Sam Biddle thinks we care too much about teens:
Teens will betray you. Teens won’t even remember your URL. They’ll click whatever’s put in front of them. They’re colliding particles. Would you interview a bee? Should tech investors study a pile of wobbling sea foam? Adult culture has become so obsessed with harvesting youth culture that we haven’t stopped to consider whether or not these kids are basically just gangly, brand-obsessed dorks who drive poorly and have partially formed brains. We’ve been worshipping at the consumer altar of teenagers that we’ve forgotten how little this particular crop has done for us; their cultural pinnacles are EDM and acoustic Vine covers. And why be surprised? Can we resent teens for not being little culture panaceas when their entire world consists of apps, track practice, and their house? We’re the fools for thinking the tiny teen world view really became larger just because it now includes the internet.
But Sam’s wrong: the app-industrial complex’s slavering maw yearns for teens not because they contain a cure for internet ennui, but because it knows they are its next host.
You know how you hate using Facebook? How it’s nothing but a social obligation and professional imposition? That is the feeling of terminal stage brand loyalty. Someone is now making money off you, because your shared business relationship has aged past the point where they have any reason to please you.
If this were a Buffy episode about drugs, now would be the time when you’d be comatose in the back of a hovel, your life force slowly draining away into some monster that delivered mystic euphoria during act one. Except nobody is about to come crashing through the door to liberate you via a poorly choreographed fight sequence.
Today’s teens are tomorrow’s locked-in social network users, and if they seem frustratingly flighty now it only means it will be that much sweeter when they finally fall into the snare.
