Is There A Youth Culture?

Is there a youth culture? It's an intriguing question. We know there people that are young and presently coming of age. We know that the ingredients of culture (the totality of social behavior) are present. These include art, music, film, literature, philospohies, career choices, tension, contradictions, paradoxes, tendencies, interactions, the means to those interactions, wealth distribution, and really just about everything else that makes up what it is to be part of the human experience. But are youth and culture cojoined and interdependent? Or is there an outside influence creating a simulated interdependence? Technically then, there are two things: Youth & Culture. The degree to which they are naturally interwoven is the degree to which there is a youth culture.

In terms of forward movement or even lateral movement that traditionally accompanies modern youth culture, there is none. In place of a youth culture, a feedback loop has been established. This loop is a money generating machine and it is growing. Investigations into what is cool (where cool is the traditional trademark of youth culture) yield campaigns to sell products. The products we then buy en masse cause cool to self-destruct, and then recreate itself as something freshly cool. This new cool is then studied and the conclusions give way to more campaigns to sell more products. The products sell like mad, a critical mass is reached, and again, cool self-destructs and recreates itself.

It's clear that I just finished watching The Merchants of Cool after having watched a documentary about Andy Warhol.

Now some of my thoughts. Much of experience for the modern Young American, and all americans in general, is more than just simulated. It's simulated within a simulation. Consider product placement in movies, Sprite sponsered concerts, and the guy who approached me in Borders first discussing history and then about joining his marketing team. In all these cases, a manufactured reality is established as actual reality. Then products are sold from within the manufactered reality, often billed as crucial to being cool as it pertains to said manufactured reality. I'm wondering if our youth culture is in fact a simulated culture necessitated by our largely simulated human experience. If that is the case, and if it does leave me and others feeling empty, then where can we go to practice being ourselves?

I say practice being ourselves with as full a recognition of what that really means as I can muster. There is no doubt in my mind that we (youth) have been made misaligned by all this subversion. So again, where can we go to practice being ourselves?