Confidence, Cohen

Tikatok: collaborative online book creation for kids

2008-03-26T11:49:00.016-04:00

The following passage from the conclusion to my master's thesis was written to address the need for solutions to making educational video games more responsive and better platforms for creative expression.

The possibility for a technological solution is very exciting, but not the only solution. The single player to machine paradigm, basically the reader to book model, is becoming less ubiquitous as games and game consoles exploit greater networking capabilities. Next generation systems support peer-to-peer interactivity in a way that may provide an opportunity to think beyond the hyper-competitive, mano-a-mano multi-player formula of the first fighting and shooting games. Proving that humans are infinitely better than machines at predicting what other humans will find meaningful, the most popular e-commerce companies, such as Amazon and Netflix, compare profiles of similar users to provide seemingly intelligent product recommendations. Basically, they side-step the need for complex machine AI by anonymously connecting users with similar tastes. It may therefore be more productive to think of a platform on which players “co-create” stories with other human players instead of building relationships with software... A truly player “co-created” game would allow players to fundamentally co-design the game, not just allow a collective experience of the finished product... It might be possible to imagine a game in which world-builders interact in real-time with world-explorers, where one player designs the challenges that the other player faces, and both learn and adapt based on the outcomes of play.

It is instructive and perhaps prophetic that I used the "reader to book" model to explain my point about games. I did not know at the time that I would be given the opportunity to put these theories into practice and help build a platform that would connect kids online with the purpose of creating and sharing books, but this is exactly what I have been working on for the past several months along with some entrepreneurs and folks from the MIT Media Lab.

Tikatok is an online community and a set of creative tools that allow children aged 5-12 to write and share picture books. It provides a database of interactive story prompts called StorySparks to help get the creative juices flowing, and then lets kids connect to their peers in order to share the book, get feedback, discuss it in groups, and even collaborate. Finally, the books can be printed out into real bound hardcover and paperback copies using print on demand. Basically, it imagines children as authors of their own entertainment in the most literal way: as authors. And it again proves Marshall McLuhan's contention that the content of any new medium is an old medium.

We've been testing the system at public and private events in the Boston area, including workshops at the Boston Public Library, and now the site is finally open for its public beta launch. We've worked hard to make it a site were kids can express themselves and have fun, but also learn and grow. Kids have created some pretty amazing books, and we are anxious to see the direction the wider community will take it. If you have a child in your life, I invite you to create a book.

At Last an Update

2008-03-25T12:33:00.003-04:00

My research and writing all paid off in the end, my master's thesis entitled "Ceaseless Becoming: Narratives of Adolescence Across Media" was completed and successfully submitted to my committee. So ends my too-short journey at MIT's Comparative Media Studies program.

Speaking of which, you can download and read the thesis in its entirety from the CMS website. Or browse other amazing theses from the department here:

http://cms.mit.edu/research/theses.php

Myself and my school mates were thrilled when Cory Doctorow blogged favorably on BoingBoing about the program and our humble theses here:

http://www.boingboing.net/2007/08/23/theses-from-mits-com.html

As always, I would love to hear your comments about the work. I recently realized that blogger's moderation was filtering a lot of your comments. Oops. That's fixed, so comment away!

Now that I've dug myself out of schoolwork and the ensuing months of paralysis, I do hope to consider posting to this blog every now and then, although perhaps in a lighter and less analytic fashion.

The Fall and Rise

2007-01-18T13:50:00.000-05:00

A few things in the news lately have inspired me to break my weeks-long silence on the blog (sorry about that, by the way). First, The O.C., a quotation from which inspired the name of this blog, was recently cancelled by Fox, in a move that surprised no one considering its poor ratings this season. It was up against two of the most popular shows now on TV, C.S.I. and Grey's Anatomy, and suffered from a creatively disappointing third season lead-in, although the episodes this season have been received quite well.

It's a shame, and just one more example of a teen show that could not quite survive its characters growing up, although series creator Josh Schwartz gave a different explanation to Entertainment Weekly in a recent issue. To paraphrase, he said that the series set a dramatic pace in its early episodes that was difficult to maintain. At the time of its debut, it was such a high-energy, film-like melodrama that it really didn't look like anything else on network television. I recall it was said by many that the show broke the runaway fervor over reality programming, and put to rest the idea that the hour-long drama was dead (the truth is probably more complicated). Consequently, or so claims Schwartz, the creative well dried up more quickly as they burned through ideas in a few episodes that other series would take whole seasons to explore.

Whatever the reason, I'll be sad to see it go, even as I recall a famous line familiar to any student of youth culture: "Hope I die before I get old."

Just as I was reeling from that news, however, I have a new reason to be excited about adolescence narratives on television: the Sci-Fi channel announced today that George Clooney is producing a mini-series for the network based on one of my favorite science fiction novels ever and perhaps the inspiration for this whole thesis project, Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age. In the past this might have freaked me out a little, especially after the Sci-Fi channel's mediocre Dune mini, but given some recent quality work on the channel (Battlestar Galactica), Clooney's strong producing track record, and the fact that Stephenson himself is adapting, I'm feeling optimistic. And as a friend researching serial television put it: "stories that detailed are best suited to long-form episodic structures on television. I'm totally psyched that they're not going to butcher this by making it a movie." Couldn't have said it better myself.

Akeelah and the Bobby Fischer: Bring It

2006-11-13T14:00:00.000-05:00

Finally caught Akeelah and the Bee on DVD, which I was anticipating as another in a long line of narratives equating success in a game or sport with emotional maturity, a theme powerfully manifested in the 1993 film Searching for Bobby Fischer (although for a darker and more literal version, check out Fresh, from one year later).

If you never saw Searching for Bobby Fischer, I highly recommend it. It's the story, based on the life of Josh Waitzkin, about a young boy who discovers he has the potential to become a chess prodigy. He trains with a strict but caring mentor (Ben Kingsley) to develop his skills and enter the world of competitive play. But his own story is paralleled with that of the title character, the young chess champion who, after several high-profile matches against top seeded grand masters, drops out of public view (and emerges later as a raving anti-Semite). (Spoiler Alert) In the championship match that ends the movie Josh offers a draw to his nemesis when he could have easily won. By losing the game Josh preserves a quality of childhood innocence and masters something more important than the game itself: compassion.

Flash forward to 2005's Akeelah and the Bee, which follows the earlier film almost note for note. The big differences being that its hero is a poor young black girl, and the competition is the Scripps National Spelling Bee rather than a chess championship. (Spoiler Alert Again). Now, it would be unfair to expect the protagonist in this context to lose. If games in these stories are supposed to teach the adolescent something they don't already know, that would be pointless. Akeelah has already learned about losing: she lost her father to random violence, her mother works seemingly nonstop to support them, and her brother is a burgeoning gangster. What she lacks is the confidence to win.

