I feel really bad for teens today

[sparrow]

I read the Facebook posts (and peeked at Tumblr :svengo:) of an 18 yo cousin and it's all I can do not to say, "You're not nearly as clever, deep, or rebellious as you think you are. It's all been done before. We just didn't advertise it!" :001_smile: The thought of having my teenage exploits live on the internet FOREVER is horrifying! I cringe thinking of her looking back at this in about 10 years and it's true of so many kids today.

 

I wonder if there will be an eventual backlash of all the transparency that currently happens and the next generation will value mystery? Will my kids be sneaky (like their mom was ;))?

[TXMomof4]

Ain't that the truth! How amazingly horrifying for there to be an account of my ignorance anywhere other than my own little brain!

[FiveOaksAcademy]

I read the Facebook posts (and peeked at Tumblr :svengo:) of an 18 yo cousin and it's all I can do not to say, "You're not nearly as clever, deep, or rebellious as you think you are. It's all been done before. We just didn't advertise it!" :001_smile: The thought of having my teenage exploits live on the internet FOREVER is horrifying! I cringe thinking of her looking back at this in about 10 years and it's true of so many kids today.

 

I wonder if there will be an eventual backlash of all the transparency that currently happens and the next generation will value mystery? Will my kids be sneaky (like their mom was ;))?

 

Oh, I know!!! So scarey!! I'm talking to my children until I sound like a broken record...drilling into them the fact that those pictures and words just don't go away!!! A friend's teen dd has posted some pics lately that are very "look at me" "aren't I cute" and quite showy. She also has posted some quotes that are worldly philosophies that would send her life into a spiritual/emotional trainwreck if she pursued them. :confused: I had to speak some truth, even if she didn't want to hear it!!

 

I am so very grateful that some of my thoughts and actions from my teens and early twenties aren't recorded for the world to see...or even for me to see. I would hate to have that kind of reminder of the worldly nonsense that I used to believe!! :svengo:

[Hedgehog]

It does surprise me what youngsters are prepared to put on Facebook.. if I was young now, I'd be much too scared in case my parents found out!!

[Belacqua]

Ain't that the truth! How amazingly horrifying for there to be an account of my ignorance anywhere other than my own little brain!

 

The drivel in my high school yearbook was bad enough (oh, the things we thought so profound!). At least my deepest recorded shame is that I wore a dorky hat in my English class photo.

[Plucky]

I know! I look at my kids' friends pages & wonder where their parents are. If my kids postedanything like some of these teens we'd have a good sit down talk & probably lose fb.

[SquirrellyMama]

I found some of the paper notes my friends and I passed around in class. That was embarrassing enough. Luckily, I was able to shred them.

 

Kelly

[Virg]

I agree! I just found the box with my high school stuff and I recycled all my notes and "journals." I couldn't believe how ignorant I was! I am SOOO glad they didn't have FB and my parents didn't allow me to have a myspace to post all this for the world to see!

[Penny_P]

Goodness- I was sooo profound and deep in high school. Some of the "poetry" and what not is so embarrassing to read today. Egads, was I pretentious.

[Garga]

I physically blush when I remember some of the drivel I used to write and ideas I believed. So embarrassing!

 

I'm soooo glad there is no electronic record of my foibles.

[kalanamak]

I found some of the paper notes my friends and I passed around in class. That was embarrassing enough. Luckily, I was able to shred them.

 

 

:lol:

For many, many years I kept a journal. I've thrown out anything prior to age 35, and the stack was only a foot shorter than me. The funniest part was writing so intensely about people ... and I couldn't remember them when I finally culled it all in my 40s.

 

Okay, I kept one poem from college. I think you can detect that it was written right after Mt. Saint Helen's blew and dusted my garden, car, and cat:

 

Our love is like a blown volcano,

All crater and steep slides,

So that our sweaty bottoms slip

In together and our desperate limbs

Struggle up the sides.

 

Made in the 1950s some time

This couch-turned-bed

Thwarts our sweatless solitude

Of sleeping on the edge.

 

So it could be said

That we, who were made in the 50s some time,

Must learn to turn in unison

Or else elbow each other all night.

