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Use and benefits of Avatars in virtual learning | Aspin eLearning

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Use and benefits of Avatars in virtual learning | Aspin eLearning

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How often do we hear this: "I am much better at remembering faces than names" or "I have a photographic memory for faces", or "Oh, yes! I know their face from somewhere"? It's been proven that human beings are wired to recognize and remember faces, it starts in infancy. Even if you haven't seen somebody in 10, 20, or 30 years, and despite the effects of time, you'll almost always recognise a person when you meet them again.

When it comes to the vastly developing virtual reality environment, an avatar is the graphical representation of the user or the user's alter ego or character; in other words, an avatar is also a "face". The more unique the "face" is, the better chance it has of being recognised and therefore remembered. Avatars usually take on a human-like appearance, which ranges from photographic representation to highly stylised or realistic looking characters in both 2D and 3D environments.

Avatars that represent their users appear in many facets of the cyber space such as virtual boardrooms, messaging and chatting, internet or console gaming, marketing, broadcasting, film, television, education and training.

As elearning material developers/providers we see the effective use of avatars as an integral part of contemporary online education. From being just a digital representation of the user, avatars have developed and are now serving roles as the educators by delivering online learning in "human" like manner, so that learning becomes widely accessible, interesting, engaging, and memorable.

More and more education facilitators from kindergarten to higher education as well as professional work environments, are breathing digital life into teaching by using these customised speaking and non-speaking animations to explain simple or complex subject matter to students through storytelling and interactive activities. Avatars can serve in a number of capacities, depending on how the educator wishes to engage students in a particular lesson or activity.

Here are some amazing ways avatars are being used in education today:

1. Training teachers

Avatars are being used specifically for teacher training. Specially designed avatars realistically imitate different types of students to help teachers practice classroom management and relate to their students. The trainee teachers stand in front of a projection screen on which they see avatars that are being controlled, or acted out, by actual students trained to behave a certain way. Other noises or outbursts like laughing or obnoxious sound effects are added to simulate a fully realistic experience. (OCA or StC as our own examples)

2. Vokis

Vokis are speaking avatars, and teachers in all subjects, but especially language classes, are using them by recording their own voices to match their digital avatar. Using more animated avatars helps students who feel disconnected from class discussions or who are more audio learners rather than visual learners process material and relate to the lesson more personally. Language teachers have been using vokis to help students with pronunciation and conversation, letting them voice-over their own avatars. One of the interesting examples of this type of interaction is at SPEAK2Me.net, where a beautiful avatar named Lucy helps Chinese-speaking people practice their English. She asks you questions, which you answer by typing and, hopefully, also speaking, for the practice. The result is a real conversation with a virtual conversationalist. With practice and persistence, a quicker, better comprehension of the mysterious English language can be achieved.

3. Connecting via online learning

Online courses or teachers who use online tools like blogs and forums to connect with students can use avatars to make the Internet experience more personal and direct. Instead of reading all of the course material, avatars create the opportunity for virtual lectures and interaction.

4. Giving remote learners a campus-like feel

For several years now, Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society and Harvard Law School's CyberOne program provide open access, online courses and learning materials for the public. Unlike conventional open courseware, however, these platforms use avatars and virtual reality to help learners feel like they are actually sitting in a classroom at Harvard. By imitating the layout of campus and classrooms, students feel more engaged and enthusiastic, even if they're learning independently at home. This concept of immersive environments applies not only to universities but also to all sorts of online learning. It enables students to be a part of a specific environment instead of feeling like they are learning in isolation.

5. Avatars and virtual environments enabling effective learning for people living with disability

Increasingly, online education providers are developing learning material with the accessibility aspect in mind. These are not specifically designed courses for people with disabilities but rather regular courses equipped with specific functionalities to help the physically impaired to learn effectively and participate in different aspects of reality through the virtual world. There is also a large amount of online learning materials designed for people with specific mental or physical disabilities. Both care providers and learners perceive it to have a higher degree of effectiveness.

There are many more interesting ways in how avatars can be applied to newly developing online education practices. Let's not forget that avatars are firstly representing their characters and as such they can have quite a diverse look and feel. Their production ranges from flat photographic (sometimes blurry - not a good thing) or illustrated images, to highly skilled 2-D and 3-D characters either static or fully animated and equipped with the whole range of expressions. It is fair to say that high-end visually treated avatars have a higher chance of engaging users into the full experience of interactive education, which is also likely to result in higher retention of the learning material. However, in achieving best possible learning outcome it must be remembered it doesn't depend so much on the sophistication levels of the avatar but on how the course is structured and delivered. Therefore in many cases simple and expressive 2-D avatars can be just as engaging depending on the content. Of course, the bigger the budget the more technically advanced the avatar can be, however it is not just the budget that determines the use of the most appropriate character-avatar. It is also the nature of the learning material and the branding. The most successful avatars are the ones that help people connect with the character (or its brand) on a personal level.

According to the Stanford study, a significant body of research shows that the presentation of social intelligence* is just as critical in online interactions as it is in interpersonal interactions. They make the point that people do not discount interactions as unreal simply because they are on screen. Further, it asserts that interactive media automatically engages brain systems that are meant to evaluate social experiences. Therefore online characters-avatars that speak and interact with learners can create a more meaningful experience, increasing trust, satisfaction, memory and learning, and a willingness to return for more learning.

The study goes on to say that online characters can create a positive feeling towards the organization that sponsors the interaction, make people feel special, rather than one of a multitude of learners. The study then fortifies these assertions with a list of 10 benefits to using online avatars:

1. Avatars make explicit the social responses that are inevitable in online interactions, giving us more control over outcomes.

2. Interactive avatars are perceived as real social actors; we know they are not real, but we treat them as if they are.

3. Interactivity increases the perceived realism and effectiveness of avatars, as it simulates human-to-human conversation.

4. Avatars increase trust in information sources, and research shows that when characters guide interactions, people trust the information more than in identical interactions without characters.

5. Avatars have personalities that represent brands, create predictability and help to build relationships.

6. Avatars often communicate social roles, thus making their function as a teacher, coach, teammate, salesperson, customer service representative, more real and improving the message and experience.

7. Avatars can effectively express and regulate emotions, responding appropriately to learner interactions and adding impact and meaning to what is being learnt.