Furthermore, protagonists in movies about minorities are often designed (for better or for worse) to stand in for their entire ethnic group. This is especially true of Akeelah, whose training in spelling is accompanied by a lesson in the history of the civil rights movement. For Akeelah to throw the game might impart a lesson that, for black communities, politeness is more important than advancement, which would seem wrong for sure. But something still felt too easy about the ending. In fact, Akeelah does attempt to throw the game, but her opponent (an Asian-American super-nerd stereotype) doesn't let her. Instead, working together they spell all of the 25 final round words and are both crowned champions. Akeelah wins, but nobody has to lose. They don't beat each other, they beat the game. Everybody's happy.

This pop cultural treatment of racial politics is also reminiscent of cheerleading flick Bring It On (2000), which pits white suburban princesses against black inner city challengers in its all-important competition. But in that film, the competition between the two groups is less central to the plot than the struggles within each group. The rich girls must learn to innovate without stealing moves from their urban counterparts. Meanwhile, the black girls struggle to be recognized by cheerleading officials, and appeal to a powerful black female celebrity (obviously meant to evoke Oprah Winfrey) to sponsor their trip to the finals. As with Akeelah, their appeal takes the form of a plea for community solidarity while subtly exploiting the rhetoric of victimization. The "lessons" the black girls must learn are political--how to manipulate media and cultural identity for power--and personal--to overcome resentment of their reformed white competitors. The "lessons" the white girls must learn are mostly internal: to break the cycle of exploitation and (spoiler alert) to be happy with finishing in second place.

These films reflect and address a new American reality: in many urban areas Caucasians are or will soon be in the minority in relation to all other races. The filmmakers use seemingly innocuous high school competitions to model the real conflicts lurking within this reconfigured political landscape.

Bully Reviewed in Wired

2006-10-09T10:11:00.000-04:00

Clive Thompson, also of blog Collision Detection has an advanced review of Bully up on Wired today. He confirms that the game does indeed show its hero combating bullies and protecting the weak rather than the type of gameplay that was predicted by many reactionary legislators and parents groups. But, he claims, it's still a Rockstar game through and through: "By turning to high school, the designers have found the perfect locale for exploring the cliquishness, unfairness and brutality of everyday society."

This is, in fact, the genius of most high school narratives. Films, literature, and television shows set in high school are among the only genres that consistently exhibit an awareness that American culture is socially and economically stratified.

Bully Has an ESRB Rating

2006-09-25T23:33:00.000-04:00

"T" for teen, according to the new trailer.

Though it seems a positive sign that Rockstar has cleaned up their act in regards to this particular title, I wouldn't be surprised if the various organizations that have criticized Rockstar now turn their attention to the ESRB.

Entertainment Weekly's Top 50 High School Movies

2006-09-11T08:07:00.000-04:00

Entertainment Weekly, in what must be a joint effort with the AFI to fill the world with meaningless "best of" lists, took on my area of study in their latest issue: The 50 Best High School Movies. OK, so I'm actually a sucker for these lists. They're dumb but they do what they're supposed to do: make hermetic, authoritative judgments about topics so messy and subjective that readers are invariably pissed off by the results and must respond. Rather than take the bait and produce my own absurd list, I have just a few observations about their choices.

The Breakfast Club is their number one, and it's a safe and predictable one, striking the right balance between pop pleasure and "importance." Their paragraph-long evaluation of the film echoes many of the ways popular media have sought to define the appeal or function of adolescence narratives. "After the farcical fluff of Sixteen Candles, the issues Hughes explored--sex, drugs, abuse, suicide, the need to belong--were surprisingly subversive." So, the best high school films are foremost about "issues" rather than the "farcical fluff" of teen romance. There's a classic dichotomy at work here.

It's interesting that their list addresses "High School Movies" rather than using the more contemporary moniker "Teen Movies." It's possible that they were influenced by the recent success of the Disney Channel's High School Musical. But more likely their exercise in axiology, their attempt at elevating these films to a socially acceptable level of value and importance, was better served by an association with the history of films set in high school. Even for a rag like Entertainment Weekly, "Teen Movies"--which can trace their roots back to the beach party movies of the 60s--may be too frivolous a genre for a "best of" list. But "High School Movies" are another thing entirely. When you use that nomenclature, you associate these films with the social commentary films of the 50s and 60s, such as Blackboard Jungle and Rebel Without a Cause (number 4 on the EW list), movies that seriously addressed the issue of teen crime and delinquincy. High school movies, like high school, see teens as problems, or as representative of the dangerous social masses, that need to be massaged and elevated to respectability. There's a way that high school, high school movies, and "best of" lists all share the same modernist agenda.

But, in the end, I gotta respect a list that puts the underrated Can't Hardly Wait at number 44.

The Bully Saga

2006-09-06T08:17:00.000-04:00

I've been watching carefully the development and impending release of the video game Bully from Rockstar Games. For those unfamiliar, Rockstar is the game studio behind the highly controversial Grand Theft Auto series, and Bully is set to transfer some of the game mechanics of that title to the setting of private school, where the main character fights to get back at bullying students and teachers.

Given Rockstar's reputation, many child welfare groups and government representatives, predictably including reactionary media litigator Jack Thomspon, came out against the game very early on. Thomspon refers to the game as a "Columbine simulator." Keep in mind: this is a game that nobody outside of Rockstar has yet played! These groups object categorically to a game that features violence by or against children, regardless of the nuances of its rules and story.

The game was supposed to be released quite a while ago, but is finally slated to street in October. The reason for the delay is a point of much speculation: was it Rockstar waiting for the angry interest groups to cool down, or were they retooling the game to make it more palatable to the public, or was it simply a result of the usual game development morass?

The latest news has Rockstar changing the name of the game from Bully to Canis Canem Edit, latin for "dog eat dog," and the motto of the fictional Bullworth Academy where the game is set. I'll believe the news when I see the game on the shelves, but again industry watchers are speculating: are they changing the name to deflect the bad press?

I'll be following developments in this messy saga as the release date of the game approaches, and will share my impressions of the game when I finally get to play it.

Next on the CW: Search for the Next Pussycat Doll

2006-08-02T08:54:00.000-04:00

The new UPN/WB mash-up network, The CW, announced yesterday that they have ordered eight episodes of a reality competition series in which young women will compete to be the next member of the pop group the Pussycat Dolls. While producer McG (who also produces The O.C.) told Variety that the series would "try to explore the consequences that come with joining a group such as the Dolls," CW president Dawn Ostroff told Reuters that the series is about "female empowerment, self-discovery and personal transformation." This makes me want to vomit.

Don't get me wrong, I'm actually a fan (with reservations) of the UPN-now-CW show America's Next Top Model, which trades in the same kind of exploitation as empowerment nonsense. What I like about that show is its honesty; it's a fascinating expose of the modeling industry. By showing how difficult the job really is, it gives me a lot more respect for the models. And by showing the emotional turmoil it creates for them, I have more sympathy for this class of beautiful aliens. Instead of completely glamorizing the process, I think that the series will make anyone with dreams of becoming a model think twice about their decision.

