Tag: Youth

‘Brat’ Summer 2024: Grasping a Media Moment

At a time when wars, political campaigns, and an Olympics were going on, in Summer 2024, ‘brat’ popped up with no apparent connection to these. Here was a girl youth phenomenon expressing itself through Charli xcx’s sudden, huge celebrity.

It started with singer song writer Charli xcx’s sixth album, ‘Brat.’ Its bold green rectangle on the album cover could have writing on it. The whole package, the singer’s style, songs, and visual image, suddenly took off and became a mega hit.

Are those who study youth ready to include this moment’s splash? In a general way, sociologists recognize that media objects illuminate young people’s lives and relationships. But are we capable of grasping this phenomenon in all its various pieces? Here is a social space, radiating its meaning in a particular slice of time. Let’s list some of the dimensions of this. Its many components deliver different messages, all in a very short time.

The album cover has a catchy green rectangle. On this text can appear.

The music and lyrics are themselves memorable – Charli xcx has been recording for a number of years.

The album title is ‘Brat,’ which is a pejorative term; the written word catches attention by being unusual. The verbal meaning is deepened by Charli’s extended explanation.

Charli said that “brat” means “that girl who is a little messy and likes to party … maybe says dumb things sometimes … who feels herself but maybe also has a breakdown but parties through it … is very honest, very blunt, a little bit volatile.

The word brat is used adjectivally in the phrases ‘brat girl’ and ‘brat summer.’

Note that the vision of girlhood here has contradictory opposites; it describes a girl who has many feelings and contrasting behaviors.

Brat turns out to be a good thing, not a term of disapprobation. It is a cool persona for its, mainly Gen Z, audience. It has been use supportively for the woman American presidential candidate with the phrase ‘Kamala is brat,’ suggesting that she is young at heart and cool!

My question for sociologists is whether we have put enough effort into understanding how suddenly appearing, generationally embraced images redefine what is desirable and acceptable in people. Does each generation change what it wants people to be like? Does this express what a generation feels society needs? Are social scientists able to see what is going on in this densely expressive mode of communication? My impression is that influential media events, like ‘brat’ in Summer 2024, are still dismissed by older people as too complicated, and disappearing too fast, to be credited with being influential.

This is sad because people in every generation remember the big media events of their growing up; these are defining moments, unforgettable for how they changed the picture of what produces successful and happy people. We can all remember examples of these; illuminating moments are part of our collective understanding and should not, surely, be missing from social science descriptions of modern of life.

Media Influencers and Understanding Media: Paris Hilton and Marshall McLuhan

Marshall McLuhan needs to be credited with identifying, in the 1960s, the first media cultural generation, that we now call the Boomers. We know that this has been followed by subsequent generations, each identified by its own popular culture. McLuhan made a brilliant start by identifying media users as a new sociological feature of countries. He invented the name ‘media’ and recognized its importance for the cohort of people who grew up with it.

But where McLuhan went wrong was misrepresenting what this media-using cohort of people were actually achieving. McLuhan called this media use by young people a form of ‘tribalism.’ With this term he saw youth as failing. McLuhan regarded the only useful contribution to society as what was political and ideological. For him the newly appearing Baby Boomers lacked all serious literary and moral impact…unlike his own generation.

For himself, and people his age who lacked any surrounding media, McLuhan regarded people as influential only when they were literary individuals, private thinkers who worked alone and thought for themselves, and whose only support was alcohol. McLuhan expected men – and not women or youth – to be private, boozy, and essentially moral and politically oriented contributors to the institutional order of their society.

McLuhan couldn’t see any useful purpose for the ‘tribalism’ displayed by the media-using young people of the Sixties. For him, their deficiency, was their inability to contribute abstract concepts to the ideological discourse of the state.

Let’s jump forward forty years and look at somebody else who made, in my opinion, an equally important analysis of the meaning of media. I’m talking about Paris Hilton and her contribution to media influence through fashion and beauty. Around the Millennium, Paris Hilton was criticized by the older generation for ‘not doing anything’ and therefore not deserving any fame.