8. Avatars can effectively display important social manners, with polite greetings, effective encouragement, and even simple apologies - all making the interaction more human and more effective.

9. Avatars can also make interfaces easier to use because they make it more obvious where to find help and how to navigate throughout the course.

10. Generally speaking, avatars are well liked because they make online interactions more interesting. When presented with only a single character for interaction only 15% of users dislike the character. When presented with a choice of multiple characters, more than 90% of people prefer interaction with the character, to no character at all.

Characterising online learning practices by using avatars is surely taking a lead in today's virtual education. Where avatars are headed next is anyone's guess. It seems obvious though that, with faster connections and more sophisticated computer equipment, they're going to keep getting more lifelike and more realistic. But, then again, maybe taking a step back from reality is exactly what makes them so attractive to us.
And fun.

*Social intelligence is the quality of facial and emotional expressions, along with speaking ability and other personal skills, result in greater or lesser degrees of engagement, trust and satisfaction during a social interaction.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Use and benefits of Avatars in virtual learning

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
How often do we hear this: "I am much better at remembering faces than names" or "I have a photographic memory for faces", or "Oh, yes! I know their face from somewhere"? It's been proven that human beings are wired to recognize and remember faces, it starts in infancy.

# data[].attributes.headline
How to Hashtag on Instagram. The Easy wikiHow Way

# data[].attributes.subject
How to Hashtag on Instagram. The Easy wikiHow Way

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
One way of drawing attention to your Instagram account is by using hashtags in the 'Description' section of each photo you upload. This enables the users to browse images they want to see, and it can get some good exposure for your post,...

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Introducing Hashtags on Instagram - Instagram Blog

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Introducing Hashtags on Instagram - Instagram Blog

# data[].attributes.headline
Quadrophenia: back when Britain's youngsters ran riot | Film | The Guardian

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Quadrophenia: back when Britain's youngsters ran riot | Film | The Guardian

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Director: Franc RoddamEntertainment grade: BHistory grade: A-

Between 1964 and 1966, teenagers rioted in British seaside towns. Violence flared between mods and rockers, two youth movements that were connected in the press with drug-taking, vandalism and delinquency.

Youth culture

Jimmy (Phil Daniels), a fictional mod, hangs out in a London dive. Everyone looks about 12; pass round a few splurge guns and you'd be in Bugsy Malone. But this lot are less the adorable moppet sort of gangster and more the sort that takes pills, nicks stuff and smashes other people's faces in. Among the newspaper clippings and pornography on Jimmy's bedroom wall is an article about the 'Battle of Hastings' - not the 1066 one with the Anglo-Saxons and the Normans, but the 1964 one with the mods and the rockers. The film is based on a rock opera by the Who, which it turns into a stealth musical, complete with lavish product placement for the Who's albums. Still, Jimmy's obsession with the band is credible: their hit My Generation became the ultimate mod anthem on its release in 1965.

Violence

The mods plan a weekend away in Brighton. So do the rockers. It turns into a running street riot. Kids whack each other with deckchairs, rockers get shoved over the edge of the promenade, shops and cafes are torn apart. There's a clumsy jolt of unreality when the mods stream past a cinema showing Grease and Heaven Can Wait, both released in 1978: this is supposed to be 1965. On the other hand, there's a gesture to historical accuracy when we see a photographer gleefully taking pictures. In 1972, sociologist Stanley Cohen wrote a study of the mods and rockers phenomenon called Folk Devils and Moral Panics. Though there was no doubt that some incidents had been violent and destructive, he found that significant facts had been exaggerated by the mass media - and that the hysterical reporting of the riots had actually provoked and escalated them. There was a credible suggestion that photographers were asking young men in mod or rocker gear to pose kicking in a window or smashing up a telephone booth.

Justice

Facing down a court room full of unrepentant youth, the magistrate doesn't hold back. "These long-haired, mentally unstable, petty little hoodlums, these sawdust Caesars who can only find courage like rats, in hunting in packs, came to Brighton with the avowed intent of interfering with the life and property of its inhabitants," he says. His speech is taken word for word from remarks given in court by George Simpson, a Margate magistrate whose florid pronouncements were widely quoted after the Whitsun riots in 1964 - except, of course, that Simpson said "came to Margate" rather than "came to Brighton". Thanks to his sharp tongue, he became a national hero.

Media

Mod Ace-Face (Sting) is fined £75 by the magistrate. "I'll pay now if you don't mind," drawls Ace-Face, revealing enormous wealth and privilege (£75 in 1965 is equivalent to about £2,700 today, going by average earnings; it was ritzy for a teenager to own a chequebook). This is based on a real trial overseen by Simpson at Margate in which a 17-year-old boy did indeed offer to pay his £75 fine with a cheque. Britain's media were united in their outrage at this new breed of posh-kid rioter, and splashed the story across the front pages. What none of them bothered to report was that, three days later, the boy admitted he had never signed a cheque and did not even have a bank account, let alone £75. Quadrophenia gets slightly closer to the truth: after the verdict, Jimmy's heart is broken when he sees his beloved Ace-Face working as a bellhop at the Grand Hotel, revealing that he's not really a posh kid at all. The fact he's stuck in a lowly job would be bad enough but, even worse, they've made him dress up as a majorette. Poor Sting.

Verdict

Back in 1972, Stanley Cohen concluded: "The intellectual poverty and total lack of imagination in our society's response to its adolescent trouble-makers during the past 20 years, is manifest in the way this response compulsively repeats itself and fails each time to come to terms with the 'problem' that confronts it." Quadrophenia is a striking and evocative reminder of a bygone age when Britain was ... well, basically exactly the same as it is now.
Topics

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Quadrophenia: back when Britain's youngsters ran riot

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Director: Franc RoddamEntertainment grade: BHistory grade: A- Between 1964 and 1966, teenagers rioted in British seaside towns. Violence flared between mods and rockers, two youth movements that were connected in the press with drug-taking, vandalism and delinquency. Jimmy (Phil Daniels), a fictional mod, hangs out in a London dive.

# data[].attributes.headline
Quadrophenia: back when Britain's youngsters ran riot | Film | The Guardian

# data[].attributes.subject
Quadrophenia: back when Britain's youngsters ran riot | Film | The Guardian

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Director: Franc RoddamEntertainment grade: BHistory grade: A-

Between 1964 and 1966, teenagers rioted in British seaside towns. Violence flared between mods and rockers, two youth movements that were connected in the press with drug-taking, vandalism and delinquency.