But, at its most fatuous, America's Next Top Model does incorporate themes of transformation and growth that are usually reserved for coming-of-age fiction. They bring in host Tyra Banks's mother to have heart-to-heart conversations with the girls and help them talk about their feelings. They attempt to connect emotional maturity with one's willingness to think of themselves as a marketable brand. In short, growing up equals selling yourself. Interesting, but distressing.

I suppose this new series has the same potential to deglamorize an industry, if it can tone down the empowerment message. But I don't have high expectations. I'm all on board with the post-feminism thing. Women can be sexy and feminine and still be powerful and intelligent. The Pussycat Dolls as a burlesque show was an interesting phenomenon, a kind of reappropriation of stripper aesthetics. One can appreciate it in the same way that we can honor Bettie Page as a kind of feminist icon. But the Pussycat Dolls pop group? Which produced the song, "Don't You Wish Your Girlfriend Was Hot Like Me?" Not so much.

Teen Star Personas #1: Kirsten Dunst

2006-08-01T17:24:00.000-04:00

The cable fairy visited us last week, without us even asking, and upgraded our feed to extended basic, bringing us techno-culturally into the 1980s. The first program to catch my eye during the initial channel scan was one of those VH1 nostalgia countdown shows: The 100 Greatest Teen Stars. In addition to this show being like crack to someone who grew up during the 80s, this was also serendipitous for my research. As it so happens, I had decided about a week ago to start a series on this blog examining individual teen actors.

The academic world is slow to acknowledge the importance of actors to both the production and reception of movies and television shows. We'd rather look at writers and directors, the "creative geniuses" behind artistic works. But, and this is especially true for adolescence narratives, the star may be more instrumental in getting a movie made and helping deliver an audience. And stars bring other things to these works which enrich our understanding of them: a history of past performances, a persona.

The VH1 version of the project, though fun, doesn't dig too deeply into what these stars really mean to people--it's all eye candy mixed with E! True Hollywood Story-style micro-expose. But teen stars can become icons or placeholders for an entire generation, such that understanding their persona yields insight into pervasive social models of adolescence. So, without further ado, let's look at our first specimen.

Kirsten Dunst

Breakout Role
Claudia in Interview with the Vampire
Signature Roles
Lux Lisbon in The Virgin Suicides
Torrance Shipman in Bring It On
Nicole Oakley in Crazy/Beautiful
Mary Jane Watson in Spider-Man

Why Her?
Sofia Coppola cast Dunst as the title role in her upcoming film Marie Antoinette, which had its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival this past May. Reviews describe the film as a modern teen movie masquerading in historical garb. Set to an anachronistic New Wave rock soundtrack, it shows the doomed French queen concerned with dramas more personal than political, while being manipulated by the adults in her life. Followers of Coppola should see the obvious continuity with her first two films, The Virgin Suicides and Lost in Translation: a concern with female coming-of-age, the loss of innocence, and the burden of great expectations. But looked at as a Kirsten Dunst movie, it makes just as much sense.

Life on the Screen
By my reckoning Dunst's career has gone through two major phases so far. The first began with her breakout role at age 11 in Interview with the Vampire (1994) based on Anne Rice's novel. She played a child vampire developmentally frozen at a young age even while she gained the intellectual maturity and experience of an immortal. Her performance in this film was received on the level of a special effect. Much like the recent work of Dakota Fanning, she was praised for her almost eerie premature adultness. She continued to work in films like Jumanji and in a recurring role on the TV series E.R., but it wasn't until 5 years later that Dunst began to impact pop culture with a string of leading roles in high-profile films.

In 1999 she starred in the films Dick and The Virgin Suicides, films that largely prefigured the types of roles she would come to play fairly frequently (relative to her short career). From Dick, you see the apparently ditzy blonde who, due either to artless naivete or a latent intelligence, follows a path to a kind of enlightenment. This thread develops in the movies Bring It On and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. From The Virgin Suicides comes the theme of physical beauty masking deep emotional wreckage, which was continued in films like Crazy/Beautiful and the Spider-Man series. In these films, she seems to have it together, she's the image of perfection, but closer inspection reveals that something's not quite right, or she's an outright mess. In films from both threads, she's often portrayed as spoiled and affluent, but also genuine and fragile. The best of her films sample from this entire palette.

It's easy to see how Marie Antoinette potentially fits in to the Dunst ouvre (ooh, good band name). A beautiful yet naive queen who pays too high a price for her youthful dalliance, who is dehumanized and made into a scapegoat for all that is wrong with society before she even had a choice in the matter. A little bit of the ditz, a lot of the tragic teen heroine.

Icon of Teendom
So how are American teens like French royalty? Are they spoiled rotten, dismissive of the misery of others, capricious and flighty? These threads are evident in many contemporary stories about teens. But what Coppola seems to be trying to do with this movie, (though remember I haven't seen it yet), and Dunst with her career thusfar, is to comment on the unfairness of that characterization. Teenagers often carry the burden for adult disappointments. The first psychological texts on adolescence spoke to adult fears that the younger generation was corrupting civilization. Dunst has consistently chosen roles that deepen our sympathy for teens shouldered with unreasonable adult expectations.

Buffy to Live On in Whedon-Authored Comic

2006-07-19T11:43:00.000-04:00

Entertainment Weekly posted this cover art and information for a new comic book series continuing the post-seventh season adventures of Buffy the Vampire Slayer written by series mastermind Joss Whedon. I can't wait for this bit of "transmedia," though I fear the comic book form has become, for many media makers, merely a way to more cheaply continue stories that are no longer viable in their original form (whether due to production expense or cast non-availability), rather than stories built from the ground up for the new medium. But perhaps Whedon's the guy to prove me wrong. One thing seems certain, Buffy fans will have high expectations, and the comic is unlikely to satisfy our desire to see new stories realized with the original cast.

How Great/Terrible Was Your High School Experience?

2006-07-18T20:54:00.000-04:00

Watching and reading a lot of media about teens, I almost take for granted that everyone's high school experience was traumatic and sad. That's certainly the favored representation: embarrassment in front of peers, apathetic or authoritarian teachers, mean girl cliques, stilted romances. There are several ways to explain this. First, everyone's high school experience was awful, in its own way (remember the episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer where Buffy can read everyone's thoughts?). Second, it's just more dramatic that way, i.e. happy stories are boring (Freaks and Geeks mocks happy high school stories in its opening shot, craning away from a budding jock/cheerleader romance on top of the bleachers to the social rejects down below). Third, insofar as good art grows out of suffering, the artists who make teen narratives give accounts of high school based on their own unhappiness during adolescence. Though they indeed frequently produce "good art," it perhaps biases our view of high school, maybe even making us remember it as worse than it actually was (worse relative to the rest of our lives, of course). And if high school dramas show the experience as miserable for a few alienated outsiders, does that mean that it really was great for most people?

