Malevolence in a motif...
Over the weekend I binge watched the new Netflix series ‘Adolescence'. I found it utterly intense and compelling; that’s not to say I enjoyed it, in fact I’d say I endured it. The dark plot revolves around a 13-year-old lad who’s accused of murdering a female class mate. I don’t think I’m giving any spoilers away when I say it’s not a who-done-it, it’s more a, why-done-it?
“But why..?” I recall wrecking dad’s head with my constant ‘why’ questions in my early years. But those were different times, when mam and dad were our world-wide-web, steering our search through life’s query and quandary within their protectively nurturing boundaries.
Boundaries? As a teenager I knew exactly what mine were, because my parents clearly laid them down and I knew not to cross the line. If I were a parent of a teenager today, I wouldn’t know where to draw the lines, bar from banning them from all engagement with the internet, which would be unrealistic.
There’s one scene from Adolescence that particularly spoke to me. The detective investigating the case arrives at the boy’s school in an attempt to discover a motive for the crime from his peers. However, he’s intercepted by his own teenage son who’s a student at the school.
The roles are reversed when the son becomes the educator, informing his seasoned detective father how ill-informed he is of teenage online culture, their darker communities, and how they communicate in them.
“You’re not getting it, you’re not reading what they’re doing,” the son tells his father. So, while in search of a motive for murder, the detective learns about the malevolence in a motif, when the son informs his father of the often sinister meanings behind the seemingly benign emoji – and how they can push a vulnerable teenager towards heinous crime.
Ten years ago I decided to write the kind of story I wanted to read as a sixteen year old, a schlocky twisty horror. As a teenager, I was put off by a dense wall of words in books; so I wrote short chapters in the style of social media posts and posted them to a popular reader/writer app. The story began to gather traction amongst teens and young-adults until it accrued a sizeable, very vocal world-wide audience. These reader apps are interactive, the readers can comment on the story and with each other. And with this came my insight into the coded language in which the young readers communicated.
I was aware of the abreve-talk in texts; but this wasn’t abbreviated words, it was gobbledygook. I kept seeing comments like, “Asdfgh…” and had to ask what it meant. One young lady became my designated translator, “It means my mind is so blown by this story I have no words,” she explained.
Not long after, the emojis began to appear. Of course, I saw them as nothing more than smiling faces, multi-coloured hearts, peaches and cherries. Only now, via the series Adolescence, do I see how these seemingly innocent symbols have taken on a malevolent meaning online and in the gaming world.
I was aware that young people were using emojis to communicate, and even surmised a while back that we would soon have the first novel written entirely in emojis. But like the detective in the show, I couldn’t read them, or perhaps I purposefully miss-read them in an attempt to subconsciously ignore the darkness in their use?
The writer of Adolescence has said, “I want it to be shown in schools, I want it to be shown in Parliament, it’s crucial because this is only going to get worse.” A sentiment that has been echoed by our Tánaiste, Simon Harris. And as I write, the show has indeed been discussed in the UK Parliament.
Coincidently, I’m writing this on ‘National Teenager Day'. I truly believe in the decency of the majority of teenagers, and wrote about the inherent kindness I witnessed by a group of teens in Cavan library in an earlier column (A teenage tidal-wave in the library). It’s just that some get sucked down the black holes that proliferate the metaverse.
Maybe it will take a show like Adolescence to highlight the corrosive non-sense that thrives online. It’s telling that it’s taking a fictional-drama to prompt emotive dialogue that will hopefully affect a positive change.
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