Today's paper had an intriguing article on how young people have developed "clear disconnect[s] between their real lives and the online versions of themselves." According to the article, "[t]oday's teens and young adults have little trouble compartmentalizing their lives online and off. And that's why you see so many youngsters doing stupid, outrageous, dangerous and sometimes illegal things in online videos."
YouTube is full of videos that young people have posted of themselves doing things like driving around yelling obsenities at unsuspecting passers-by, or like beating someone up at school, or even like doing drugs.
The article, unfortunately, does not decry this type of behavior; nor does it suggest reasons for why it might be that young people are able to dissociate their actions from any concrete consequences. As much as I detest this kind of behavior and, as a Christian, long to "turn the world upside down" (Acts 17:6), so that those who engage in this kind of activity are not rewarded by becoming celebrities (which is what has been happening on YouTube)--but, just the opposite, those who honor God and serve mankind would become the celebrities--I would like to confine my comments today to discussing what may be THE reason why today's young people are able to compartmentalize their lives in this way.
Neil Postman, in his book Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, has traced this tendency in young people to...you guessed it...television. He argues that television is a medium that is nothing but one dissociated image after another. It is quite commonplace today for us to be watching a news program one minute about record starvation problems in Africa and then a commercial the next about the all-you-can-eat pizza buffet down the street. We don't even stop to think about how ludicrous it is that two such images are juxtaposed (nor do television producers want us to). And that is just one example among what could be thousands. We are bombarded with image after image on television, one having little if anything to do with the next. Television, by its very nature, has "programmed" those of us who have grown up watching it to dissociate and to compartmentalize. So, it is no surprise to me that today's young people, who have grown up on television, engage in compartmentalizing their lives. They are just living consistently with the way they have been raised.
Putting a label on the problems is fairly simple. The solutions, on the other hand, are not so simple.
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