I ask because I'm currently watching two teen TV series which were cancelled due to low ratings before they even finished their first season--Freaks and Geeks and My So Called Life--and I wonder if the adolescent misery factor had anything to do with their lack of success. Of course, TV shows fail to gain an audience for tons of different reasons, so I don't want to read too much into this. But compare these shows to a few recent teen series that have done well in the ratings: The O.C. (last season notwithstanding) and MTV's Laguna Beach: The Real Orange County. Both have drama and conflict, certainly, but both also celebrate the adolescent years and show their kids having a grand old time. Maybe the wider television audience remembers their high school favorably, and it's only the artists (and critics) that were perpetually unhappy.

And, frankly, all this teen angst is wearing on me. I find Freaks and Geeks amazing and totally watchable, but only because it tempers its characters' constant mortifying embarrassment with extremely funny moments. Its tone is not melodramatic but sardonic, like a lot of the best stories of adolescence, going back to Dickens. In contrast, My So Called Life, while compelling "quality television," sure takes itself seriously. I was enthralled with the first few episodes, finding them prescient, intelligent, and sensitive. After watching several in a row, however, I felt myself drawing away from the characters, wishing they would just get over themselves.

Thinking back to my own high school experience, it was a mix of joy and anguish. I wasn't popular, I was painfully shy, and I hated being patronized by the institution. But I also met friends that I still have to this day with which I had all kinds of fun, and I began all manner of intellectual pursuits under the tutelage of some very devoted teachers. It wasn't perfect, but it wasn't constant suffering, either.

So, how was high school for you?

What American Idol and Freaks and Geeks Have in Common

2006-07-16T17:14:00.000-04:00

One of the most satisfying aspects of studying adolescent narratives is watching ideas about childhood and society proliferate across radically divergent texts. Take the TV shows Freaks and Geeks and American Idol. The former was a critically acclaimed but underwatched period teen drama cancelled by the Fox network after only 18 episodes (3 unaired), which went on to build a cult following. The latter, of course, is the mega-hit talent competition pitting young performers against each other for a recording contract.

What these shows have in common is a concern with innate talent or competence, and self-evaluation. More specifically, they represent a reaction against the popular psychological maxims of the preceding era which endorsed promoting "self-esteem" as a kind of panacea for adolescent problems.

The lead character on Freaks and Geeks, Lindsay Weir, is a smart high school junior from a good home going through a kind of existential crisis following a death in the family. Formerly an academic overacheiver, a "geek", she begins to hang around with a group of apathetic stoners, the "freaks." Though she tries to conform to their laid-back attitude, she can't help but try and save them from themselves, and the series is a chronicle of her perpetual failure in this regard. In an episode entitled "I'm With the Band," she encourages one of the freaks who is an aspiring drummer to try out for an open space with a local rock band. Of course, though he is obsessed with building his drum kit and creating elaborate fog and strobe light staging, he has never seriously studied or practiced his playing. But Lindsay's advice will be familiar to anyone who grew up during that time: "you can do anything that you put your mind to." At the audition, however, he can't keep up with the band and is humiliated. Like much of the series, the scene simultaneously evokes pathos and humor. We feel bad for the character, who has a serious psychological investment in his dreams for superstardom, and little else going for him. But the idea that all one needs to succeed is a belief in himself is exposed to ridicule, and there's a sadistic pleasure in his failure.

Sadism is a good word for what many fans of American Idol feel when watching that show, especially the episodes that open each season. While the show touts itself as a talent competition, the audition episodes are more of a search for the most deluded amateurs, and America pretty much eats it up (ratings consistently taper off after these early episodes before picking up again once the field of finalists starts to narrow). There is certainly a rubbernecking aspect to watching really bad singers who don't know any better, but just as important is what comes after: the judicial smackdown. Simon Cowell has gained fame for putting poor performers in their place. He's a fantasy of the authoritarian parent who will not coddle over-confident adolescents.

And perhaps Americans believe themselves unable to discriminate between earned self-confidence and labored self-delusion. Nary a reality competition show on the airwaves lacks a hard-nosed judge with some sort of European accent. And I don't think it's a coincidence that the Brits and Australians are also compulsory in infomercials. An American trying to sell us a product can't be trusted, he'll exaggerate from his inflated sense of self-worth. But those Brits, they lack artifice; they'll give it to you straight.

The similarities between the shows end there. American Idol goes on to reestablish a notion of born competence--you either have it or you don't--whereas Freaks and Geeks complicates matters. Lindsay does seem to have benefited from a stable and supportive family life, and her parents affirmations contrast strongly with what we learn of the other freaks' filial relationships and dysfunctional households. But other things simply can't be helped by talking, such as her younger brother Sam's lack of physical development. When he's intimidated by the thought of taking a shower after gym class, his mother tells him to pronounce, "I'm proud of my body." Which, of course, only causes him more embarrassment.

The high school of Freaks and Geeks is something of a nightmare of multiplicity: students of highly varied socio-economic backgrounds, stages of physical development, innate talents, and learned competency trying in vain to cope using universal rules espoused by parents, peers, and guidance counselors, rules that never fail to make things worse.

Fox's O.C. Shake-Up

2006-07-03T12:11:00.000-04:00

Variety first reported last week that Fox has scaled back its order for new episodes of The O.C. to 16, instead of the 22 customary for prime-time dramas. It will also face steep Thursday night competition from a few other hit shows very popular with teens, CSI and Grey's Anatomy.

There are several ways of interpreting this news. The most pessimistic evaluation, and probably the most likely, is that Fox has lost confidence in the show's longevity after a third season that was disappointing in both ratings and reception. They're simply hedging their bets, and if the show fails to perform better this season, so long Seth Cohen.

However, there are a few points that make me moderate my disappointment. First, as reported in Entertainment Weekly, is that series creator Adam Schwartz has been enticed to return to the series full time and take a more hands-on approach to guiding the show. Second, Fox has yet to resort to the true sign that a show is circling the drain, they haven't moved it to another time slot. Finally, the show has never had a typical season order. As you may recall, the show was introduced during the summer months and, after it became a big hit, picked up for a full fall season. The first season subsequently had 27 episodes, season 2 had 24, and this recent season had 25. A couple extra episodes a season may not seem like many for the viewer (although it's likely to fatigue some), but it's likely very taxing for the production company. 22 episodes a year is already a major undertaking, giving cast and crew little time to work on other projects or find time to for a creative recharge. If I thought anything was wrong with the last season, it's that I could have done without half of the episodes. A smaller season order, coupled with the return of the show's creator, gives me hope for a tighter and more effective season arc. I even wonder if the reduced order may have come out of a request from the producers, with the intent of giving the crew more time to do higher quality work.

If television weren't in such a transitional stage right now, with networks experimenting with new models of production and distribution (something the success of the summer launch-pad approach pioneered with The O.C. has encouraged), I would totally discount the second option. There is a glimmer of hope out there that television producers are starting to realize that quantity at the expense of quality is not the way to maintain viewership.

