Month: June 2015

Dear Ms Samantha Taylor,

I take your point on board but Franzen, Louis CK and Greenfield are correct. I strongly agree with your statements concerning the way teenagers live their lives. You assert that the current crop of teenagers are a different generation as they are disinterested and have detached themselves from real society. You and the media present teenagers in a negative way as superficial, fickle and apathetic because, you say, of the lack of awareness they show to reality or the real world. In your view, teenagers concentrate too much on social network sites and they seem to be apathetic about their education and future. I really agree for the following reasons.

Recent evidence from Franzen has shown that about “92% of teenagers go on-line daily and 56% go on-line several times a day”. The data from different sources vary, but the most important thing is that this shows how important a smartphone or computer is to a teenager’s daily life. It is their everything.

I believe on-line socialising is creating a uniquely shallow and trivial culture, making teenagers unable to socialise in a meaningful way. Too much on-line fraternising amongst teenagers has created a generation who in fact can’t relate face to face. This in turn has a negative and detrimental impact on the majority of teenagers. Texting and the use of mobile phones has established itself as the preferred and favoured channel of basic communication between the majority of the teenagers. As a result of this, they are not ready for the real world where people skills make the difference between success and failure in the current jobs market.

Moreover, teenagers do not place as much importance on academic challenge, and focus too much of their time on social networking sites which can make it more difficult for them to distinguish between the meaningful relationships we foster in the real world and the numerous casual relationships formed through social media. Teenagers’ attitude to education shows how little value and importance they put on it; education seems to be low on the list of their priorities. While teenagers spend all those countless hours glued to Facebook, social networking has indeed “turned them into screen-enslaved social inadequates”. You are right. Hours spent on social networking sites are turning teenagers away from reality. Electronic gadgets are leading teenagers to become socially withdrawn and unable to relate to others.

While we are busy tweeting, texting and spending, the world is drifting towards disaster. Teenagers don’t really take into consideration or realise that their generation is a major crisis about to reach its peak. Now that we have all these new expensive gadgets and high-tech items, teenagers are being brainwashed to the extent that they are detaching themselves from reality. The story of David Molak is a classic example of a teenager who was cyber bullied to his own death. It is heartbreaking that in the real world social media is having a disastrous effect on the mental health of the nation. Obsession with gadgets is pushing teenagers over the edge, into an epidemic of psychological disorders. They seem to depend on social networking sites for self-satisfaction and higher status amongst their friends.

Teenagers seem to focus on social media rather than on the type of person they want to become. These days, teens above all seek status and acceptance amongst their peers and these are not always healthy aspirations. Also, teenagers are apathetic because of the amount of hours they spend on social media rather than studying and planning for their future. I strongly feel that teenagers are a brand-new generation of digital addicts, spending hours upon hours texting, unwittingly changing the world for the worse as more and more of them devote themselves to the world of superficial triviality.

To conclude, teenagers’ addiction to social networking sites emphasises that we could be raising a generation who live only in the thrill of the computer generated moment. Teens are in danger of detaching themselves from the real world because they seem to shy away from academic challenge and lose themselves to social media. Such sites are changing children’s brains, creating a dystopian generation of selfish, self-obsessed robot-narcissi.

In both poems, the poets show that conflict has had major effects on people’s lives. In ‘Belfast Confetti’, Ciaran Carson shows that the protagonist is being affected by the conflict which is a civil war between the protestants and the IRA. Likewise in ‘At the Border’, a group of people have been forced to flee from Kurdistan to Iran because of the effect of the civil war. Both poems emphasises the violence that conflict brings on people’s lives.

‘In Belfast Confetti’, the poet starts the poem with an adverb ‘Suddenly’. This emphasises the idea that the protagonist is in a state of danger. The adverb sets up the rest of the poem in quite a dangerous and suspicious way. The poet in Belfast Confetti uses juxtaposition. He contrasts the two words, Belfast and Confetti. We know Belfast is the city where an religious and political war is taking place. We usually associate the word Confetti with moments of happiness, celebrations and special occasions but in this case, the connotation of Confetti is the nuts, bolts, screws, nails and bombs. The poet starts the poem with the adverb ‘Suddenly’ to try and emphasise the fact that the situation the protagonist finds himself in, is dangerous and life-threatening. Wheras, the title of the ‘At the Border’ tells us that a group of people are set to leave their current surrounding and migrate to Iran because of the impact a civil war has towards an individuals life. The poet uses the year 1979 which tells us that that year was a significant year whether it was the start of the war or the time they forced to leave.

The poet also uses a metaphor to suggest that the riot squad are coming to put an end to the conflict.

Likewise, the poet uses the verb ‘stuttering’ to try and draw attention that the protagonist feels brainwashed as he sees the battle going on around him. We know that the protagonist is struggling to take control over his mental state and his thoughts have been scrambled by seeing blood, dead bodies, sound of gun shots going off and people screaming.