I recently did some reflecting about the uniqueness of culture today for young teens. Here are some things I came up with:

A Culture of Information

We all live in a culture of information; so in a sense, this is not unique to middle schoolers. What is unique is that this reality is shaping them during their early adolescent development in ways that wasn’t true prior to the last decade. Furthermore, they have always lived in a culture of information.

Almost every bit of information needed (and excessive quantities of information that are not wanted) is available with the click of a mouse in ways that shape our worldview. This is about access to information as much as the onslaught of information. The access of information shapes middle schoolers’ culture of immediacy, their sense of entitlement and their work ethic. The onslaught of information has a numbing effect. Because everything a middle schooler needs to know is readily available, and because they constantly are bombarded with suggestions and data of every sort, they are less attentive to all information.

A Culture of Immediacy

Consider the things you had to wait for as a middle schooler to which today’s middle schoolers readily have access. You take a picture on your camera or phone and see the immediate result. You hear a song on the radio and can instantly download it to your computer or phone. Considering a purchase? Browse instantly online and get others’ input via user comments. If you want, make an instant purchase and wait, at most, a day or two for the item to arrive.

If you’ve ever been “stuck” somewhere without your cell phone and tried to find a pay phone to make a call, you have been reminded of this shift.

Sure, most of us have access to all this immediacy; but we didn’t grow up with these conveniences as the norm. Today’s young teens never have known a world without instant everything. Doesn’t it strike you that our idea of old-school hominess includes making bread in a computer-enabled machine that does all the work?

Here’s a great example of this shift: For adults, e-mail communication changed everything. We were able to send and receive written communication without writing by hand and going through the “hassle” of using the postal system. Written communication became almost instantaneous, but no one predicted that teenagers would dispose of e-mail as too slow and clunky, opting for the intensely more immediate communication pathway of text messaging. We adults saw text messaging as a utilitarian means of quick planning. Teenagers turned it into a social phenomenon.

Middle schoolers don’t have a willingness (or the ability) to wait for anything. Our culture has trained them to expect everything instantly. Patience is a rough one, “delayed gratification” is a foreign concept, and slowness can have a deeply profound impact on their lives as it’s something they simply do not experience daily.