Self Evolved: The Problem of the Past

2006-06-19T10:35:00.001-04:00

I need to diverge briefly from my concern with TV shows and literature to address an article I read recently which asks questions that hit to the heart of my interest in adolescence. It's a historical overview of human self-understanding and provides a compelling but, for me, problematic framework for describing how human psychology has evolved over time.

Roy F. Baumeister's "How the Self Became a Problem: A Psychological Review of Historical Research" was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 1987. Yes, it's almost 20 years old, so I may be merely shadowboxing here, but it's a very evocative treatise. It's a complicated article, supplemented with an impressive graph depicting ideas of selfhood across major historical stages, but I'll try to boil it down.

Baumeister describes four "problems" pertaining to the self: self-knowledge, self-definition, self-fulfillment, and the relationship to society. He then shows how each of these problems were addressed from the late medieval period to the late 20th century. Students of sociology may not be surprised at the overall trajectory of his historical evolution: folks in the medieval period were untroubled by psychological issues, and the farther you get from this period the more complicated things become.

So, for example, on the issue of the relation of the individual to society, those in the late medieval period took for granted that they were part of a fixed and stable social order, and that everything was ordained by God. They also did not question that Christian salvation was the way to personal fulfillment, or that there was any difference between one's inner and outer selves.

He provides a lot of evidence, and concedes that his article describes trends rather than universals, so I don't want to mischaracterize his arguments as trite or simplistic. I'm still skeptical, however, about historical arguments that exploit a belief that those in the past were fundamentally lacking some major human insights, or that take a lack of historical evidence as proof that medieval serfs were cool with their plight.

This is similar to the argument that I've encountered in my research on childhood that says pre-modern folks did not see any difference between children and adults: the "tiny adults" thesis. Ideas of human development have indeed changed, and my own thesis is built on our ability to perceive and describe those changes. But it's sobering to consider how deceptive the historical record can be. How arguments about reality, whether philosophical or scientific or literary, persist and are held up as the truth for a given period is such a complicated process, involving economics, politics, and mere chance.

Similarly, arguments about contemporary life tend to skew and oversimplify reality. "Trends" are revealing, but also misleading because we tend to glom on to what is novel. Of course people are still dealing with psychological issues that were first described centuries ago, hence the continued relevance of Shakespeare's plays. Baumeister shows how the early modern period (that's Shakespeare's era) was highly concerned with sincerity, the "equivalence of inner and outer selves, as a virtue." Are we so postmodern, as many suggest, that we've abandoned the struggle for authenticity? Honesty and sincerity may not make the most compelling subject for contemporary drama--it's "been done"--but it's something I certainly struggle with. We don't collectively solve all of our psycho-social struggles and move on, having learned our lessons.

Having said that, I do like Baumeister's categories. If adolescence narratives are concerned with how their heroes solve these "problems" of the self in reaching maturity, it gives us four questions to answer of any such story. How does a character define the self? How can she know her true self? How does she find fulfillment? And how does society help or hinder the path to fulfillment? This is just one possible starting point.

Veronica Mars - Trauma Is Good For You?

2006-06-12T13:44:00.000-04:00

I'm about three quarters of the way through my Next Big Teen Show, Veronica Mars (or at least the first season of it), and am really enjoying it. It's as smart and funny and well-acted as everyone says. You should watch it.

The conceit of the show is that Veronica is a kid detective. Not your light-weight Bloodhound Gang-type detective, but your full-on crafty private dick. In the ever-widening spectrum of teen sleuths, she's stylistically somewhere between Nancy Drew and the kid from the recent movie Brick. She's abnormally resourceful, witty, and fearless. She's also alienated and has a terrible reputation at school (not at all uncommon for a teen drama). So what made her this way? Flashbacks reveal that she used to be one of the flighty popular girls (shades of Buffy, pre-slayerhood). Then her best friend was found murdered, her parents got divorced, and she was slipped a mickey at a party and likely raped. And now she's ever so cool!

This seeming contradiction isn't exclusive to teen drama. All drama is driven by conflict and extremes, and heroes are often flawed or damaged or otherwise made complicated and/or sympathetic. The cliche that whatever doesn't kill you only makes you stronger is at the heart of many a story. But showing trauma as empowering for fictional teens has become quite a trend lately. Harry Potter is basically neglected and abused through his entire childhood, but comes out a lot more well-adjusted than his spoiled cousin. Then, when a friend is killed before his eyes, it gives him the special power to see things others can't.

I hate to be PC about this, but I have some good friends who work with traumatized kids every day, and know sexual abuse rarely transforms someone into a super-intelligent crime fighter (at least not initially). So why is this convention powerful? The kids in these stories are usually drawn in contrast to a community of spoiled and unselfconscious preppies (the rich kids at Neptune High, the blue-blood legacy wizards at Hogwarts, the "newpsies" of The O.C.'s Newport Beach). What makes them strong is whatever makes them different from the kids who get everything they want. It's less a comment on trauma, perhaps, then on contemporary perceptions of youth. So we seem to be back into a phase of: our kids are spoiled and need some tough love. And I was just getting used to the related but more adult-centered criticism: we're too overprotective and quick to medicate.

Beyond the Break - Surfer Girl Redux

2006-06-10T17:13:00.000-04:00

I heard some decent things about Beyond the Break, a new cable drama about teenage professional surfers, so I caught the pilot episode. It's on The N, a fairly new nighttime-only channel which specializes in teenage programming (it shows original series as well as repeats of shows like Degrassi: The Next Generation and Sabrina, the Teenage Witch). So this new show is clearly designed to appeal to the contemporary teen, and it wears its influences on its sleave. Anyone who remembers the 2002 surfer girl movie Blue Crush will recognize the basic formula: a multi-ethnic cadre of up-and-coming female surfers try to make a name for themselves while holding down day jobs in Hawaii. Beyond the Break also throws in a twist cribbed from The O.C.: one of the characters is a misunderstood juvenile delinquent from the California hinterlands.

Stylistically, when the show isn't throwing in 24-esque split screen transitions, it has the feel of, well, "verite" if you're feeling generous. It's shot on location, which yields shots of beautiful scenery, but can just as often look rushed for the character shots. And some of the cast look a lot better than they act, which adds to a certain roughness around the edges.

But I'm being too hard on the show. I didn't find it terribly compelling, but compared to the down-market teen TV of my generation, like Saved by the Bell, it represents quite an evolution. The dialogue is punchy enough and at least a few of the characters edgy (and pretty) enough that it will probably find an audience.

Thematically, perhaps the only place it really held my interest was in its depiction of the class differences between the surfer girls. As I thought about it more, I realized how many adolescence narratives deal explicitly with social class. Teens in the US are perhaps in a much better position to appreciate class difference, as they are forced into contact with each other in school, or must take on menial or service-oriented jobs (a thread of cultural studies considers children to be a "perpetual underclass"). TV shows about adults rarely show characters from a range of backgrounds, as if once people grow up they prefer to believe in a classless utopia.

