At least in Orwell's 1984 the Tele-Screens were imposed by an external authority. The present day is much worse than he could have ever imagined.
Everyone over the age of 13 carries a high-quality camera with them at every waking moment; in fact, they regularly shell out for higher-quality cameras as technology improves! Not only that, but they've been operant-conditioned to take photos and videos of any interesting events and send it to the central servers of spy companies like Facebook and Snap, where they will be stored permanently for the foreseeable future - and they do this all for free!
Most of my exposure to the written word has been through the internet, and most of my time on the Internet has been spent on sites full of people who are much older than I am. You are what you eat, I guess.
CP stands for "College Placement" and is the baseline, AP is regulated by the College Board and considered the most prestigious, and Honors is somewhere in between.
Second-tier compared to the world's top universities; that is, Harvard, Stanford, Oxford and their ilk. I've seen posts on this website[0] how some big tech companies almost exclusively skim off the top.
No, I don't have a blog. There aren't many things I'd like to write about, and pretty much all of the things I would like to write about have been written about more eloquently by others. There's a lot of subpar and garbage information in this world, especially on the internet, and I'd rather not contribute to the pile if I can help it.
I agree with you on that last point - I'm talking largely about the trans people who are very online and very vocal about it (a self-selected demographic), not trans people in general.
It's not true that nobody's fucking. The LGBT kids fuck to an extent, as do some of the lower achievers, but even then it's nowhere near as much as I expected.
I'm surprised to hear you compliment my writing style. I always thought it was subpar - too many clauses, a slew of unnecessary qualifiers and weasel words, no shortage of kludges for things I can't express very well. I tend to be better at it after I've been reading a book for a while and have "effective rhetoric" somewhere in my brain's cache line.
I've seen a lot of kids my age become Communists or Nazis due to internet-induced radicalization; I was rather close to becoming a radical leftist myself. Personally, I think it's harmless; they tend not to hold these views for a long time when tempered with the saner views of their peers and broader society. It's like the chicken pox - you get it once, become a bit nasty for a while, and then you're immune to further insanity.
It's when the person in question is mentally ill or socially isolated (i.e a NEET living in their mother's basement) that radicalization becomes harmful, because there's nothing to bring them back to the baseline. Marginal identities attract marginal people.
(I have a theory that online transgender-ism is spreading in exactly the same way - note the massive amount of trans people online who are also NEETs, weebs, and/or communists. But that's a story for another day.)
16-year-old here. My experience is probably markedly different from most teenagers in the US (I'm an immigrant who goes to a competitive school full of other immigrants) but I find that, for the most part, this article hits the nail on the head. High School is nothing like the usual media portrayal - I've never heard anyone even talk about a party, nobody's doing anything stronger than weed, nobody's fucking or even dating at all.
Smartphone use definitely has a negative effect. I'm in some APs, some Honors, and some regular classes and the #1 difference I've observed between the kids in each cohort is how often they're on their phones. The CP kids leave their phones on their desks and are making out with the damn things whenever they can, sometimes even when the teacher is trying to lecture them. The Honors kids have them under their desks and only use them when they have nothing more pressing to do. The AP kids have them on mute in their backpacks. (I leave mine in my locker, and only use it to listen to music.)
Most of the anxiety is over college admissions - not necessarily to the Ivy League (everyone knows that's just luck of the draw), but the "second-tier" schools (Carnegie-Mellon, Rensselaer, Duke, Cornell, etc.) where over-achieving can still net you a good chance of admission. There's a lot of focus on "building your brand" and trying to "stand out" (make your life more "interesting" in the narrow ways that look good on a college application). The more technically-oriented kids are balls-deep in resume-driven development; they follow the tutorial for every trendy tech buzzword possible (mostly data-science and ML stuff) so that they can blog about it on their Squarespace-generated portfolios. I'm a member of the FIRST Robotics Team and, like everyone else there, I do absolutely nothing, because the team has 5 times more people than it actually needs. I once witnessed the entire programming subteam (about 20 people) spend 3 hours trying to flash an SD card.
The main thing I notice among my peers is an obsessive (borderline autistic) focus on "getting in" and having good credentials. Enjoying your life and doing things that you take pride in are secondary to the all-encompassing drive to impress people who know nothing about you. I wish I could say I'm above it all, but I've certainly internalized it to some extent - I feel a nagging sense of guilt when playing video games, or reading books that don't imply intellectual clout, or anything else that's internally rewarding but "non-bloggable". If I had to characterize my generation with a pathology, it would be exhibitionism.