But Paris Hilton did make a huge contribution. She demonstrated that being beautiful, wearing the right clothing, hair and makeup was enough. You didn’t have to do anything that was political, ideological or charitable, in order to be influential. Being beautiful was enough, because it was an effective use of the power of media. Paris Hilton showed that political, ideological, and philanthropic activities were irrelevant to the popularity of the media. Today’s ‘media influencers’ now understand this basic truth. At the Millennium, it was not clear how much work went into presenting oneself. Before she went out, Hilton had to spend 45 minutes on hair, and another 45 minutes on makeup, as well as finding and wearing the right clothing. She would make changes of clothing during the day so that news photographers could publish her pictures at different events on the same day. This was not ‘doing nothing’; this was hard work that was relevant and necessary to effective deployment of media.

In sum, Paris Hilton’s achievement was showing that being beautiful is enough; through media, anyone can be influential with youth and affect society. You don’t need to be conceptual, policy oriented, or a political advocate for one cause or another. The media is its own thing, a fact which every subsequent generation has learnt for itself, and inspires so many of our young women to become media influencers. McLuhan was wrong. He could not have predicted the profound change which has shifted society away from literary high culture and politics. Much of the old ruling heights of political consciousness have lost influence due to the rise of media.

More sadly, social science generally, has failed to catch up with the importance of youth and media. Why did reading and print media decline? Without media, how do we know how young people see themselves collectively? What is each generation adding to media? The great transformation by which youth and media have been elevated into importance is demonstrated perfectly by Paris Hilton.

Today, people have largely forgotten Marshall McLuhan. His limitations are now all too obvious; businesses now study each youthful media cohort and report on what is new. These innovations are taken very seriously – and rightly so.

So it is disappointing that academic social science has so far failed to learn the Paris Hilton message that using the media is enough in itself. What is the mechanism by which media is so effective? How does the personal life of young people shape politics, economy, and popular culture? Our current social sciences cannot tell us the answer because, in important ways, our sociology and political science are stuck back in the McLuhan Era. They still suppose that written commentary, and policy making within formal organizations, are the only ways of steering society. Revisiting the legacy of Paris Hilton may be a good way to cast off the obsolete vision that still sees no purpose for the media in a modern country.

The Connection Problem in Sociology

Our profession posits the existence of many features of social life. I’m interested in the synchronization of free individuals over their lifecourse. But whatever one’s topic of study, if it takes place in an advanced society of today, the connection problem remains to be answered. What is it that binds people together? If the facts we find cannot be linked to coercive institutions – the structural explanation – or explained by restrictive civilized culture – some -ism or -archy – our social science has got an explanation gap. How do autonomous individuals relate to each other across many varied phases of life and contrasting conditions? Every pattern sociologists find, from the smallest fad to the biggest macro trend, poses the same problem of connectivity. How are these people communicating? In our complex societies, how do patterns in private life exist at all?

This is the Hobbesian problem of social order writ large. Hobbes wanted a solution based on coercion – the Leviathan. Locke offered a solution based on shared, enlightened interest through property ownership. But today’s life demands explanations that are infinitely more detailed and reaching separate individuals. And, at the same time, our explanations must recognize differences over time. Individuals and generational cohorts innovate collectively across each decade. What is more, these manage to be collectively orderly. How can this be explained?

Where can our missing connectors be found? Let’s take an example of transition from courtship to committed relationship. Lydia Kiesling gives us a biographical account of her finding ‘the one’ at age 23 in a sudden revelation after a period of wild dating (The Cut 2019). Lydia knows she’s out of sync with her peers; too precocious early on, and too quick to commit to a life partner and enter the next phase. Other undergraduate students reading this account, circa 2020, recognized this girl as being out of sync too. Her age is essentially still undergraduate college, with today’s five and six year graduation rates in mind.

So one individual is free to be out of sync. But, at the same time everybody, individual and observers alike, knows what the normal and expected chronology here really is. What does this example tell us about generational sync overall?

What is the cause of it? Should we describe it as ‘normative’? This seems too strong by half. Our protagonist is not harmed in the least by being in breach of any such norm; she knows she has been ‘wild,’ but can do what she wants and end up with a happy result that suits her and her partner equally. What is the power of a norm if it doesn’t matter to the people involved?