The Legacy of Catcher in the Rye

2006-06-09T10:09:00.000-04:00

When I made the unlikely comparison between Catcher in the Rye and The O.C. in my last post, I was probably writing under the influence of an essay I read recently, "Teenage Wasteland: Coming-of-Age Novels in the 1980s and 1990s" by Kirk Curnutt, published by the journal Critique in 2001. Cornutt uses Catcher as a starting point to talk about the notable novels concerned with young adults that came after. He provides a simple yet powerful model of development to describe changes in the fiction, as well as the changing social attitudes toward youth. The adolescence of Salinger's novel is an uncompromising moral idealism confronted with the corruption and hypocrisy of adulthood. Holden Caulfield rebels against an authority that does not deserve patronage, and hopes to protect the next generation from adult phoniness. In short, though he may be cynical and disenfranchised, Caulfield is passionate and yearns for social engagement.

According to Cornutt, the novels that followed retained the cynicism but jettisoned the passion and idealism. Works like Less Than Zero, Generation X, and The Secret History show adolescence as a bleak, amoral period. The characters in these novels have an incapacity to feel, and experience their own lives as if mediated, often through the lens of empty popular culture. Instead of challenging adult authority, the novels display a kind of nostalgia for adult attention and guidance, and a concern with rebuilding family, not surprising given the rising divorce rates during that time period. Cornutt gives a name to the narrative formula employed by many of these titles: "despair-repair." He warns against the kind of sociological simplification these titles exhibit, and suggests that future novels should not merely reinscribe pre-Catcher in the Rye notions of adult authority.

I generally found the article very helpful for its description of intellectual trends in a swath of fiction I am not yet totally familiar with, but I do have some criticisms. The method of identifying a kind of authoritative vanguard of titles to prove this teleology from adolescent idealism to disaffection has limits. What about all the titles that don't necessarily earn critical acclaim, but may speak more directly to and about the generation they represent? For example, the oft-ignored category of Young Adult fiction--all those stories about high school sports, the embarrassments of puberty, and teenage detectives. Or genre fiction like Ender's Game, which offers a pretty scathing indictment of adult authority. Or works in other media, such as John Hughes' influential teen movies. Granted, Cornutt's project is to ask why the examples he gives have earned such notoriety, how they have tapped into adult fears about children, rather than if they represent accurate reflections of youth.

Also, I wonder if there is perhaps a simpler explanation for this evolution. If coming-of-age novels are a genre, then how much of this innovation can be explained as a challenge to genre conventions rather than intentional commentary about youth. How else could novelists escape the shadow of Catcher in the Rye than by pushing the disaffection towards the nihilistic? Also, could the visibility of these particular titles be a matter of population dynamics and political economy? Generation X was a numerically smaller generation than the Baby Boomers. And if the Boomers are a greater market force, it shouldn't surprise us that stories idealizing Boomer adolescence, like Catcher in the Rye, but vilifying Gen X adolescence would gain prominence.

But if there's some truth to Cornutt's model, as I do believe there is, how do we fit contemporary adolescence narratives into his progression? Is a series like Harry Potter, with its glorification of adult authority figures like Dumbledore and Serious Black, merely recalling the nostalgia for authority? Or is Harry's general apathy towards the rules, and his distrust of adults like Snape and the Dursleys, put him more in the Holden Caulfield vein? Or how about Buffy the Vampire Slayer? Buffy's talents both alienate her from and connected her to society. She endures a period of numbness (season 6), but gets over it. How to describe these works' attitudes towards adolescence without simplifying?

The O.C. - Quick Reflections on Three Seasons

2006-05-29T13:04:00.000-04:00

A few nights ago I finally got caught up on The O.C., although three seasons in five months can hardly be described as a leisurely pace.

The O.C. has been less successful this year, ratings-wise. And the general consensus among fans is that its quality stagnated this season. But it has tried some interesting things over the years, and certainly the first season is very instructive about how to make a teen series that resonates with adolescents and adults. And its portrayal of teens could certainly bear some scrutiny.

So, here are a couple of threads I find interesting:

1. Commentary on Gen X. I discussed this in an earlier post. References to the 80s abound. The show seems to be using contemporary teens to talk about the previous generation; not surprising as the show's creator, Josh Schwartz, is an X-er. One more example: in an episode titled "The O.C. Confidential," Seth and Summer attend a party at the house of an upwardly mobile thirty-something, and it's an effective parody of the neuvo-adult hipster scene. Summer's reaction is predictable: "Ew."

2. Seth Cohen: trickster. Like Xander in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and, hell, comic relief characters back through Shakespeare or even trickster mythology, Seth (and lately his girlfriend Summer, as well) has special powers. He has one foot in the fictional world and one foot in the real, and he manipulates the boundary at will. His comedy can reference pop culture, not-so-pop culture, the show's own formula, and even literary criticism (he refers to a plot device at one point as an "objective correlative"). What's novel is how this function is expressed through his adolescence. He can pull it off as an essentially liminal and cynical teen.

3. Heroic adolescence. Although it may seem a stretch, there's something of Catcher in the Rye in the show's characterization of adolescence. Ryan is impulsive and hot headed, but only as a result of his almost pathologically strong moral character. He always puts his own interests at risk for his friends, and is constantly attempting to "save" them, often from those Holden Caulfield might have described as adult "phonies." This protective impulse, Caulfield's saving grace, is itself questioned. Do Ryan's friends really need him to save them? Might his actions to save them actually imperil them? And does his concern prevent him from taking care of himself?

Seth, too, has a bit of that sarcastic reform school outsider in him. A half-Jewish, emo-loving comic book geek, the other kids tease and ostracize him such that he runs away at the end of the first season. Yet he does not question the importance of excelling in academics and he productively channels his angst into a comic book that is actually published. In a post-Catcher world, the "phonies" aren't necessarily the serious students, but the mock-disaffected drop-outs and hip partiers.

4. Dense intertext and self-reference. I actually wrote a paper about this during the semester, so I won't belabor the point, but The O.C. goes meta on several different levels. It has a show-within-a-show called "The Valley." When MTV launched Laguna Beach: The Real Orange County, "The Valley" also got its own knock-off, "Sherman Oaks: The Real Valley." Seth, as I mentioned above, is often the vanguard character for this kind of material. The show became self-referential almost out of the gate, and responds quickly to the public discourse it generates inside the narrative. For example, a recent episode had Marissa meeting a girl whose father created "The Valley." Talking to the unseen doppleganger for Schwartz, the girl advises "you can't do this to yourself every time you get the ratings." In its reference to adolescent-themed material across media, the show positions itself as the teen media mothership.

I'm sure there's more to be said, but there are so many other shows out there to watch, and so little time. But look for my weekly reflections about the series when it starts up again in the fall.

Gilmore Girls Showrunners Won't Follow the Show to the CW

2006-04-25T09:43:00.000-04:00

As a big fan of the WB's Gilmore Girls, I was saddened to read this interview with showrunners Daniel and Amy Sherman Palladino, who detail their harrowing experience over the last 6 years, and the network's refusal to meet their demands for the 7th season. Seems they've been working under year-to-year contracts all this time, without a dedicated staff director, and forced to take on multiple tasks more efficiently relegated to other staff. Their reward for all this hard work is the CW (the UPN/WB mash-up network coming next fall) refusing to negotiate, and dropping the show's creators for its next season.