Youth culture

Jimmy (Phil Daniels), a fictional mod, hangs out in a London dive. Everyone looks about 12; pass round a few splurge guns and you'd be in Bugsy Malone. But this lot are less the adorable moppet sort of gangster and more the sort that takes pills, nicks stuff and smashes other people's faces in. Among the newspaper clippings and pornography on Jimmy's bedroom wall is an article about the 'Battle of Hastings' - not the 1066 one with the Anglo-Saxons and the Normans, but the 1964 one with the mods and the rockers. The film is based on a rock opera by the Who, which it turns into a stealth musical, complete with lavish product placement for the Who's albums. Still, Jimmy's obsession with the band is credible: their hit My Generation became the ultimate mod anthem on its release in 1965.

Violence

The mods plan a weekend away in Brighton. So do the rockers. It turns into a running street riot. Kids whack each other with deckchairs, rockers get shoved over the edge of the promenade, shops and cafes are torn apart. There's a clumsy jolt of unreality when the mods stream past a cinema showing Grease and Heaven Can Wait, both released in 1978: this is supposed to be 1965. On the other hand, there's a gesture to historical accuracy when we see a photographer gleefully taking pictures. In 1972, sociologist Stanley Cohen wrote a study of the mods and rockers phenomenon called Folk Devils and Moral Panics. Though there was no doubt that some incidents had been violent and destructive, he found that significant facts had been exaggerated by the mass media - and that the hysterical reporting of the riots had actually provoked and escalated them. There was a credible suggestion that photographers were asking young men in mod or rocker gear to pose kicking in a window or smashing up a telephone booth.

Justice

Facing down a court room full of unrepentant youth, the magistrate doesn't hold back. "These long-haired, mentally unstable, petty little hoodlums, these sawdust Caesars who can only find courage like rats, in hunting in packs, came to Brighton with the avowed intent of interfering with the life and property of its inhabitants," he says. His speech is taken word for word from remarks given in court by George Simpson, a Margate magistrate whose florid pronouncements were widely quoted after the Whitsun riots in 1964 - except, of course, that Simpson said "came to Margate" rather than "came to Brighton". Thanks to his sharp tongue, he became a national hero.

Media

Mod Ace-Face (Sting) is fined £75 by the magistrate. "I'll pay now if you don't mind," drawls Ace-Face, revealing enormous wealth and privilege (£75 in 1965 is equivalent to about £2,700 today, going by average earnings; it was ritzy for a teenager to own a chequebook). This is based on a real trial overseen by Simpson at Margate in which a 17-year-old boy did indeed offer to pay his £75 fine with a cheque. Britain's media were united in their outrage at this new breed of posh-kid rioter, and splashed the story across the front pages. What none of them bothered to report was that, three days later, the boy admitted he had never signed a cheque and did not even have a bank account, let alone £75. Quadrophenia gets slightly closer to the truth: after the verdict, Jimmy's heart is broken when he sees his beloved Ace-Face working as a bellhop at the Grand Hotel, revealing that he's not really a posh kid at all. The fact he's stuck in a lowly job would be bad enough but, even worse, they've made him dress up as a majorette. Poor Sting.

Verdict

Back in 1972, Stanley Cohen concluded: "The intellectual poverty and total lack of imagination in our society's response to its adolescent trouble-makers during the past 20 years, is manifest in the way this response compulsively repeats itself and fails each time to come to terms with the 'problem' that confronts it." Quadrophenia is a striking and evocative reminder of a bygone age when Britain was ... well, basically exactly the same as it is now.
Topics

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Quadrophenia: back when Britain's youngsters ran riot

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Director: Franc RoddamEntertainment grade: BHistory grade: A- Between 1964 and 1966, teenagers rioted in British seaside towns. Violence flared between mods and rockers, two youth movements that were connected in the press with drug-taking, vandalism and delinquency. Jimmy (Phil Daniels), a fictional mod, hangs out in a London dive.

# data[].attributes.headline
Use and benefits of Avatars in virtual learning | Aspin eLearning

# data[].attributes.subject
Use and benefits of Avatars in virtual learning | Aspin eLearning

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
How often do we hear this: "I am much better at remembering faces than names" or "I have a photographic memory for faces", or "Oh, yes! I know their face from somewhere"? It's been proven that human beings are wired to recognize and remember faces, it starts in infancy. Even if you haven't seen somebody in 10, 20, or 30 years, and despite the effects of time, you'll almost always recognise a person when you meet them again.

When it comes to the vastly developing virtual reality environment, an avatar is the graphical representation of the user or the user's alter ego or character; in other words, an avatar is also a "face". The more unique the "face" is, the better chance it has of being recognised and therefore remembered. Avatars usually take on a human-like appearance, which ranges from photographic representation to highly stylised or realistic looking characters in both 2D and 3D environments.

Avatars that represent their users appear in many facets of the cyber space such as virtual boardrooms, messaging and chatting, internet or console gaming, marketing, broadcasting, film, television, education and training.

As elearning material developers/providers we see the effective use of avatars as an integral part of contemporary online education. From being just a digital representation of the user, avatars have developed and are now serving roles as the educators by delivering online learning in "human" like manner, so that learning becomes widely accessible, interesting, engaging, and memorable.

More and more education facilitators from kindergarten to higher education as well as professional work environments, are breathing digital life into teaching by using these customised speaking and non-speaking animations to explain simple or complex subject matter to students through storytelling and interactive activities. Avatars can serve in a number of capacities, depending on how the educator wishes to engage students in a particular lesson or activity.

Here are some amazing ways avatars are being used in education today:

1. Training teachers

Avatars are being used specifically for teacher training. Specially designed avatars realistically imitate different types of students to help teachers practice classroom management and relate to their students. The trainee teachers stand in front of a projection screen on which they see avatars that are being controlled, or acted out, by actual students trained to behave a certain way. Other noises or outbursts like laughing or obnoxious sound effects are added to simulate a fully realistic experience. (OCA or StC as our own examples)

2. Vokis

Vokis are speaking avatars, and teachers in all subjects, but especially language classes, are using them by recording their own voices to match their digital avatar. Using more animated avatars helps students who feel disconnected from class discussions or who are more audio learners rather than visual learners process material and relate to the lesson more personally. Language teachers have been using vokis to help students with pronunciation and conversation, letting them voice-over their own avatars. One of the interesting examples of this type of interaction is at SPEAK2Me.net, where a beautiful avatar named Lucy helps Chinese-speaking people practice their English. She asks you questions, which you answer by typing and, hopefully, also speaking, for the practice. The result is a real conversation with a virtual conversationalist. With practice and persistence, a quicker, better comprehension of the mysterious English language can be achieved.