But, apparently contradicting this, everybody shares a consensus understanding of what the right age is for each stage of the life course; this is a collective awareness held by the whole cohort. And this shared perception is validated by the fact that the average age members of one generation complete each phase of life close to the same age. People pair up in budget-sharing couplehood in their mid 20s, and marry at around 30. What is more, these age synchronizations are not inherited. They are different from their own parents’ age timing and in the content of their courtship process. e.g. the rules of dating, breaking up, and finding new suitors.

What conclusions can we draw from the facts we have found here? The evidence of collective sync suggests that some kind of norm or rule exists. We see this in one of young people’s most important choices – the selection of their life partner. On the other hand, breaking the chronological rule appears to be totally without any penalty. Apparently, the obedience to timing is completely optional. This latter implies that norms or rules carry no reward or cost for breaking them. How does something with no consequences get created and how can it be influential? This is part of a problem sociologists face in trying to understand what connects people in private life. Young people appear to be collectively coordinated by age, but in practice individuals are evidently free to operate separately. They can create their own futures, heedless of others. What sociological principle is at work here? Whatever connects people must be a new kind of order. It cannot be one of culturally defined rules of the type enforced by state civilizations. Nor can it be a principle of rational action based on reward or loss – of the economic kind. Youth courtship shows us neither norms, nor rewards and punishments. Fixed civilized fixed rules for everyone, or self-interest in the economy, just don’t seem to apply here.

So what should sociologists do? Do we throw our hands in the air and despair of ever explaining what goes on in private life? Should we retreat and confine our studies to politics and formal organizations? Is it just safer to pick topics that aren’t sociological – that are political and economic – because, and here is the huge paradox, sociologists are afraid to study topics that are sociological? They find that blaming problems on the economy and institutions is much easier to do! Trying to be a sociologist of the real lives of youth today may take you into a difficult terrain where rules exist but are optional for individuals. This new zone isn’t based on morals. Nor can we easily see good or bad consequences. It lacks all current explanation. In sum, it’s too hard for the modern mind to grapple with personal relationships and it appears only fiction writers and entertainers can present it – as drama and not social science. Can sociology as a discipline just accept that it has been defeated by this?

This author admits to being unconventional for a sociologist. I believe social science can escape from its ‘connection problems’ if it ventures into a new explanatory framework. If we take our entire private lifecourse as one topic and study it within its own relationship rules and logic, I feel confident that this will show us how private connections stand in the center of social life. And this, I believe, will reveal youth and lifecourse to be their own, shared sociological sphere.

Youth and the Covid Crisis

I enjoy postings and news items on youth because I learn from them and like commenting on them. Youth is fascinating to me, not for some particularistic concern, but because it illuminates so much about wider society. The sociology of young people reveals our most formative stage of life.

People who don’t care about youth usually dismiss all stages of the life course. In this superficial view, children are relegated to mere dependents, and all adults are regarded as independent grown ups. What this misses is the sociology that creates each new generation. In youth we can witness how individuals connect into relationships, and how these combine into one, shared society.

So when a single topic Tweet or blog describes youth, it opens a door into wider subject matter however narrowly it starts. For example, do university students involved in sex destroy the Covid lockdown? This seems like a narrow concern of the sexologist. But correctly understood, this question opens wider and wider circles of sociological events. For example, have present governments underestimated the significance of courtship for youth? Do the needs of teens necessarily destroy the interpersonal separation intended by lockdown? Does increasing evidence from the United States of partying at universities, and from the United Kingdom of raves involving thousands of people, show that, for young people, lockdown is unsustainable?

This health related policy of government isn’t being undermined by a simple ‘need for sex.’ The reasons are much wider. Government policy is facing the gravitational mass of large numbers of people in one phase of life, a time when sex is only one piece of involvement in relationships and learning about society. These formative years of youth present an entire demographic whose purpose is to meet and discover self and others. Is it reasonable to block these critical years of their essential purpose? Consider the long term consequences. An entire age cohort is being damaged during its formative years, and society is losing its potential future progress by damaging this generation. Do advisors to governments understand how they have failed particular sections of the community? Have they actually factored in the cost of injuring an entire demographic?

It is becoming increasingly clear that lockdown is unsustainable. One reason for this is clearly youth. How sad that policy discussions have not included the sociology of relationships. Countries that have locked-down their populations reveal ignorance of the needs of youth. Simultaneously, other sections of the community, such as the poor, have been ignored too. It is sad that sociological information has not been able to point the way to a better public policy in a crisis.