Teens and Pop Culture

Gone are the days of cultivating epic CD and video collections, and staying home so you don't miss your favourite TV show.  Generation Z may never know the thrill of diving over the couch to grab a snack before the ad break is over, the annoyance of someone speaking so you miss half a scene that you'll never get back, or the boredom of  watching something you're not interested in for hours because it's the only thing on. (Image from  Giphy ) (Image from Giphy ) Especially among young people today, media engagement today is all about on demand, online streaming (Xiao, Wang & Chang-Olmsted, 2018).  In fact, most teenagers are viewing and watching using methods that didn't exist when they were born (Resnikoff, 2017)!   One librarian using music as a method of bringing students into the library noted the change from CDs to downloading to streaming, as the sheer range of music on streaming services, as well as the ability to make and share playlists made

While I'm blogging about the new ways in which teenagers are connecting with popular culture, it would be remiss to miss out something that has changed as dramatically as dating.  In my day you had to talk to a girl, and suffer all of the jitters and excitement that comes from that face to face encounter - for better or for worse!  But now an astonishing number of young people are connecting through the use of apps, some of which match them with potential partners with the swipe of a button. (Image from Giphy , 2019) Although Tinder and most other dating apps are designed for users ages  1 8 and over, there are some apps - such as Yubo , which are specifically designed for adolescents, aged 12 and up.  Also, with the help of a fake Facebook profile, it's easy enough for teens to sign up to Tinder and other dating sites using an incorrect date of birth, and many do (Francis, 2019).  Legal or not, teenagers are using dating apps - and other apps not specifically designed

What is a VSCO girl?  A legitimate question.  If you don't have an Instagram account and you aren't a 13 year old girl, you would be excused from not knowing they exist.  However, in my cohort at school, the VSCO girl phenomenon is alive among dozens of girls who are now walking around with hair scrunchies on their wrists, weaving friendship bracelets, and refusing to drink out of anything plastic.   Being a fairly new phenomenon, there is no definition of a VSCO girl in any dictionary in print, however, they are defined on social media, blogs, and in urban dictionaries all over the internet.  A huge part of the definition of VSCO girls centers around branding. Image retrieved from  https://www.instagram.com/p/B1j-6zvgrMO/?utm_source=ig_embed VSCO girls are well known to wear and use the specific brands shown in the above image.  They have been described as being perennially "beach-ready" (Salazar, 2019), and their look went viral over the recent summer seas

I n ever thought it would come to this, but here I am writing a BLOG! Not being a very avid social media-ist, writing a blog is well outside of my comfort zone.  I feel like eating pizza with a knife and fork - out of place. This blog is geared to look at pop culture and the way teenagers are influenced by, and interact with media in 2019.  This is a subject that interests me greatly, as it affects my work with middle years students.  Would I have created a blog to write about it on if it weren't required for my postgraduate study?  Solid no! - But I believe that understanding pop culture's influence on adolescents is incredibly relevant and important.  I will be sharing some thoughts and research around this topic, and look forward to reading others' perspectives too. (Giphy, 2019) Until next time, James Reference: Giphy. (2019) Retrieved from  https://giphy.com/search/hoping-this-goes-well