my manifesto for the evening; clasp your hands and sing.

[aamcnamara]

(No, I still haven't written on the novel. That's my next task. People keep asking me good questions!)
(This is related to my previous post.)

mrissa asked me here about my strong identification as a teenager, and whether I thought it was personal or something generational.

I got a little off-topic--short answer: I think it's mostly personal--and it turned into an interesting introspective thing for me, so I'm posting it here and linking in a comment.

This is my answer.

I have always wanted to be taken as an equal by the people I look up to.

Part of that has been wanting to grow up, already, so that I can be an adult. But part of that is also knowing that I can't hurry time, and that people know I am young, and that I want to be a part of the community now. And I don't want to be a part of the community on false pretenses, even if I could get in that way, because that feels like lying, and to be a member of the community you have to tell the truth.

And it's all mixed up with the times when people have thought I'm stupid or lying because I'm a kid, and my righteous anger to show them that kids (and teens) are in fact smarter than you realize, sharper than you think, and will not let you off so easy this time. And with having chosen to go from homeschooling to school with my age-peers, rather than skipping grade after grade to find somewhere the academics were challenging, because I wanted to have friends.

In other words, I think it's probably a personal difference [between me and mrissa on this subject], but in any case, thanks for the opportunity to think about just why I have that strong belief. It'll be interesting to see what happens when I am not, in fact, a teenager any more. (If every generation does this, maybe I understand more about how older generations of fans act than I thought I did.)

[Related to shadesong's post: In general, though, I think that today's generation of fans can find more geeky friends--it's more okay to be geeky in a lot more places today, and there's also the Internet--which allows them to own their geek pride, but at the same time, there's no getting around the fact that they're teens; and sometimes the adult programming just doesn't give teens what they want. Often, perhaps.]

Comments

[anisosynchronic.livejournal.com]

People in general, regardless of age, tend to make assumptions that everyone else has the same experiential baseline that they have--and also tend to forget that the future, the past, and the present are not the same environment.

That is, while Baby Boomers could watch Moon landings, remembering that at the time there were no Internet, no LiveJournal, no Facebook, no personal computers, no compact disc, no home videotape or camcorders (there were film cameras with grainy black and white 8 mm and scratch sound and scratches and dropouts and it was expensive...), no cell phones, and people forget that those things weren't around on a regular basis, because they are so much a part of contemporary consumer culture.

Those sorts of things get very weird very fast... people forget thing, and then their "memory" attempts to do reconstructions based on what would have been resonable.

A generation from now, the world probably will look quite different from wht it looks like today....

Traditionally science fiction conventions have tried to be relatively age-insensitive in the non-discriminatory definition. E.g., there is no lower limit for age to vote in the Hugos, site Selection, and participate in the Worldcon Business meeting, if the person has a full membership and not a "kid-in-tow" or child membership. The outside world, however, has laws regarding minors, and those can be quite constaining.

(As regards special rates, that's a sort point with me--when I was in years of unemployment and underemployment and with a negative cashflow, nobody ever gave me any discount, while families regardless of income status, the elderly regardless on income status, and students regardless of income status, all got substantial discounts for all sorts of things... when I was a college student I had a lot more discretionary spending than I did when I was years out of work and watching the balances on credit cards and loans get larger and which... So, I regarded preferential rates subsidized by other who had to pay ore, as offensive and obnoxious, and still think is offensive and obnoxious. I'd rather not give discounts to any class, and instead have the prices be the same for everyeone, and not have Groups A, C, and D, subsidized by gouging Group B...