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Sunday, October 29, 2006

Not the brightest of boys but the kids are ok (all things considered)


Youths face legal action over violent web videos
Teens who appear in homemade video clips posted on internet sites such as YouTube could be opening themselves up to police prosecution.
Videos of New Zealand school students fighting - including some from the prestigious Auckland Grammar - were brought to public attention last week and police say they could become involved.

"If there was a complaint, police would investigate," said police spokesman Jon Neilson.


What makes me laugh about the new fear of young people posting fights on YouTube is that we aren’t dealing with the smartest young minds here are we? As the boys get indentified, they can expect to see the serious side of posting such violent images, hardly the new social collapse is it? But this story tops a long list of stories about Society’s new love/hate affair with ‘yoof’. I don’t think we have a ‘yoof’ problem, we have an adult problem, as Finlay MacDonald points out in his latest column, “Ever since they were invented, teenagers have been causing adults great anguish. Whether they were wiggling their hips to Elvis, hanging out at milk bars, wearing flowers in their hair or safety pins in their cheeks, it has always been the same. They are a menace to society, a sign of the rot spreading within our moral core, a generational time bomb, out of control and out to get us.”.

This fear mongering has reached a new level as NZ is painted repeatedly by the media to be on the verge of social collapse because young people haven’t been hit enough ‘to learns some respect’. I think Finlay gets closer to the truth when he states, “So let's not gloss over the fact that today's teenagers are also the test spawn of the post-Rogernomics age, born into the great commercialised, corporatised, professionalised, privatised, individualised, incentivised, globalised world that is their only experience of social reality. People wonder what happened to the sense of community, to civic values and neighbourly trust, that once seemed central to the national spirit. Could it be that it was replaced, not by degeneracy per se, but by the crowded emptiness of the mall, the soulless efficiency of the drive-through, the vicarious violence of video games, the vapid brand-awareness of hyper-consumerism and the sweet tasting oblivion of discount liquor”? . Yoof and the behaviour they copy are taught, adults need to ask where such behaviour is being followed and look at their own actions before blaming yoof for copying it.

4 Comments:

At 30/10/06 8:40 am, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Don't blame adults, they are just irresponsible yoof that got older.

 
At 30/10/06 12:43 pm, Blogger Luke said...

hahaha i seen many of these been passed around at school on phones. grammar boys are funny!

I reckon this craze of vid fights has always been a problem, its just that now they're all on cam.
First camera phone violent vids i know of are those brtish guys who slap people in the face randomly on buses.

 
At 30/10/06 3:16 pm, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Speaking of irresponsible youth,
how are you Luke?

 
At 31/10/06 5:25 pm, Blogger Luke said...

haha im ok oh great responsible and mature adult.

 

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