Alex Chin, 19, an A-level student from Windsor, has been a keen fire-juggler and extreme-sports enthusiast for five years. In a previous era, he would have sent a few photos to a god-like style magazine. Being a Noughties teen, Alex decided to post images — and then footage — of his more combustible routines on an urban circus-skills website called www.houseofpoi.com.
He and his friends almost always video their skateboarding runs, either with a camcorder or, more likely, with their mobile phones. Alex explains that the person doing a difficult skateboard trick cannot see whatever “crazy stuff they’ve done, unless it’s being filmed. And wanting to nail a trick, on camera, encourages you to repeat it until you get it perfect”. He says he can squeeze 30 minutes of footage onto his rather basic Sony Ericsson K700i mobile. The best bits are then Bluetoothed between friends’ phones, because it’s easy and free. Video captured by a mobile phone is, of course, low in quality, but, as he sagely points out, it saves dragging a camcorder around all day. There are numerous websites where Alex could post his clips, but he confesses to being reluctant to do so, as the standard is so high.
In the quest to learn new tricks, previous generations would have studied what he, rather depressingly, calls “old-school videos”. However, Alex says that his friends all now look to hyper-realistic skateboarding games, such as Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, instead. There, they can freeze or rotate the characters in 3-D and plan how to work more moves into a single run. Ed Leigh, team manager of several professional skate- and snowboarding teams, including Vans and Nike, agrees:
“If you look at skate videos of younger pros, such as PJ Ladd, you can see him pulling all sorts of hideously difficult tricks that he almost certainly routined from playing games.”
There is nothing new in kids emulating the moves of the pros. What’s different here is the way fantasy and reality have collided. “People are constantly trying to do tricks that they’ve seen in games, but are considered physically impossible, like a double backflip on a bike,” Alex says, earnestly explaining that this is what pushes the whole sport forward.
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He admits that the CCTV generation’s obsession with showing off for the camera has spawned the nasty phenomenon of “happy slapping”, and worse. This is fuelled by what he calls “Jackass” culture, or laughing at video clips of adult actors being painfully stupid, a reference to the cult MTV show. If pain can be a tutor, Alex learnt his lesson the hard way when he fell two storeys and broke his collarbone taking part in parkour, a bizarre urban activity that involves acrobatic climbing over buildings, as featured in the BBC promotional film Rush Hour.
You don’t need to pursue extreme sports, or shatter bones, to find fertile subject matter. Jessica Adler, 18, is an enthusiastic film-maker who creates short, imaginative documentaries about her friends’ lives. She began at 14, filming her school’s annual play with an “old, basic camcorder”. This grew into more sophisticated movies as she began weaving in behind-the-scenes footage and music with the versatile, if “crash-prone”, Pinnacle Studio software (£35 at www.amazon.co.uk). Jessica moved on to a free film course in west London, run by a charity called Youth Culture TV, and is now taking A-level film studies.
What’s novel about today’s youth culture is the complicated blurring of the line between different media formats, and, indeed, fantasy and reality. Backyard wrestling, for instance, began with kids copying the razzmatazz faux fights of wrestlers they saw on US television. This became a cult activity, as portrayed by the Channel 4 documentary Lock up Your Sons, which showed British teens forming local clans and competing to post footage of their fights online. Console video games have since been based on backyard wrestling, and raised the stakes by showcasing ever more outlandish moves, such as leaping from great heights onto burning tables, all now enthusiastically re-enacted by the young.
The American academics Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin attempt to describe this process of media content being refashioned in a theory they call “remediation” — in other words, the ways in which technology, and in particular the net, stimulate the next generation.
Today’s kids — born digital natives, as opposed to adults, who must become digital immigrants — are not only at home with new technology, but know how to make it work for them. For the past three years, Josh Knox, now 16, has taken regular videos of his brothers Tom, 14, and Sparrow, 11, performing snowboarding and skateboarding tricks, though “seriously” only for the past 18 months. There was no fancy equipment. Josh made 10 short films, each lasting five minutes, on an old Hi-8 video camera and Windows Movie Maker — the basic free software within Windows XP — before burning them onto CDs, which he and his siblings gave out to “people we knew through festivals, who we thought could hook us up with free gear”.
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His clear intention was also to find sponsored kit by sending these short home movies to semiprofessional team managers. The stuff of fantasy, right? Wrong. Both Tom and Sparrow were picked up by teams and flown out to Australia to film Five’s Bafta-winning show Rad TV. Josh has since worked with professional film crews at the Urban Games in London, and saved up for three years to buy himself a smart new Sony camcorder. “Remember, I don’t work,” he laughs.
“Sponsor-me videos are my favourite thing in the world to watch,” says Ed Leigh, “because of the raw enthusiasm and the passion.” He knows that the kids who can afford to buy all the kit are rarely as talented as the ones who cannot. There is no price on being innovative, though. Leigh recently signed up a nine-year-old who sent him a short video clip, direct to his mobile phone. “It was really impressive,” he says. He is now attempting to set up a project to promote digital literacy by taking digital cameras, camcorders and a few cheap laptops into skateparks and running free workshops. The kids would take photos before being shown how to build their own basic website. Whether or not you approve of extreme sports, or of corporate sponsorship — the tactic of giving children free clothing is no charitable gesture — projects of this kind encourage creative skills.
As Britain’s manufacturing industry declines, the next generation must be given the keys to the digital toolbox, and what better than to make their apprenticeship fun? Ask Lauren Balsom, 17, from Sharnbrook Upper School, in Bedfordshire, who was a finalist in a recent Channel 4 competition promoting tele- vision journalism. She and 15 classmates attended extra school lessons for two months before researching and filming a story about underage drinking, which led to them being invited along to Channel 4 television studios for a day.
“It was great,” she says. “We gained experience in all aspects of journalism, including filming, editing and script- writing. I even co-presented our feature story.” As a legacy of this competition, Channel 4 has provided free video-editing software, raw news footage and lesson plans for schools online at www.channel4.com/breakingthenews.
The price of all this digital liberty is a loss of parental control. Both on the streets and in the virtual world, teenagers are exposed to ideas, or material, of which parents may not approve. Their addiction to mobile phones is unnerving, and frequently expensive, too. Hoicking valuable gadgets around in public places brings with it attendant risks.
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The fact is, however, that children no longer rely on a media elite for their cultural soul. They set up online fanzines, or remix their favourite tracks into “mash-ups”, then file-share these new creations. There is no more scratching around to discover a scene. Whether they enjoy the exotic taste of Asian bhangra music or Japanese animé, they are exploring new art forms — and hopefully learning a few life skills.
There is also a world of difference between the urchins who scratch their names (tags) onto bus windows, and the levels of creativity expressed at the global graffiti encyclopedia www.artcrimes.com, or the celebration of vibrant street art at www.woostercollective.com.
Teenagers are able to share ideas in ways impossible to conceive a decade ago. There may be something disconcerting about their constant need to video each other, rather than going out to play for the sake of it. They are also, undeniably, being exploited by corporate brands. Yet there is no denying that technology has changed their world. They no longer want to be the best on their street. For good or ill, they belong to a virtual gang, whether they chat, show off or play computer games online in teams, or clans, based all over the world.
It’s ironic that, on a weekend, it will still be kids living nearby who come a-knocking on your door. And they’ll probably all have the same stupid haircut.
HOW TO LEARN NEW TRICKS WITH YOUR EVERYDAY GIZMOS