Or do I? There's a wry smile at the corner of most of my interactions with youth. Like, he doesn't really get it, or but how could he really understand?, or even I'll play along for a while and maybe he'll go away. On an instinctive level I get that over 25 and over the hill sentiment, I voiced it myself at 14, 17, 20. I can try to understand, or (teenagers hate this term) RELATE, gaining insights or learnings on an intellectual level. I can read the treatises, pick apart the adolescent brain forensically, attend the forums, view the documentaries. In some ways you might say this demographic group is THE most analysed, most interviewed, most targeted one in the first world, holding as they do the keys to fads, trends, viral activity, consumerism, consumption. Money.
But they're slippery, oh so slippery. The teenagers and young adults I know now are quick to smell a rat and generally hate to be pandered to or tricked by corporations or advertisers. But they can also annoyingly jump on a passing fashion with manic loyalty, rediscover and embrace a cultural flop, restart a lost movement that had unceremoniously reached a dead end. The youth of today are happy to cherry-pick from culture, to be highly political or openly blase, to revive a shibboleth as if they had invented it.
And they invent, mash up, re-purpose, re-brand, re-design, bootleg, pimp, modernise, experiment, abbreviate and acronymise like crazy. I love 'em, really, as frustratingly arrogant and slippery as they can be. I'm coming to this unit as a librarian too, not as a teacher or a writer (I've been those in the past), so I'm seeing 'the youth' as clients and collaborators, as co-conspirators, as the representatives of the hope that is to come. So I won't be saying 'Read it' like the post-youth hipsters above, I'll be coming in open-minded and willing to read anew.