Wired High

Remember high school? Well, it's not like that anymore. The Internet, digital cameras and instant messaging have changed everything from homework and plagiarism to bullying and dating. A teacher explains.

By Vanessa Richmond

AT 8:05 ONE MORNING NOT LONG AGO, two Grade 12 girls sauntered into my Vancouver high school classroom. One, Jen, was describing some “extracurricular activities” with her boyfriend. “He acted like he totally wasn’t into it.” An honour student, Jen took out her homework and a copy of Hamlet, along with a printout about dorm life at an eastern Canadian university. “I can’t deal anymore,” she said. “Yeah, but if you dump him, think he’ll post something about you?” asked her friend.
I went to the computer lab to round up my students. One was printing out science homework. Another said, “Coming—I just have to finish MSNing my friend.”

I’ve taught at 10 different Vancouver schools in the past seven years, full- and part-time, and as a sub. Talking to parents, I find that many feel that their kids communicate in fractured, misspelled fragments and wasted hours on the Internet. Parents roll their eyes at the amount of time their teenagers spend MSNing, text messaging, hanging out on MySpace, talking on their cellphones, or gaming online; and at the explicit nature of popular music and many websites. Others paint pictures of cyber-Armageddon, or the Borg of Star Trek. Few seem to realize that the two seismic shifts in our high schools—technological and cultural—are actually one and the same. Technology has triggered a social earthquake.

Let’s start with the sex part. An 18-year-old girl told me: “Your generation thinks sex is a big deal. No offense, but it’s just not now. We’re over that. It’s just like another thing we do.” Students talk about sex around teachers in a way my own classmates, in the early 1990s, never would have. My 16-year-old students have seen more porn on the Internet than most people twice their age (like me). Teacher friends in other schools report that kids in Grade 6 talk openly about engaging in oral sex and intercourse.

“She sleeps with everyone,” a 17-year-old-student said of her friend Nicole. “No joke, I think she’s hooked up with just about every guy in our grade. Whatever.” When I was in high school, the one girl in our class who admitted to having sex was labelled a slut. She sat alone at lunch, or with boys. I’ve not heard a female student utter the word “slut” (as an insult) in years.
Statistics Canada confirms that the proportion of teens having sexual intercourse by the age of 15 has been rising steadily since the early 1980s. And my now-prudish Generation X isn’t trailblazing for them; their models are celebrities, whom technology has made instantly ubiquitous. For many teenagers, a Nelly Furtado song like “Promiscuous” is as close as their cellphone. Music videos, gossip magazines, television shows and cosmetics advertising all promote the idea that sex is everywhere, sex is good, the earlier the better. “He’s hot—I love him,” Paris Hilton says on TV. Later that evening, a pubescent girl circulates the clip on the Internet and posts, about her new math teacher, “He’s hot—I love him.”

Honour Roll students wear bikini tops and painted-on, low-rise jeans to school dances, grinding it out on the gym floor while music videos play on the wall—the girls have cloned the outfits worn by singers and actors on TV that very week, having looked these up on the Internet. And why wouldn’t they choose as their models people like Jessica Simpson, Beyoncé and Rihanna? They’re more influential, wealthy and powerful than just about any female CEO you can name. In what loosely gets called “third wave feminism,” teen girls tend to link sex with power. Technology and celebrity culture have merged to make teens more sexually aware, and sexually active, than ever before.

Technology has changed the ways teenagers connect socially as well. In July, Reuters reported that, for the first time, MySpace.com ranked as the No. 1 U.S. website, displacing Google and Yahoo email. MySpace attracts 80 percent of social networking users; FaceBook is a distant second at seven percent. There, youth leave messages for each other, chat in forums (I posted a message on Nexopia, a Canadian site, researching this article and within a couple of hours had 127 replies), and post images.

A visit to any of these networking sites shows teens in the process of self-branding—just like their favourite celebrities do. Even more important than the words they use to portray themselves are the images. Earlier this year, the New York Times reported that self-portraits are the primary use of digital cameras. In Canada, there are seven million digital cameras; 54 percent of households have one, versus fewer than five percent of households in 1999. On MSN alone, six million photos are uploaded daily. More than 2.5 billion photos have been uploaded since December 2004.

“I change my FaceBook image every day,” explained one 18-year-old. “It’s just one of the things I have to do. It has to be who I actually am that day; it has to be right.” Like many teenagers, she uses sophisticated techniques to capture her changing moods and identities; she’s the star of her own life. Psychologists call this “the imaginary audience” and say it’s a key part of growing up. Gone are the days of using a hairbrush as a microphone in the bathroom, my own version of private stardom.

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