[sparrow]

:lol:

For many, many years I kept a journal. I've thrown out anything prior to age 35, and the stack was only a foot shorter than me. The funniest part was writing so intensely about people ... and I couldn't remember them when I finally culled it all in my 40s.

 

Okay, I kept one poem from college. I think you can detect that it was written right after Mt. Saint Helen's blew and dusted my garden, car, and cat:

 

Our love is like a blown volcano,

All crater and steep slides,

So that our sweaty bottoms slip

In together and our desperate limbs

Struggle up the sides.

 

Made in the 1950s some time

This couch-turned-bed

Thwarts our sweatless solitude

Of sleeping on the edge.

 

So it could be said

That we, who were made in the 50s some time,

Must learn to turn in unison

Or else elbow each other all night.

 

Priceless!

 

I was writing the great American novel in high school. Actually, I was writing my fantasy life. "Ostracized", bookish girl that wears black, Chuck Taylor Converse shoes meets "exotic" Polish exchange student. Hey, I did marry into a VERY Polish last name :D.

 

I'm blushing for myself. I'm blushing for each of you. I'm blushing for my poor cousin that has no idea what she's doing. :blushing:

[Parrothead]

Way back when, if one wanted to ditch it all and start over all one had to do was move to the other side of the country and come up with a new cool name. And in the case of some women, become married and widowed within moments. In this case very pregnant and single Jane Smith, leaves the family farm, moves to the city and becomes Mrs. June Jones.

 

During my time one could change ones name on the sly, but it took a bit of finesse. Usually if one wanted to ditch it all and start over one just moved to a new town several hundred miles away ditching the childhood nickname along the way. Bucky-boy Black becomes Mr. William Black.

 

Now, these kids won't have anyway to get away from themselves. Potential employers look up their Facebook pages. Little Susie looks like a party girl and Little Bobby likes has a problem with authority. It really is sad.

[Halftime Hope]

we were at a graduation this morning. Oh, my goodness, the student speaker (elected by his peers) was something...very, very eloquent ($5 vocab, beautiful turns of phrase, writes like I'd like my students to write), but not a blessed thing to say. 20 minutes of drivel. He'll keep that speech and read it with embarrassment in 25 years.

 

The admin that spoke were the same, and loong-winded to boot. Dh and I were both shocked at the 15 minute long intro of the commencement speaker. Sigh!

 

The speaker himself was great, but his best advice took 2 minutes, and if he had kept it to that, the students might have had something memorable to to hand onto. As it was, I'm afraid it was lost in the tedium of the morning.

[Garga]

:lol:

For many, many years I kept a journal. I've thrown out anything prior to age 35, and the stack was only a foot shorter than me. The funniest part was writing so intensely about people ... and I couldn't remember them when I finally culled it all in my 40s.

 

Okay, I kept one poem from college. I think you can detect that it was written right after Mt. Saint Helen's blew and dusted my garden, car, and cat:

 

Our love is like a blown volcano,

All crater and steep slides,

So that our sweaty bottoms slip

In together and our desperate limbs

Struggle up the sides.

 

Made in the 1950s some time

This couch-turned-bed

Thwarts our sweatless solitude

Of sleeping on the edge.

 

So it could be said

That we, who were made in the 50s some time,

Must learn to turn in unison

Or else elbow each other all night.

 

 

That's almost as bad as Vogon poetry.

[justamouse]

I physically blush when I remember some of the drivel I used to write and ideas I believed. So embarrassing!

 

I'm soooo glad there is no electronic record of my foibles.

 

Ohh yeah.

 

I keep trying to drill it into mine, too, that they'd better be careful. One listens, the other not so much.

[MrsBasil]

Hee, I did graduate when the internet was around and used(2000), but not quite like today.

 

At least our liberal use of deep and profound quotes from Pink Floyd, The Simpsons, and one liners from Robert Frost and Dylan Thomas* are relegated to our yearbook...which will be safely hidden from my kids come teen years.

:lol: Although the use of quotes from Dazed and Confused might even be more embarrassing as I age.

 

*Seriously one liners. Everybody who used them picked the same one line from the same two poems.

