Lifespace

We appreciate young people’s freedom and creativity, but not seeing or hearing or feeling it outside well established media channels. We like them to be with friends, but loitering is viewed as a social problem. A system called mosquito uses high frequency sound to make people under the age of 25 (approximately) move away from places we don’t want them to hang around. The truth is that the social spaces of many urban areas are heavily restricted. The ideal person in such surroundings is buying stuff!

On this background it’s striking how the picture of the youth’s use of the Internet is often so colourful. They make friends and flirt and chat and quarrel and do all sorts of things in this ‘virtual space.’ Given that we don’t give them any real space, it’s suspiciously convenient to imagine that they have an almost infinite space somewhere else. I’ve heard teenagers talking about hanging on the net. Isn’t that cute?

I realise the importance of the net, but the way we depict it in general, and especially the way we think about young peoples ‘life online,’ should be the object of constant critical inquiry. The metaphors we use should be scrutinized, the architectures of control investigated. To think that most young people today are expressing them selves in new ways in virtual environments is in my opinion far too optimistic. When in a fatalist mood I think it is consumption all the way down.