3. Connecting via online learning

Online courses or teachers who use online tools like blogs and forums to connect with students can use avatars to make the Internet experience more personal and direct. Instead of reading all of the course material, avatars create the opportunity for virtual lectures and interaction.

4. Giving remote learners a campus-like feel

For several years now, Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society and Harvard Law School's CyberOne program provide open access, online courses and learning materials for the public. Unlike conventional open courseware, however, these platforms use avatars and virtual reality to help learners feel like they are actually sitting in a classroom at Harvard. By imitating the layout of campus and classrooms, students feel more engaged and enthusiastic, even if they're learning independently at home. This concept of immersive environments applies not only to universities but also to all sorts of online learning. It enables students to be a part of a specific environment instead of feeling like they are learning in isolation.

5. Avatars and virtual environments enabling effective learning for people living with disability

Increasingly, online education providers are developing learning material with the accessibility aspect in mind. These are not specifically designed courses for people with disabilities but rather regular courses equipped with specific functionalities to help the physically impaired to learn effectively and participate in different aspects of reality through the virtual world. There is also a large amount of online learning materials designed for people with specific mental or physical disabilities. Both care providers and learners perceive it to have a higher degree of effectiveness.

There are many more interesting ways in how avatars can be applied to newly developing online education practices. Let's not forget that avatars are firstly representing their characters and as such they can have quite a diverse look and feel. Their production ranges from flat photographic (sometimes blurry - not a good thing) or illustrated images, to highly skilled 2-D and 3-D characters either static or fully animated and equipped with the whole range of expressions. It is fair to say that high-end visually treated avatars have a higher chance of engaging users into the full experience of interactive education, which is also likely to result in higher retention of the learning material. However, in achieving best possible learning outcome it must be remembered it doesn't depend so much on the sophistication levels of the avatar but on how the course is structured and delivered. Therefore in many cases simple and expressive 2-D avatars can be just as engaging depending on the content. Of course, the bigger the budget the more technically advanced the avatar can be, however it is not just the budget that determines the use of the most appropriate character-avatar. It is also the nature of the learning material and the branding. The most successful avatars are the ones that help people connect with the character (or its brand) on a personal level.

According to the Stanford study, a significant body of research shows that the presentation of social intelligence* is just as critical in online interactions as it is in interpersonal interactions. They make the point that people do not discount interactions as unreal simply because they are on screen. Further, it asserts that interactive media automatically engages brain systems that are meant to evaluate social experiences. Therefore online characters-avatars that speak and interact with learners can create a more meaningful experience, increasing trust, satisfaction, memory and learning, and a willingness to return for more learning.

The study goes on to say that online characters can create a positive feeling towards the organization that sponsors the interaction, make people feel special, rather than one of a multitude of learners. The study then fortifies these assertions with a list of 10 benefits to using online avatars:

1. Avatars make explicit the social responses that are inevitable in online interactions, giving us more control over outcomes.

2. Interactive avatars are perceived as real social actors; we know they are not real, but we treat them as if they are.

3. Interactivity increases the perceived realism and effectiveness of avatars, as it simulates human-to-human conversation.

4. Avatars increase trust in information sources, and research shows that when characters guide interactions, people trust the information more than in identical interactions without characters.

5. Avatars have personalities that represent brands, create predictability and help to build relationships.

6. Avatars often communicate social roles, thus making their function as a teacher, coach, teammate, salesperson, customer service representative, more real and improving the message and experience.

7. Avatars can effectively express and regulate emotions, responding appropriately to learner interactions and adding impact and meaning to what is being learnt.

8. Avatars can effectively display important social manners, with polite greetings, effective encouragement, and even simple apologies - all making the interaction more human and more effective.

9. Avatars can also make interfaces easier to use because they make it more obvious where to find help and how to navigate throughout the course.

10. Generally speaking, avatars are well liked because they make online interactions more interesting. When presented with only a single character for interaction only 15% of users dislike the character. When presented with a choice of multiple characters, more than 90% of people prefer interaction with the character, to no character at all.

Characterising online learning practices by using avatars is surely taking a lead in today's virtual education. Where avatars are headed next is anyone's guess. It seems obvious though that, with faster connections and more sophisticated computer equipment, they're going to keep getting more lifelike and more realistic. But, then again, maybe taking a step back from reality is exactly what makes them so attractive to us.
And fun.

*Social intelligence is the quality of facial and emotional expressions, along with speaking ability and other personal skills, result in greater or lesser degrees of engagement, trust and satisfaction during a social interaction.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Use and benefits of Avatars in virtual learning

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
How often do we hear this: "I am much better at remembering faces than names" or "I have a photographic memory for faces", or "Oh, yes! I know their face from somewhere"? It's been proven that human beings are wired to recognize and remember faces, it starts in infancy.

# data[].attributes.headline
7 Moral Panics: Mods and Rockers / Stan Cohen

# data[].attributes.subject
7 Moral Panics: Mods and Rockers / Stan Cohen

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
7 Moral Panics: Mods and Rockers / Stan Cohen

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Moral Panics Watch the film clip from the 1979 film Quadrophenia which tells the story of disturbances between two subcultural groups of largely working class ...