[Pax]

I've gotten rid of the majority of my teenage ramblings. I keep a few notebooks as reminders of just how idiotic I was. Angst was my middle name and my slogan in life was "Death to Suburbia".

 

My 15 yo ds has a fb page that I keep an eye on. I recently found a post that he had hidden from me about how much he hated one of his teachers (he is in ps). He immediately had his fb account deleted and we had another sit down about what constituted as an appropriate thing to be posted.

 

Unfortunately, my 35 year old sister still has not figured out that posting certain things on FB is not advisable.

[LibraryLover]

One can delete anything on FB at any time. Once can delete an entire account or individual comments whenever they wish. Sure, others can right click save it, but is that less worse (grammarians please...this is literary license on my part, so back the heck off) than writing a smarmy book of poetry and having it published. ;) Jonathan Livingston Seagull, anyone? ;)

 

But I would also cut the kid some slack. Everything has been done/said before. Everything. Even adults complaining about kids not being as smart as they think they are. It's all been said. :D

 

Unless you're Homer, it's been said. ;) Leave them be...they are reading each other's thoughts for the first time, and they don't need us geezers to offer our 'profound' wisdom to their youthful chatter. ('cause you know how we are all so profound... and all. lol ;))

Edited May 16, 2011 by LibraryLover

[donnabrenton]

yeah its a truth..:)

[Peela]

I love teens- and I try to be very gentle on them. I remember teen years being very rough for me, emotionally. And for all their comforts and privileges many modern teens have, it's still a challenging time of life. Give me my 40s anyday.

[katilac]

One can delete anything on FB at any time. Once can delete an entire account or individual comments whenever they wish.

 

Alas, the Wayback Machine has the purpose of archiving the internet, so not even deleting your posts is any guarantee:

 

http://www.archive.org

[Mejane]

One can delete anything on FB at any time. Once can delete an entire account or individual comments whenever they wish. Sure, others can right click save it, but is that less worse (grammarians please...this is literary license on my part, so back the heck off) than writing a smarmy book of poetry and having it published. ;) Jonathan Livingston Seagull, anyone? ;)

 

But I would also cut the kid some slack. Everything has been done/said before. Everything. Even adults complaining about kids not being as smart as they think they are. It's all been said. :D

 

Unless you're Homer, it's been said. ;) Leave them be...they are reading each other's thoughts for the first time, and they don't need us geezers to offer our 'profound' wisdom to their youthful chatter. ('cause you know how we are all so profound... and all. lol ;))

 

:iagree:Some of the things I've written here are... less than profound. I realized that too late to edit or delete, dang it. :D

[twoforjoy]

This is why I get so frustrated with people talking about how ignorant/vapid/shallow teens today are. It's not teens today, it's just teens. Thankfully, most of us grew up at a time where we had no means of making our teenage musings available for general consumption. I doubt we would have came off looking a whole lot better than today's teens.

[Jayne J]

I always tell my kids I am leaving them the blessed gift of anonymity. I have no scrapbooks, 1/2 of 1 baby book filled out, no fb page, no blog.

Let's hope that my dc will treasure the wonderful gift I am giving them (it is not laziness, darn it, it is a gift!) and will commit all of their typical/hilarious/deep/profoud/angsty teen musings to burnable media.

[SquirrellyMama]

I guess I didn't feel people were saying that teens today were worse than in the past. Although I may have missed a post where that was said.

 

It is the fact that they have a very public way of expressing it that we didn't have. Yes, I was an idiot as a teen. And I mean idiot. I'm embarrassed to even thing about it. I'm really glad I was able to shred the evidence. Teens today may not be so lucky.

 

Kelly

[LibraryLover]

Alas, the Wayback Machine has the purpose of archiving the internet, so not even deleting your posts is any guarantee:

 

www.archive.org

 

 

I didn't realize all of FB is being archived. That's pretty impressive. How would one search FB postings?

[elise1mds]

HA! One of my friends and I were just talking about this very topic last night. She had been going through some old boxes and found her high school thesis paper and made herself read it. When she called me, she was laughing so hard she was crying, and it reminded me of the time that I found all my paper notes (SCADS of them) that I had saved. They made beautiful compost...