Granted, this is a very one-sided perspective on the matter, but the result is perhaps the worst possible for fans of the series. GG may not have the high profile of other recent teen TV shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but the show is consistently exceptional, and the Palladino's some of the most prolific writers on TV, having generated over 90 scripts for the show. That's not normal for TV, which is typically much more collaborative. If the series can be said to have an author, it's certainly these two. Once again, television networks show a basic minsunderstanding of the creative process.

Class with Sherry Turkle: Evocative Objects and Childhood Development

2006-04-13T16:29:00.000-04:00

Were children being raised smarter in the 80s? Have GUIs made us all intellectually lazy and less self-reflexive?

Sherry Turkle, MIT Media Lab researcher and author of seminal books about the psychological ramifications of technological change, visited my Media Theories and Methods class this week to talk about her work. In preparation, I read as much of the 20th anniversary edition of The Second Self as I could. I found a lot to admire, and a lot that was relevant to my own work on adolescence narratives.

To very quickly summarize that book, it presents the results of her study of children learning the LOGO programming language in the early 1980s. She describes how children were integrating their experiences of computers and computerized toys in their understanding of the human and their own minds, how computers pushed at the conventional boundaries of what we understand as alive and intelligent. In learning the abstract language of the machine, the children were necessarily articulating their own knowledge of themselves in a rather unprecedented way.

In her new introduction and epilogue to the book, she expresses disappointment that children are no longer taught programming, and that the graphical user interface pioneered by Apple, while pulling down many barriers to computer use, has made the way computers work far more opaque. Widespread adoption of the PC has come at the cost of a more shallow engagement with these evocative objects. This is also a key concept in her follow-up book, Life on the Screen.

In my class, and, by sheer coincidence, a class later in the day when we discussed the very same book, many of my classmates, some computer programmers, disagreed strongly. One argument went that all computer languages are, themselves, abstractions; very few people program in machine code. Graphical and WYSIWYG interfaces have allowed all user levels to work more masterfully with computers as tools. In particular, modding communities around video games have allowed those without deep programming skills to participate in the creation of simulations. And, in fairness, Turkle herself worried that she was overstating her objections, that she had become likeJoseph Weizenbaum, a curmudgeonly voice against technology.

But I believe her argument to be substantive, with reservations. Turkle's definition of programing seems to be very qualitative. Even though writing code is an abstraction, she differentiates between levels of abstraction. Coding in C is programming, writing HTML and designing furniture for Second Life isn't. While this seems subjective, that doesn't necessarily make it invalid. What seems to be important is that the level of abstraction be deep enough to provoke a comparison with mind. She describes coders using the language of programming, like "buffer" and "debugging," as metaphors for their mental processes. Is the "desktop" model as evocative? Do we say to ourselves, "wait a minute, I need to copy that to my clipboard" or "hold on while I open a new window?" Coding metaphors pull you into the machine, desktop metaphors push you back out into the world.

But the computer isn't the only "evocative object" out there, as I'm sure Turkle would agree. In particular, I would cite stories as both seductive and uncannily suggestive of mental processes, hence the fields of autobiographical memory and cognitive narratology. Storytelling, like coding, can put people into that space of meta-cognition, thinking about thinking. If anything, user-friendly computers, the Internet, and gaming have provided powerful new tools for telling and sharing stories.

Great Social Media Blog - Apophenia

2006-03-03T09:25:00.000-05:00

Just discovered apophenia, a wonderful blog by danah boyd, a PHD student at UC Berkeley School of Information (and an MIT Media Lab graduate), who does research on social networking, youth culture, and lots of other cutting edge stuff. Her post on perpetual liminality reads as a pretty thorough and elegantly articulated summary of why I'm researching youth culture and media literacy.

The OC - All About the 80s

2006-02-22T12:52:00.000-05:00

I was going to wait to comment on The O.C. until I was all caught up on the latest episodes—I burned through the first 2 seasons in about a month, and have been picking away at the third more slowly since class started a few weeks ago—but I feel compelled to record some thoughts about it after watching season 3 episode 4, titled "The Last Waltz." The episode ends with Ryan and Marissa, the heroic teen couple, facing the daunting task of remaining true to each other even while attending separate educational institutions (Marissa at, gasp, public school, and Ryan homeschooling). Marissa suggests a solution: "the next song that comes on the radio will be 'our song.'" Of course, in fiction, the things that happen "at random" are often the most deliberately constructed events in the whole story. I had a guess at what was coming up next, and I wasn't disappointed: an 80s cover. Specifically, Youth Group covering Alphaville's ballad "Forever Young."

Josh Schwartz, the creator of the show, is almost the same age as myself, born in 1976. At 26 when the show debuted, he was the youngest person ever to run an hour-long network drama series. Many attribute its success to his youth, which gave him, or so the theory goes, a heightened ability to connect with contemporary teen audiences. But for all of the show's references to current pop (and underground) youth culture, it just as frequently flatters audience members of my generation (Generation X, 13th Gen, whatever you want to call us). The entire first season was arguably an extended riff on several John Hughes movies (especially Some Kind of Wonderful and Pretty in Pink). In addition to "Forever Young," the show has also hosted covers of "If You Leave," originally by OMD (which is also a musical reference to John Hughes's The Breakfast Club), and several Oasis tunes (of course, Oasis patterened themselves as the 90s-era reincarnation of The Beatles, which makes their subsequent reappropriation all the more appropriate). Is this mash-up a kind of colonization of current youth culture by the previous generation? Or an ingenious method of preserving the potentially ephemeral works of Gen X pop artists (let's face it, those John Hughes movies weren't always great)? Or, biased by my own personal relationship to the show, am I overstating things?

Cultural transmission through youth entertainment is not a new concept and, until the networks start airing series written and produced by teens, somewhat unavoidable. But this seems to have a different flavor. Just 15 years ago, the popular television series built around multigenerational appeal was The Wonder Years. That featured many of the same coming-of-age themes relevant to teens, but was overtly about the baby boomer experience: set in the 60s with a classic rock soundtrack. George Lucas, once a guest star on The OC, set his coming-of-age films in the 50s and in timeless sci-fi environments. Schwartz's 80s references are, at once, thinly veiled and thoroughly transformed; sort of the televisual analog to sampling in rap music.