# data[].attributes.headline
Race Class and Imagined Community Archives - Phil Cohen Works

# data[].attributes.subject
Race Class and Imagined Community Archives - Phil Cohen Works

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
This text explores the history and forms of working class racism in Britain since the beginning of the Industrial revolution up to the present. It examines the way the English working class was positioned as a both a 'backbone of the nation' and a 'race apart' in the dominant discourse and how this shaped the internal development of its culture and politics, especially within the labour movement. It was written for a collection edited by Ruth Frankenberg Dislocating Whiteness published in 2002 and can be viewed here: White Labour

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Race Class and Imagined Community Archives - Phil Cohen Works

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
This text explores the history and forms of working class racism in Britain since the beginning of the Industrial revolution up to the present. It examines the way the English working class was positioned as a both a 'backbone of the nation' and a 'race apart' in the dominant discourse and how this shaped the internal development of its culture and politics, especially within the labour movement.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
What makes being young so exciting? It's a question new exhibition We Could be Heroes at London's Photographers' Gallery aims to provide a cacophony of visual answers to when it opens this Friday. Focussing on the post-war period, an era that saw the first generation of 'teenagers' - a newly dubbed term - injected with a sense of optimism as they lifted a middle finger to the traditions of the past. The group show, featuring photography masters Bruce Davidson, Ed van der Elsken, Bert Hardy, Karen Knorr and Olivier Richon, Jacques Henri Lartigue, Roger Mayne, Chris Steele-Perkins, Anders Petersen, Al Vandenberg, Weegee and Tom Wood, charts this international development of youth culture over the period of the past 100 years. Davidson candidly captures a Brooklyn gang of teen dreamers engrossed by James Dean and Marlon Brando in 1959, while Knorr and Richon's obsession with the London punk scene spills over to provide a set of aesthetically thrilling images and an accurate documentation of the subculture's symbolism. Whereas, elsewhere, both van der Elsken and Petersen immortalise the confusion that accompanies such newfound freedoms. Though the subjects differ in age, location and sartorial taste, one thing is consistent throughout the work of each photographer on show; an unwavering rebellious spirit, a yearning sense of freedom and a charming knack for discovery.
We Could Be Heroes is on show at London's Photographers' Gallery from 6 February - 12 April, 2015. For more, click

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What makes being young so exciting? It's a question new exhibition We Could be Heroes at London's Photographers' Gallery aims to provide a cacophony of visual answers to when it opens this Friday.

# data[].attributes.headline
Youth culture | From the Guardian | The Guardian

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Youth culture | From the Guardian | The Guardian

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The emergence of this thing called "youth culture" is a distinctly 20th-century phenomenon; the collision of increased standards of living, more leisure time, the explosion of post-war consumer culture and wider psychological research into adolescents all contributed to the formation of this new social category defined by age. Previously, the rite of passage between childhood and adult life had not been so clearly demarcated -this is not to say that young adults didn't have their own activities before the invention of Brylcreem and crepe soles (youth gangs were common in Victorian Britain, for example) but it hadn't before been defined or packaged as a culture.

Once "invented", the "youth culture" provoked a variety of often contradictory responses: youth was dangerous, misunderstood, the future, a new consumer group. British post-war youth culture emerged primarily in response to the American popular culture centred on rock 'n' roll. The 1955 film Blackboard Jungle, with its soundtrack featuring Bill Haley And The Comets' Rock Around The Clock, was a defining moment, inspiring people to dance in the aisles (and some to slash seats). The fear was not only of hoodlums but also of the creeping Americanisation of British culture.

But the impact of imported US films and music did not lead to cultural homogenisation; instead, it inspired a series of spectacular - and distinctly British - youth subcultures from the mid-50s to the late-70s: teds (quiffs, Elvis, flick-knives, crepe soles, working-class London origins circa 1953, drug of choice: alcohol); mods (Jamaican-rudeboy/Italian-cool style, US soul, purple hearts, The Small Faces, scooters, working-class London origins circa 1963, drug of choice: amphetamines); skinheads (Jamaican ska, exaggerated white, British, working-class masculinity, contrasting starkly with middle-class hippiedom of the same period, boots, braces, shaved heads and violence, sometimes racist, late 60s origins, drug of choice: amphetamines); punk (Sex Pistols, spit, bondage, swastikas, circa 1976, drug of choice: glue and amphetamines).

Drug use became a feature of youth subcultures from the Mods onwards - not just any old drugs, but ones that characterised and defined the subculture in question. Mods chose speed because it made them feel smart and invincible; it also gave them the energy to keep on the move, awake at all-nighters (and through work the next day). Later, within rave culture, drug use - this time, ecstasy - was central to the point of being almost obligatory.

Dick Hebdige, acommentator on youth culture, argues that the multicultural nature of post-war Britain was crucial to the formation of many subcultures; each one, he says, should be seen as a response to the presence of black culture in Britain, the ska/rudeboy-inspired two tone movement being a particularly vivid example. The tribes were created through the amalgamation of particular types of cultural goods; music, fashion, hairstyles, politics, drugs, dances - with their boundaries defined through crucial choices: Vespas or Harley-Davidsons, speed or acid, Dr Martens or desert boots. But then, youth culture is full of contradiction: the desire to express individuality by wearing the same clothes as your mates, and rebelling against capitalism at the same time as being a perfect capitalist slave.

Britain also led the way in the study of youth, and its celebration of creativity and resistance, though these studies, naturally, have their favourite subcultures, often overlooking others. (Still, the kiss of death for any subculture is to be "understood" by a sociologist.) By the late 70s and early 80s, youth subculture began to change, and became less gang-oriented. The regular emergence of new subcultures slowed down, and the first major period of revivals began. It became difficult to identify distinct subcultures, rather than just musical styles. In fact, something weird happened: everyone started behaving like a teenager. By the 90s, "proper" grown-ups had started to complain that contemporary youth were dull and conformist, and the music of small children became the preferred choice of most teenagers - Pinky & Perky dressed up as Steps.

Today, there are still plenty of new genres of music, but they don't have such visible subcultures affiliated to them. Even something as recent as 80s dance music and rave culture - after its initial, Smiley-faced, ecstasy-fuelled unity - fragmented into a multitude of sub-genres with no definable set of cultural attributes. Despite society's consistent attempts to regulate youth culture, perhaps the main cause of its demise in recent years is the extension of adolescent behaviour until death by the Edinas and Patsys of this world. Youth culture is now just another lifestyle choice, in which age has become increasingly irrelevant.

Timeline
1929 Borstals open as special prisons for adolescents.
1947 School-leaving age raised to 15.
1953 The Wild One, starring Marlon Brando. ('What're you rebelling against?' Brando replies: 'What've you got?') First reportings of teds in the UK media.
1957 Elvis scores his first UK number 1 with 'All Shook Up'. First UK youth TV broadcast, Six-Five Special, on national TV.
1959 Mark Abrams's The Teenage Consumer outlines the potential of youth as a new consumer group.
1967 Radio 1 launched.
1971 Misuse of Drugs Act.
1977 The Sex Pistols' God Save The Queen charts at number two in Silver Jubilee week.
1981 Inner-city youth/race riots in Brixton and Toxteth.
1989 First recorded UK ecstasy-related death: Clare Leighton in Manchester's Hacienda club.
1994 Criminal Justice Act targets travellers, festivals and raves.
Topics

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The emergence of this thing called "youth culture" is a distinctly 20th-century phenomenon; the collision of increased standards of living, more leisure time, the explosion of post-war consumer culture and wider psychological research into adolescents all contributed to the formation of this new social category defined by age.

