There was certainly a pranksterish element, for instance, to the Facebook led campaign to get Rage Against the Machine to No.1 for Christmas instead of X-Factor’s Joe McEldery. For all the swagger and delight in putting a broom through Simon Cowell’s bicycle wheel in his ride up the charts, though, no-one seriously believed that this was a fatal blow to the pop machinery. Had the purpose been to send a popular or meaningful song up to the top then any number of venerated artists, from Bob Marley to Woody Guthrie, would have brought weight to the proceedings. Actually, if it was really about finding a more credible alternative to McEldery’s Miley Cyrus cover just about anything short of the webuyanycar.com jingle would probably have done. But it was somehow perfectly apt that the focus was loud, sweary, I’m-notgonna-tidy-my-room rock in all its high adolescent dudgeon. It was an adolescent moment, although a large proportion of the participants were long out of their teens. In some ways, this was as much about a division between a ‘web’ constituency and a ‘TV’ one as between ‘rock’ and ‘pop’ fans. And the question of whose constituency the web was came
into sharper focus during the election campaign. Certainly events that are writ large in such times tend to recede into the small print once the hard copy votes are counted but in that most serious of popularity contests adolescent discourse came to the fore as ‘adult’ assumptions of what has previously worked fell apart. The once iconic campaign poster was reduced to instant fodder for quickly multiplying online spoofs. When the Conservatives tried to harness this trend with their ‘cashgordon’ website, an unmediated feed from twitter led to a barrage of graffiti from web-natives. Adults unleashing their inner adolescent left the Conservative party looking like a patrician teacher stumbling around the digital playground trying to join in with a game the rules of which he doesn’t quite grasp. It’s also notable that when the old guard of the right wing press unleashed its stentorian wrath on the Liberal Democrat leader the immediate backlash was characterised not by measured adult counterarguments from their counterparts in the leftleaning press but a sarcastic barrage of twitter posts blaming Clegg for everything from lost car keys and stubbed toes to volcanic eruptions and the colour of Walkers crisp packets. An effective comment on a serious
point? Yes. A mature and adult way to express it? No. But sometimes measured adult responses are just spitting in the wind or, at best, preaching to the converted. Shouting and screaming rarely helps either, beyond providing a transitory sense of self-validation. There is, however, more to adolescent behaviour than that. The note pinned to the back of the jacket, or the nickname uttered at the edge of hearing are usually more effective at undermining the headmaster’s authority than a flat-out row. Twitter and Facebook aren’t going to save anyone’s democracy on their own. Neither is photoshopping the PM into whatever random grotesquery springs to mind. But when would be vendors and leaders of all hues are trying to use an adolescent medium to guide us towards their preferred optionwhether it’s for Number 1 or Number 10- childlike tantrums of disapproval are easy to sideline or demean and mature discussion can be drowned out or mired in detail. Sometimes it takes the sarky, smart-arsed inner adolescent of people who know better to give a good oldfashioned two-finger salute to the powers that would be and show them that even if they own the playground, the rules of the games played in it are open to question.
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