marketers sell them. According to
media critic, Douglas Rushkoff, many times it’s a bit of both: “It’s
a giant feedback loop. The media watches kids and then sells them an
image of themselves. The kids then act on the media image,
exaggerate it in an effort to be ‘more cool’, and the result is a
vicious cycle.”
We need only to think of recent Hollywood films
like ‘Borat’ or ‘Clerks 2’, where the key element is to ‘dare to
dare’ – which in some cases even means pushing rape or bestiality as
‘cool’ or comical concepts. To be fair, the situation is not
perfectly suited to the South African scene. For one thing, South
African youth are not as far down the ‘slippery slope’ of the modern
entertainment world as their overseas counterparts. And, of course,
neither the local marketing scene nor local youth are nearly as
affluent or pleasure-driven as in the US. However, the strong
influence of Hollywood and MTV culture on SA youth – and all around
the world - is undeniable.
Kids growing up too soon...
New York University professor Neil
Postman was, during his lifetime, one of the premiere authorities on
media and entertainment trends. In 1982 he penned ‘The Disappearance
of Childhood’ regarded as a classic work on the subject. For
Postman, thanks to current media and entertainment trends, children
today are being literally forced into adulthood before their time.
The Harsh reality
He gives the example of the Middle Ages; a
time of relative barbarism and sexual openness. Because of the
prevailing culture, children were privy to acts of sex and violence,
whether brutal jousting contests (not as glamorous as cinema would
have us believe), or in witnessing sexual acts at home as they were
all forced to share the same family bed with their parents.
For
Postman, children in these times had no childhood. They saw and took
in things on a daily basis that the later West would never allow.
For this reason, they had little of what we would call childhood or
an ‘innocence period’. This all changed in later years, however, and
by 1850 - a more civilised age - the need for a proper ‘childhood’
period became evident, when children could be sheltered from the
harsh realities of life until such time as they reached their teens
and could be introduced to the more dubious aspects of the world in
a mature way, in keeping with their development.
What Postman
calls the “disappearance of childhood” began in 1950, when current
trends in media and communication changed the way we see the world.
Today children get all the violence and sexual content they could
‘want’ from the entertainment media, much of it through TV sets in
the privacy of our own lounges. The old censorship categories are
fast being eroded, as children are allowed access to more and more
programming a civilised society would have either banned or
regulated a long time ago. According to Postman, then, because of
current trends in media and communication, we as a civilisation are
returning to a Dark Age – i.e. we are going backwards, not forwards.
True, we cannot lay all the blame for the state of the world at
the feet of the media industry. We are living in an age where
single-parent families are a fact of everyday life and where
divorce, crime and HIV have shaken the family structure to the point
where, in some cases, an older sister or brother is forced to become
the new ‘head of the family’. As a result, many children do not have
the opportunity to explore their childhood fully and are pushed into
adulthood before their little systems are ready for it.
Add to
the problem that if one has never been a child, has never allowed
childhood development its natural course, one cannot properly reach
emotional maturity. This means that when such children grow up,
something will be lacking in their development. There will always be
something missing from their adulthood. Eventually you will have a
generation with, on the one hand, children acting (or trying to act)
like adults and, on the other, adults who are in many respects
children who have never grown up. The damage to such a society is
incalculable. Perhaps we are already seeing this, through
irresponsible attitudes to marriage, marital fidelity and a bad work
ethic that permeates Western society.
Children of the Revolution
Often overlooked is that many of
today’s adults emerged from the Sixties – an era characterised by
rebellion, opposition to traditional morality and the family
structure, and general anti-West sentiment. A lot of these ‘free and
easy’ sixties attitudes filtered down to the next generation (i.e.
to those who are currently leaders of the present generation). For
many parents today, much of modern youth culture may not seem all
that much out of place because “we did it too.”
But rebellion
breeds rebellion and we often don’t realise how much the rebellious
and morally lax ways of the Sixties – which we may carry around as
baggage and not even realise it – carry across to the present
generation of youth, breeding even greater rebel attitudes. So once
again it is indeed the ‘children of the revolution’ who are the real
victims.
Life imitating art
It is such trends that influence our
day-to-day living. Therefore, we have TV shows where overly-mature
kids talk back to their parents and where kids look, talk and act
like adults. And kids, influenced by what they see on TV (among the
many other bad influences in our topsy-turvy society), soon learn to
act like their teen icons – learning adult ways before they are
ready for them. So we have kids looking, dressing and acting like
adults, at times so eerily reminiscent of an adult trapped in a
child’s body.
In our SA, reports of teen troubles abound on a
daily basis. Children as young as 13 or 14 engage in sex acts,
sometimes with much older partners. Restaurants frequently sell
alcohol to under-18’s, resulting in fights and vandalism – sometimes
aimed at security guards. Some teens, ever-bored in a
fast-gratification culture, are given as much as R500 by their
parents and dropped off at shopping malls for the evening, with
little or no supervision!
So what can we do about it?
Perhaps one problem is apathy, a
sort of helplessness that “Everybody lets their kids do what they
want, so what can I do?” – a sort of peer pressure for parents. Or
perhaps there’s even that self-conviction (and in some cases
self-deception) that, “my kids would never do drugs.”
The fact
is, if parents don’t take a firm stand in solving the problem, no
one else is going to. This means, among other things, the strict
enforcing of boundaries. A visitor from another society may, for
example, find it odd that so many allow their fifteen-year-old
daughters (and younger) to go into places that have to employ
bouncers to ensure violence doesn’t break out. Perhaps we have been
moving down this path for so many years that it is hard to see the
situation objectively. If more parents took a stand – even
boycotting many of the favourite ‘night spots’ – we might begin to
see a resolution of the many problems of our age. We have also got
to be discerning about the sort of films and TV shows we let our
children watch. In too many households TV becomes a sort of
‘substitute nanny’. If left solely to the media entertainment world
and its ‘gospel’, however, it is doubtful our children are going to
grow up with a balanced view of morality, ethics or the
world.
What it boils down to is that the family is the building
block of society. Once disintegration sets into the family
structure, this inevitably has a ripple-effect on society as a
whole.
For nearly half a century now, Western youth have been
drawn further and further away from the solid moorings of parental
and Biblical teaching. We are told that the Messianic age will see a
turning of “the hearts of the fathers to the children and the
disobedient to the wisdom of the just” Luke 1:17 – i.e. a time of
strengthening of those family bonds for so long attacked by the
enemy.
In our crumbling Western society, perhaps the Pied Piper
has been calling the tune for far too long. As he leads the sheep
further and further away, who will go out and bring them back into
the fold? We know from the Word of God that there is a solution -
“If My people, who are called by My Name, will humble themselves and
pray and seek My face and turn from their wicked ways, then will I
hear from Heaven and will forgive their sin and will heal their
land.” 2 Chron 7:14.
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