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The so-called Social Media is here to stay. It is not just a part of our lives anymore; it is a way of life for most people. Be honest.

You have said "what is on your mind" countless times, re-tweeted every little burp of your favourite "personalities" a million times, instagrammed the story of your life away and it doesn't stop there, does it? I am old school so I can't keep up with the newest forms of social networking.

It is life a full time job now trying to stay abreast with the slightly veiled forms such as LinkedIn, WordPress, Blogspots, Tumblr etc. (What the hell happened to the trail blazers like hi5 and Pingu? What is it their names that let them down?)

Anyway, the first thing people do now when they wake up from the mat is to check Social Media especially Facebook and Twitter. I am not making that up, I read that somewhere but don't ask because I can't remember.

Back in the day, people checked missed calls and text messages. Before that era, people prayed, had their 'Quiet Time', read their Bibles, recited the Quran, performed incantations or libations, said their canticles, and chanted or whatever else, first thing in the morning. Not anymore.

I am not saying Social Media is becoming a religion for many, but we are not too far from that, are we? If football clubs with ever disloyal and money-hungry players can become religions, why can't Facebook, be? The network is said to be the third largest "nation" in the world after only China and India.

YouTube, Google, Thisis50.com and a thousand others are now jumping on the whole friends/subscription hype too. What it means is; the larger your network, the more connected you are. Hence, the more popular you seem to think you are. A video with a million views on YouTube is rated over a video with ten views. The artiste in the video with a million views is likely to be more recognized than the other. Last time I checked LinkUp TV was being penalised by YouTube for being dishonest with their page views. Yes, LinkUp TV found it necessary to alter their view counts to make them larger than they actually are. Imagine.

A Twitter handle with 3 million followers is likely to be more famous than one with 3 followers. What's the point? There's none, dare I say. To me, having 600 solid contacts on your Blackberry does not necessarily mean you get more business done than a person with 70 contacts. Elton John had no mobile phone last time, I heard. Yet, he undeniably gets his stuff done alright. Kreayshawn, a recording artiste, has over a million followers on Twitter but her record sold the least ever in the history of big label-backed performers.

Now, if you checked Facebook every few minutes on your phone so that you accrued two hours of Facebook time in a day, that means that in a 12 days, you would have spent 24 hours (1 day out of 12) on Facebook. Doing what? LIKE-ing a few pictures, chatting some rubbish, poking people you think are ignoring you, commenting on the pictures of friends and enemies alike, pressing play on some videos, playing Farmville and spying what is on other people's minds. 24 hours of doing that? Addictive as it is, it's hard to see the usefulness of all that.

After connecting with a few old friends and family from back in the day, what else do you do?

Do you realize Social Media could be a free way of advertising new businesses or promoting existing ones and therefore take advantage of that?

Also, it could be a way accessing "breaking news"(remember the demise of Osama Bin Laden?) or fake news (multiple deaths of Eddie Murphy, Bill Cosby etc). Information online and especially via social media is probably one of the reasons big time publications such as Newsweek are going online only now.

So back to the issue - what do you really do with your thousand social media personal pages? Do you just come on there to show the world how beautiful and perfect your life is? Or to show the number of Ace of Spade, Alize and Moet you held and probably didn't even drink at the nightclub? Or to show the world the sexy, exotic girls that you hang with? Or to show that tiny weeny flimsy black dress you bought from Dior in Paris?

If we are going to "waste" time then we may as well "waste" it properly. Now allow me to go update my Facebook status and all that #shit.......

Disclaimer: "The views/contents expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of Lenny Briscoe II and do not neccessarily reflect those of Modern Ghana. Modern Ghana will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements contained in this article."

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The so-called Social Media is here to stay. It is not just a part of our lives anymore; it is a way of life for most people. Be honest. You have said "what is on your mind" countless times, re-tweeted every little burp of your favourite "personalities" a million times, instagrammed the story of your life away and it doesn't stop there, does it?

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Zoella Full Interview Vogue November 2014 Issue (Vogue.co.uk)

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Zoella Full Interview Vogue November 2014 Issue (Vogue.co.uk)

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There is little I don't know about Zoella as recently we have spent a lot of time together. I've watched her brush her teeth; I know what her bedroom looks like (or so I think) and even sat awkwardly as she cried great gulping, gasping sobs, a tidal wave of tears washing away her carefully applied make-up. I've joined her goofing about with her boyfriend, Alfie (all teeth, quiff and easy charm), and joined in "chummy chats" with her best friend, the perennially bubbly and blonde Louise Pentland.

<p style="text-align: left;" class="CaslonbodycopyBodyCxSpMiddle">I have also observed her early-morning make-up routine, oohed over the cute guinea pigs Pippin and Percy, and rifled through her wardrobe favourites - high Peter Pan collars are a staple. Today she is riffing on everything from troublesome skin to new hairstyles, her manner casual, chatty, soothing and intimate, big pretty blue eyes drawn wide. "Day before yesterday, I decided to put some blonde streaks through my fringe," she says. "But then when I got home I decided I didn't like it. Yesterday I got it changed back - just thought that I'd tell you that!"

<p style="text-align: left;" class="CaslonbodycopyBodyCxSpMiddle"> Zoella chatters on. But our friendship is far from exclusive. Rather, I share her and these bedside confessionals with 5.9 million subscribers on Youtube. They can't get enough of this diminutive star. She posts about two films a week on her two Youtube channels, each on average 12 minutes long, and ranging in theme from My Everyday Makeup Routine (5 million views) to Little Ways To Change Your Life (2.4 million views).