 

Myspace was the big thing when I was in high school and in my early college years, and I'm very proud to say that account has been deleted for years! I realized I'd outgrown it when I was flipping through pages and realized that all the backgrounds - that were supposedly SO individualized - were pretty much variations on a theme.

 

I am very, very glad I'm all growed up. ;)

[sparrow]

I guess I didn't feel people were saying that teens today were worse than in the past. Although I may have missed a post where that was said.

 

It is the fact that they have a very public way of expressing it that we didn't have. Yes, I was an idiot as a teen. And I mean idiot. I'm embarrassed to even thing about it. I'm really glad I was able to shred the evidence. Teens today may not be so lucky.

 

Kelly

 

:iagree: It wasn't my intent when I started this thread and I also must have missed a post from anyone saying teens are worse today. That was my whole point. Teens are exactly the same. I just feel bad for the electronic trail some may be leaving. My paper trail was bad enough.....and thankfully mostly shredded now :D.

[vonfirmath]

Honestly? Going back 10 years on Facebook -- not going to happen. I've tried to go back 3 months and on active pages its pretty much impossible!

 

I can not even go back to find things *I* posted about my kids!

[vonfirmath]

I didn't realize all of FB is being archived. That's pretty impressive. How would one search FB postings?

 

I don't think Wayback Machine IS archiving Facebook.

When I go to try and look at it, I get this message:

Page cannot be crawled or displayed due to robots.txt.

 

See www.facebook.com robots.txt page. Learn more about robots.txt.

[sparrow]

Honestly? Going back 10 years on Facebook -- not going to happen. I've tried to go back 3 months and on active pages its pretty much impossible!

 

I can not even go back to find things *I* posted about my kids!

 

Oh, it's there. You just have to look in the right places. I'm also not just talking about Facebook.

 

I can simply google my name and find my salary from when I worked for a public university, a picture from a health and fitness day 12 years ago, a letter to the editor I wrote 15 years ago. Stuff I'd completely forgotten about.

[vonfirmath]

Oh, it's there. You just have to look in the right places. I'm also not just talking about Facebook.

 

I can simply google my name and find my salary from when I worked for a public university, a picture from a health and fitness day 12 years ago, a letter to the editor I wrote 15 years ago. Stuff I'd completely forgotten about.

 

Ah. Thought you were talking about Facebook. I'd LOVE to be able to pull up information from a couple of years ago on facebook. But I've tried and I can't get to stuff I remember posting there. Yes, if you are not careful on the Internet you will end up spilling more than you mean to.

 

My dad used to say, WAY before the internet became something anyone talked about, that you ought to assume anything you said or wrote down would be headline news in tomorrow's paper.

[katilac]

I don't think Wayback Machine IS archiving Facebook.

When I go to try and look at it, I get this message:

Page cannot be crawled or displayed due to robots.txt.

 

See www.facebook.com robots.txt page. Learn more about robots.txt.

 

Ah, okay, I didn't know FB blocked the crawlers. It's not like they're known for their extreme views on protecting privacy ;)

 

For those who just want the short story, search engines and archive sites often use something known as web crawlers or robots (aka bots), but if a site doesn't want to be archived, there's a bot that will prevent it. Web Crawler vs Blocking Bot, sounds like a video game or horror movie. So, as of now, it looks like foolish FB users only have to worry about people saving their pics & posts.

[Trish]

I agree! I just found the box with my high school stuff and I recycled all my notes and "journals." I couldn't believe how ignorant I was! I am SOOO glad they didn't have FB and my parents didn't allow me to have a myspace to post all this for the world to see!

 

I kept a detailed journal from 6th grade through the end of college. Even if I were to accidentally become extremely famous, history does NOT EVER need to know what I wrote. They are shredded for posterity.

[KrissiK]

:lol:

For many, many years I kept a journal. I've thrown out anything prior to age 35, and the stack was only a foot shorter than me. The funniest part was writing so intensely about people ... and I couldn't remember them when I finally culled it all in my 40s.

:iagree:

Oh my goodness. I'm so glad I'm not the only one who is completely embarrassed at my own idiocy. And the fact that it lasted longer than my 20's is amazing. I thought that by the time I became an adult I should have gained a little wisdom.