ART's Romeo and Juliet at the Loeb: Agro Teen Love

2006-02-05T17:31:00.000-05:00

Caught the American Repertory Theatre's production of Romeo & Juliet Saturday night. Director Gadi Roll, and lead actors Mickey Solis and Annika Boras, eschew any attempt at historical fidelity to either the play's original setting or Elizabethan England, instead shoehorning Shakespeare's characters and dialog into a commentary on contemporary youth culture. Comparisons to recent movies are impossible to avoid, as the play evokes the anachronistic approaches of Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet and Brian Helgeland's A Knight's Tale (complete with absurd Renaissance/hip-hop hybrid dance numbers), with costumes seemingly inspired by goth culture and The Matrix. Radically divergent from Luhrmann's film, though, are the against-the-grain interpretations of the starcrossed lovers and a palpable resistance to melodrama. Romeo is all brood and angst, with little hint of the romantic sentimentality that many may associate with the roll. Even more thoroughly transformed, Boras's Juliet offers a sharp contrast to Claire Danes's ultra-feminine teen princess version. She stomp-runs around the stage and mostly screams her dialog. This seems an attempt to add some "girl power" for audiences accustomed to strong feminist teen heroines like Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Together they create a vision of doomed punk love that made a lot more sense in Sid and Nancy. Solis's Romeo seems completely unconvinced of his own affections, a puzzling choice given his eventual suicide. The play, though in some ways attempting to engage and affirm contemporary teen culture, ultimately reflects a reactionary vision of teens as hopelessly disaffected and insincere.

What do I mean by "Adolescence Narrative"?

2006-01-25T12:45:00.000-05:00

It might help to clarify the conditions I will use to select titles for study. First a note about media. I'm in the Comparative Media Studies program, so that gives me the special freedom to select narratives from just about anywhere I want. I'll be looking at film, television, literature, and video games, mostly. But I may consider others, especially comic books, music, and fashion.

As I see it, there are three primary overlapping approaches to identifying adolescence narratives, each organized around the types of subjects with a stake in teen consumption.

1. Textual analysis - Author intent.
2. Marketing/distribution analysis - Industry strategy.
3. Ethnography/Market research - Reader response.

First would be a more traditional interpretive approach concerned primarily with the text. Any text with a major teen or young adult character, then, would be relevant. With this approach, it's not particularly important whether the text be marketed to or read by teens. It therefore conveniently sidesteps issues of fidelity to real youth culture. By the same token, though, analysis of such material limits one to questions about the cultural surround of a given text. Not, what does this text teach us about how teens live? But, what does this representation tell us about the author's view of teens? Or, how does this text reflect cultural constructions of adolescence? Important questions, to be sure, but with a limited utility.

The second considers adolescence as a market for cultural producers and the media industry. It interprets marketing strategy and product placement to give a picture of teen consumption patterns and industry expectations. For example, one would look at the books classified in the Young Adult section of the bookstore. This is a notoriously slippery methodology for several reasons. Teens may be unusually resistant to corporate marketing strategy. So what if NBC markets a show to the youth of America if teens see through it and its audience turns out to be younger children? Furthermore, the industry may not be advertising to the obvious demographic. Knowing teens to be skeptical to media representations of teen life, they may ostensibly target a media product to a higher age range, but really be aiming at the lower range. A show marketed to teens may really be a show made for children.

The third approach attempts to document, through accurate market research or close ethnographic studies with teen participants, what teens are really watching, reading, playing, etc. Any such study must be aspirational, with a recognition that the total complexity and diversity of teen media consumption habits, and how individual use and transform what they consume, may be ultimately unknowable. Such studies must be rigorously developed and carefully controlled, but the resulting data could be extremely powerful.

A possible fourth approach would be a personal archaeology: to think back to what media I was consuming as a teen. This would be subjective as a rule, and I can't say how accurate my memory would be about what I really consumed during that period vs. what I remember consuming. But, the limited data I could produce from this methodology may well prove insightful.

For my thesis, I'll likely be aiming for a kind of sweet spot between these approaches. I want to find texts that meet several of these conditions at once: texts about teen life that teens actually watch. I'm also going to pay particular attention to texts that explicity concern the relationship between adolescence and adulthood. For this blog, however, I intend to record my thoughts about texts that fit any one of the conditions mentioned above.

Welcome!

2006-01-24T15:38:00.000-05:00

I'm a first year graduate student in the Comparative Media Studies program at MIT. I'm writing my thesis about media representations of adolescence, or, more specifically, the transition from adolescence to maturity; what one might call "coming of age." I decided on the topic after considering the films, books, and TV shows that have been important to me during the last several years. I assembled a list of favorites, and an obvious trend stared me right in the face. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Harry Potter, The Virgin Suicides, and the list goes on. It wasn't an exclusive trend, I'm a well rounded individual, but, clearly, part of me is obsessed with adolescent culture. Or, our culture is obsessed with adolescence. Or, adolescence is just an extremely critical period of contemporary life. Probably all three.

By most quantitative standards, I'm an adult. I'm 29 years old, married, a college graduate, licensed to drive, etc. So, what do these narratives of adolescence do for me? What is the appeal of The O.C. for adults? And what is the appeal of the show to the age range that it ostensibly represents? We grow up understanding that childhood is a liminal period, that is, it's merely a transitional path on the road to adulthood. When we become adults, we stop growing, our identities coagulate, we know all we need to know about living. We're finished.

Except that just about every approach to studying development now refutes these truisms. Postmodern theory challenges the very concept of a coherent identity, describing instead a multifaceted personality formed in dialog with media. If there's a postmodern marker for maturity, it's merely an awareness of one's own participation in a capitalist economy (Trites). From cultural studies comes the concept of adolescence as a social discourse; best understood not as a biological or cognitive fact, but as a series of fictions, often perpetuated by adults to keep youth a perpetual underclass (Vadeboncoeur & Stevens). And in developmental psychology, the information processing model of human cognition rejects the empirical existence of developmental stages, asserting that human development proceeds through aggregate learning and competencies; that development is a lifelong process.

Furthermore, a series of economic and social upheavals have troubled conventional markers of maturity. Rarely do individuals stay at the same job for their entire lives. Career mobility is the rule rather than the exception. The postindustrial requirement for highly educated workers, which has sent more people to college and graduate school, has pushed back the age range in which people "settle down." In short, being an adult is more and more like being a teen, if it ever was really that different. In a way, this is all great. Who wants to believe that they can't change and grow after the age of 18? But in another way, it represents a significant challenge to education. How do we prepare people for such a dynamic world?

But, this is all background to the goal of this blog, which is to record my reflections on adolescent representations in media, and to share some of my research on media use by teens (as soon as I do some). The title, for the uninitiated, comes from The O.C., a fine example of a narrative of adolescence, and one that constantly brings the changing relationship between adolescence and adulthood to the fore. The quote is a bit of peer to peer wisdom, advice to one of the teen heroes of the show, Seth Cohen, which then becomes a self-affirmation, and then a memorable tagline. Maybe it functions as a life-lesson towards a more mature Seth, maybe it represents a realization that one's self-narrative determines one's reality. Or, maybe it just sounds nice.

Cited works:

Trites, Roberta Seelinger. Disturbing the Universe: Power and Repression in Adolescent Literature. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2000.

Vadeboncoeur, Jennifer A. and Lisa Patel Stevens, ed. Re/Constructing 'the Adolescent': Sign, Symbol, and Body. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2004.