<p style="text-align: left;" class="CaslonbodycopyBodyCxSpMiddle"> If you are reading this, burrowed solely in your Instagram account, and have never heard of a vlogger, it's probably because you are over 30. For the uninitiated, vloggers are video bloggers - instead of a written blog, they chat straight to a hand-held camera or smartphone, holding a make-up tutorial, sharing a fashion haul, or just filling you in on their day. After a rough edit, all done on a home computer, the film is uploaded on to their personal Youtube channel. Postings are frequent and intimate, the content is highly subjective and revels in the minutiae of the everyday, the DIY character of their output is purposeful. And Zoella, whose real name is Zoe Sugg and who hails from a small village in Wiltshire is, at 24, the current cyberspace queen.

<p style="text-align: left;" class="CaslonbodycopyBodyCxSpMiddle"> After ingesting so much of the chirpy charisma she radiates on camera, in person she appears low-key, even a little withdrawn, as she arrives for the Vogue shoot in the Brighton studio, one of the rare days we could pinpoint in her hectic schedule. The long brunette dip-dyed hair, often drawn into a high scrunched bun on screen, is looped in a simple ponytail, eyes pale without their usual high-definition black eyeliner. While a simple tailored black jacket, cream circle skirt and velvet flats are doing little to diffuse the magnificent cleavage that adds an outlandish sexiness to her tiny frame (on camera it is disguised). She is not so much the girl next door as a fresh-faced beauty.

<p style="text-align: left;" class="CaslonbodycopyBodyCxSpMiddle"> But it is the extraordinary ordinariness that Zoe projects as Zoella, the sensible older sister (albeit a very pretty, media-savvy older sister), that has been core to her success, able to command large fees for projects with beauty and fashion brands (be it Simple, Boohoo or Topshop). Now there is a contract with Radio 1, a deal for a novel ( Girl Online - its protagonist is a teen blogger), and a range of Zoella products. Not for her twerking, belfies (bottom selfies, a Kardashian favourite) or iced-water bucket sloshing, and no red-carpet lifestyle. Rather she is 100 per cent wholesome, attainable and approachable. Twenty thousand messages in the comment box under each of her posts are not unusual - no detail is too banal for discussion.

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It's not something I could have prepared myself for. Every day I am still coming to terms with this, it's not gone to my head...

<p style="text-align: left;" class="CaslonbodycopyBodyCxSpMiddle"> She maintains a natural humility, while engaging in an essentially narcissistic, egotistic endeavour - the constant sharing of her opinions, tastes and obsessions, be that homeware, fashion, lipsticks, or recovering from her first break-up - or (skin) breakout. Her fans are on average aged between 11 and 17, and the sacks of fanmail attest to their ardent involvement in the everyday intricacies of her life. The letters arrive from Hong Kong, Singapore and New York, often stuffed with sweets or scribbled with doodles. An increasing number of followers now hang around outside her seafront apartment in Hove, posting letters through her door, shouting up to her window even as she files her latest blog/tweet/Instagram/Facebook update.

<p style="text-align: left;" class="CaslonbodycopyBodyCxSpMiddle"> Their constant attention - even when it is a little unsettling - is feeding the roots of a global brand. Her products, launched this September, include a pencil case, bath foam and scent, all decorated in the smudgy pink and tans of her logo. Put it this way: if every one of her subscribers buys one product, this equates into shockingly prodigious sales.

<p style="text-align: left;" class="CaslonbodycopyBodyCxSpMiddle"> "I started filming as a hobby," Zoe says, with a self-deprecating shrug. "It's not something I could have prepared myself for. Every day I am still coming to terms with this, it's not gone to my head..." Despite the façade of friendship implied, "there are things I keep to myself - we do edit ourselves," she insists. She kept a bad break-up in 2012 private and promises she and Alfie will not get engaged online - they have discussed this already. Alfie Deyes is a star in his own right with his Pointless Blog channel (2.7 million subscribers). They frequently produce joint videos, the better to share their subscribers - such as "Guess the Body Part" (2.5 million views), or their "How Well Do We Know Each Other?" sketch - Alfie flashing just the right amount of tanned, toned flesh and Zoe revealing a more risqué, flirty side. Her younger brother, Joe Sugg, is another vlogger, going under the moniker Thatcher Joe, along with his flatmate, Caspar Lee. Then there is Louise and her Sprinkle of Glitter site, also Jim Chapman and his fiancée, the make-up specialist Tanya Burr. Many are based in Brighton. Theirs is a large gang, all friends, sharing their innocent japes and combined tens of millions of subscribers. They require no team or financial input, just a camera, a computer and their personalities.

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<p style="text-align: left;" class="CaslonbodycopyBodyCxSpMiddle"> By the end of sixth form at the Corsham School, a visual-arts college in Wiltshire, Zoe was watching Youtube a lot - "beauty videos, beauty tutorials, make-up collections". She preferred the content to what was available on television, "because you got the sense of the person. I trusted their opinion. It was, 'This is me in my bedroom; I'm not a TV set.' It had this rawness to it. There's also more to watch on Youtube, it's selective; you can type in anything and get multiple videos." After graduating with three As (art, photography and textiles), she opted for an interior-design apprenticeship over university and started experimenting with her own blog. One of her first posts focused on a visit to her local coffee shop and the brownies she found there. "I'd write about little bits of make-up I'd picked up, and I used to go to car-boot sales and share cheap things I'd found." Note these are not items about designer fashion or celebrity gossip, which makes their popularity puzzling. "It's just really real..." she guesses, when quizzed on the attraction. "It's why reality TV does so well, because it's addictive to watch. People say they like my fashion-haul videos because it's like you've been shopping with your friends and you look back over what you have bought. But this isn't just one friend - it's millions. Because of social media I can make a video, they can comment to each other, it's more of a direct relationship."

By 2009 she had 1,000 followers on her written blog. And, buoyed by other vloggers she was following, she attempted her first films - "I had a mirror in front of me and a digital camera on a stack of books." Her blog fans switched to Youtube, so she was guaranteed an early audience. The first notable success, she recalls, was 60 Things In My Bedroom, holding up items from her room, as simple as that, no words, just music. She was 19 and the West Country accent was still strong.

<p style="text-align: left;" class="CaslonbodycopyBodyCxSpMiddle"> "I felt it was a normal pace until I reached 200,000 subscribers and then it just shot up." By 2012 the trajectory was such she could afford to give up her day job at New Look, after earnings from Youtube advertising far outstripped her wages (you are paid a nominal amount per view). "Then it was 1 million subscribers in April 2013 - after that it snowballed. By April of this year it was 5 million."

