My lovely, 14-year-old niece Kate is an unabashed shutterbug. Top-of-her-class smart, she is also ambitious, pushing for prep school in a family of public high school graduates. Who knows? She might become an Ivy League college grad and pro photographer in the same space of time it takes my hair to go from new—and disguised—to fooling nobody gray.
Sure, I’m biased, but even the facts fall “all ducks in a row” for her. My sister Renee and I agree that her kid has all of our good qualities and few, if any, of our physical shortfalls. So, in addition to dancing and singing well, for instance, she kicks butt in field hockey, unlike her Aunt, who feared the little hard ball and couldn’t hold a stick without a slimy, death grip.
And, because Kate is what demographic experts refer to as an Echoboomer (9-29), she is a MySpace maven. She’s also what I’d argue, a typical member of her group, many of whom use cameras as a branding tool in a way this Gen X gal couldn’t fathom of doing at 14, when the “it” girls were Pat Benatar and Debbie Harry on vinyl, not Britney and Beyonce in digital heavy rotation.
Today, of course, the digital world in all aspects is as real as any other—to some, more real. Kate’s MySpace page is set on private, but if you could check it out, you’d notice a few things immediately. First, she is 17 or 18, depending on her mood. (Okay, some adolescent traits are constant.) She also frequently changes the graphics and layout on her home page, which is easy to do with Freelayouts and other sites offering HTML and Flash code with a cut and paste.
Granted, the writing on the site is some sort of bastardized pidgin, more like texting than anything she ever learned in English composition class. But the way Kate uses images is anything but an amateur act: she posts a minimum of four or five in her profile—and they change frequently. Sometimes daily.
The headshots convey a thought out persona that, like the original, is strong, a little naughty, silly, and fun. The persona, though, is always on and always posed. One of my favorites? Miss Kate in flirty fun mode.
Like other MySpace enthusiasts of the very young demographic, Kate tries to make her chronicle slick and interesting for her community of friends, which number about 90 as of this writing. And, she wouldn’t dream of posting an average picture. To be “boring” is probably the worst thing you could be as she sees it. Sure, we in the Gen X era disliked boredom, too, but my guess is we had a different relationship to it. Our pictures weren’t as slick and we probably, as a group, demanded less from our consumer products, including our cameras.
Maybe your special Echo kid is like this: every day is a day recorded in some way. Getting together with friends becomes an occasion for picture taking. And, certainly, anything with a specific itinerary like, say, a day trip to the city gets snapped to exhaustion. No moment is too small to be added to a vast album or at least a desktop folder. According to Forrester Research Inc., approximately 23% of youth ages 13-22 are publishing and updating pages weekly. Sound familiar? Or, as Kate likes to say: “I hate being bored—so we take pictures or work on our MySpace profiles.”
What the Kidz Want
I can only guess what it feels like to be a kid today. It seems to me that, on the peer pressure front anyway, it’s only more intense than the “rad” early 80s. For starters, the very young are living through a very labeled, very mass luxury goods era that are making teens and tweens only more brand conscious. (And this is the case even as the group disdains branded goods on a certain level and seeks to “mash them up” to make them their own—call it the YouTube effect.)
In the solid middle class household of my youth—the sort of house that blended utilitarianism with touches of Florentine aspiration—brands counted but we often made do without them.
With cameras, we were a Kodak Instamatic family that later upgraded to the Kodak Colorburst 50. These were point-and-shoot numbers designed to be botch proof. The images they returned were slice of life, basic as apple pie, but served the hunger of nostalgia.
Like Kate, my sister and I had our after school pursuits. But “getting pictures taken” was imposed—from school portraits to the action shots of, say, our annual recital that my Aunt Mickey peeled off one year as part of a college project with her Canon 35mm. Images not related to holidays are rare artifacts indeed.
Not so with the post “Wired” generation. After getting a Canon PowerShot camera last Christmas that went with her everywhere, Kate already has a tidy sum of personal history captured.
Most of the resulting pics of the period show my niece and her friends displaying what I’d call girl power lite, or proto-suggestive swagger—a cross between a photoshoot and social science experiment. (And none of it 2 gross, btw.)
During a recent visit to my niece’s bedroom, I was greeted by a wall of Kate. In one image, she was leaping gazelle-like off the ground. This was followed by a series in which she and her friend Skylar were hanging out on a front porch in the country, with Kate’s face in the extreme foreground and Skylar in full view in her best, “I’m a country bumpkin laying back for a snooze” posture. In another series, Kate and another friend, Francesca, were doing the bump, which I didn’t think kids knew about anymore. I saw a few snaps of random travel-related photos and others of her in her field hockey uniform.
The best of these show a real perspective, photos with a subject and no visual distraction, the way you learn to do it in a photo class. And, having seen Kate in “photo shoot” mode, I know she’ll take an image over and over until it’s exactly the way she sees it in her head.
Gen X Tries MySpace
I’ve been blogging on the social networking site myself. I signed up last November out of curiosity and to keep a quasi-parental eye on the proceedings. As it turned out, I had fun with the free form word smithing and with changing the layout of the intuitive interface, tweaking the color palettes, column widths, and fonts. Kate advised me to add pictures.
I sifted through some stock and posted some pics: Flowers, odd light patterns, one photo of hands pressing into transparent fabric. My profile was pretty plain, though.
Over time, some “friends” gathered. One guy emailed me and said he was confused. Were the pictures I posted photos I took or merely images that I liked? I answered the latter. He asked why I didn’t post a picture of myself and I wrote back, because I want people to focus on my writing and I’m not looking for a date.
Meanwhile, Kate kept up with chorus and school, and gleefully snapping her “down time” until late this spring, when I was told somebody at school sat on her PowerShot and busted the lens. Of course, my sister talked about money and trees, telling Kate that if she got a job babysitting, she could earn the cash for a new digital camera. The wish list was mounting. She wanted more memory. She wanted higher resolution. Mind you, with all her activities and the general busyness around the household, Kate didn’t have all that much time to suck her teeth about it.
And her friends must have pitched in to fill the gap. Somehow, when I would check on MySpace, her photos were being updated: Kate with a peace sign; serious Kate; Kate refusing to smile because of her new braces. Then, this October, when she turned 14, mom bought her grand daughter a Kodak M Series EasyShare 883. With face detection technology, digital image stabilization, and 3-inch LCD, the thin body and silver unit became, with her mobile, part of her traveling kit. She was thrilled and photo snapping continued in earnest.
On a recent visit to the city, she took some great shots of us on the subway platform and waiting to be seated at the Hard Rock, my concession to a young tourist’s tastes. We saw Hairspray, and she got some excellent shots off of the pop luxe marquee. Sometime during our three days together, I caught Kate’s enthusiasm for the digital self-portrait. She even got me interested in the Photobooth and iPhoto apps on my new Mac and talked me into taking some impromptu head shots—playing around with the effects. And, yes, I found my own version of Kate’s flirty face and posted a few shots. I won’t claim to be in my niece’s league but I have to agree with her. Pictures of yourself don’t have to be traumatizing and you can take them over and over until you get exactly what you want.
