Tuesday, March 27, 2007
We Are The Sex Media: Digital Intimacy and Teens
filed under: Dating 2.0, We Are The Sex Media by Lux Nightmare
If you read this blog regularly, you’re probably well aware that we at Sexerati are pretty big fans of digital intimacy; of using all the latest tech and hacks to work your way into someone’s heart (or bed). But we’re consenting adults, (theoretically) able to make educated, informed choices about who we do (and don’t) want to fuck, about whether our online excursions accurately reflect our IRL feelings about the people we interact with.
I often wonder how I would have ended up if I’d been born a few years later — five, or even ten years — if the Unpersonals and text messages and IMs I now view as a boon to my dating life would have caused me to develop into a fundamentally different person if I’d had ready and immediate access to them at the age of twelve, or thirteen or fourteen.
And maybe I would have: a recent article in The Age suggests that digital intimacy — texts and IMs and, yes, MySpace — leads teenagers down a path of accelerated physical intimacy, that the rapid formation of relationships online (combined with media messages proclaiming that, yes, everyone is having sex and if you aren’t you’re a loser) can lead to risky decision making.
I’m split on the issue of teens and the Internet, particularly when it comes to sex. The Internet is wonderful because it offers so much opportunity, so much information, so much access. The Internet is terrible because it offers so much unfiltered information, so much access to harmful influences, so much opportunity for disaster.
So where do we go from here? How do we manage our changing social sphere, the changing social lives of teenagers? Do we banish teenagers from digital life, declaring them emotionally unready for the world of online intimacy (unlike, you know, all those adults who are so emotionally mature and ready to take on the world)? Or do we work to build a framework to manage this new world, these new intimacies — do we sit the teenagers in our lives down and try to have a talk with them, try to educate them about the world around them, give them the tools to filter through the available information and make their own decisions?
I am, not surprisingly, for the latter: though I fully admit I’m not one hundred percent sure what that conversation, what that dialogue, looks like. But maybe the most important thing is just opening the door: maybe that’s enough to set us on the path, to put us on the road to figuring out how to help teenagers manage digital intimacy as they navigate themselves towards adulthood.
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My roomate and I were talking about Myspace Culture this morning, and about how the problem with it isn’t young people connecting, but what they’re connecting over. Young people, especially when they get talking, are so much more likely to rebel, but instead of talking about injustice and revolution they’re posting provocative photos at 13, and not as social commentary. I’m not saying everybody should be an activist, but it is sad that such an amazing networking tool is so rarely used that way.
I’d like to think there’s a learning curve to both activism and social software. When I was a young sex radical, all my slogans were way more in-your-face; e.g. “Yes, I’m bisexual, and no, I don’t want to sleep with you” — rather, I still say things like that, but I moderate it based on audience. We’re just seeing that sexual and activist learning curve develop on such a scale, and live, for the first time in history.
Heartening thought: MySpace was used in California to stage massive student walkouts in high schools in support of Latino immigrants. There’s a potential there. I know if I were on MySpace now as a high school student, I’d probably not have published an underground newspaper and blog there about the hypocrisies around sex in my school.
I don’t think the issues of intimacy and aging are as different online as they were off. we never learned how to face this directly and realistically before the digital age and so many of the difficulties are hangovers. It is the same problem in a new media. The fundamentals of the “problems” (if there really are any - but that’s another aside) are the same as they were 20 years ago, just the parameters (of discourse - i.e. media) and directions of exploitation (by both sides - kids are never as dumb as we’d like to imagine) have increased exponentially