<p style="text-align: left;" class="CaslonbodycopyBodyCxSpMiddle"> Unlike the fashion bloggers that decorate the international shows, her style reflects that of girls her age - she shops on the high street, in Topshop, Miss Selfridge, River Island and Primark, sharing her hauls with her fans, holding each item up for admiration (the stock is not lent or given by the brand, but bought over a period of months). Leggings, high-waist jeans, crop tops and pretty collared shirts in vibrant colours are her mainstays. A tiny size six, she and Louise often discourse on the opposite spectrums of their body shapes - petite opposed to plus-sized, in tune with teenage body issues.

<p style="text-align: left;" class="CaslonbodycopyBodyCxSpMiddle"> Today she slips excitedly into the glamorous gowns we have bought for her to play with, swiftly apologising for "flashing my buttocks at you". A tangerine drop-waist chiffon dress from Preen adds depth to her blue eyes; an Osman gown brings red-carpet regality. She falls in love with a DvF sequined shirtdress, claiming it will be perfect for her forthcoming Greek holiday with Alfie.

<p style="text-align: left;" class="CaslonbodycopyBodyCxSpMiddle"> Posing for the camera, she accidentally switches to Zoella, the corners of her mouth twitching upwards. "It's so hard not to smile," she squeaks. Any minute I expect her to shout, "Hellooo, everybody!", her greeting at the beginning of each video.

<p style="text-align: left;" class="CaslonbodycopyBodyCxSpMiddle"> Despite the media interest, there is nothing showy about Zoe; when she looks in the mirror it is with a critical eye, that of one assessing a product. She admits to being a perfectionist and an over-achiever. "I'm a total people pleaser," she says later in her white-walled apartment, noisy seagulls wheeling outside. I spot homeware "hauls" from a recent video dotted about the kitchen, all in sugary tones of pink, yellow and baby blue. "Which is a bit of a downfall for the most part, because you can't please 5.9 million people all the time," she sighs. "It can be a lot of pressure as well as exhilarating. I could never let the teacher down, I always worked hard, too scared to get in trouble." Not a rebel then? "No," she laughs, a hoot and infectious giggle combined.

<p style="text-align: left;" class="CaslonbodycopyBodyCxSpMiddle"> There is a thread of anxiety running beneath her jollity. At 14 she suffered her first panic attack and they have continued since. "I was always a very anxious child," she admits. She had to leave a One Direction concert last year after the crowds induced a severe attack (she later met the band and, on discovering Harry Styles followed her on Instagram, "freaked out!"). "Stress, not enough sleep, and travelling brings them on. I've done two live TV appearances and that was really scary. Here I've got control," she says motioning to her cosy flat. Adversely, the little world she built in her bedroom - actually her guest room, decorated with fairy lights and scented Diptyque candles - is now the very cause of her anxiety. Success comes at a cost. "But I push myself to do more because it's just fear and if you let that win it's not helping anything." And she has used her experience to talk to the teenagers who regularly tune in. This is not someone held in the grips of their illness, but rather pushing forward faster because of it. She even faced thousands of fans this summer for a vloggers tour through America, Louise and Alfie both reassuring constants at her side.

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It's not worth ruining the trust of my viewers because they're the people who got me here today.

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Integrity, she insists, is vital - fashion bloggers have been

dogged with controversy, accused of providing favourable reviews in

return for free product. "I probably turn down 90 per cent of what

is offered. Most of the time I have either bought the products or

been sent a press release, but there is no money involved." Where

there are brand collaborations they are clearly tagged and deals

are brokered by her management agency, Gleam Futures (such is the

success of their British clients they have just opened an office in

LA to better represent them). Fees can range from £5,000 to

£20,000, the attraction being the relatability she holds with her

subscribers. "For me, it's not about the money," she says. "It's

not worth ruining the trust of my viewers because they're the

people who got me here today."

At the time of going to press her subscribers had jumped another 100,000 during August. She can compete in numbers with the biggest vlogging stars in America. Where does she see her future? "I don't know. With social media you have to roll with it; everyone is just getting to grips with what's happening. But hopefully somewhere bigger and more exciting." There is no doubt of that.

This article was first published in the November 2014 issue of Vogue magazine

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There is little I don't know about Zoella as recently we have spent a lot of time together. I've watched her brush her teeth; I know what her bedroom looks like (or so I think) and even sat awkwardly as she cried great gulping, gasping sobs, a tidal wave of tears washing away her carefully applied make-up.

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THE BIG HAUL: This Teenage YouTube Shopping Star Makes Half-A-Million A Year And Has More Fans Than Vogue - Business Insider

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THE BIG HAUL: This Teenage YouTube Shopping Star Makes Half-A-Million A Year And Has More Fans Than Vogue - Business Insider

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Business Insider/Mike Nudelman
Any discussion of Bethany Mota, 18, social media goddess and ascendant fashion icon, needs to begin with her metrics. Mota's most popular YouTube channel has more than 4.8 million subscribers - more than Lady Gaga's. As of this writing, upward of 2.2 million souls follow her on Instagram- more than Vogue, Elle, Marie Claire, Glamour, and Cosmopolitan combined. Her Twitter following is a mere 1.15 million, not great but nothing to sneeze at.

Mota, who graduated from high school last year and still lives with her parents in a quiet northern California city they'd prefer remain confidential, is a "haul video" superstar. In this YouTube genre, women - almost always women - go shopping and then discuss their latest "hauls" for the camera.

It's really as simple as that. No stylists, no editors, no models stomping down the runway: Just a kid in her room with a pile of shopping bags. In one recent video that has racked up more than 600,000 views, Mota shows off a series of blouses, hair accessories, and beauty products, as well as a sunflower dress. "I love sunflowers," she notes. "They're one of my favorite flowers."

Subjected to this Warholian monologue over lunch, most of us would probably ask for the check. But we're not in the demo. Haul stars like Mota have tapped into a market, and increasingly, established fashion brands are taking notice.

Before Christmas, Aéropostale (ARO), a teen apparel fixture with its stock near a five-year low, introduced a Bethany Mota-branded clothing and jewelry line. There are Bethany Mota sweaters, Bethany Mota skirts, and even a Bethany Mota sequined bustier.

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While YouTube has been a launchpad for celebrities in the past (for instance, Justin Bieber), the Mota deal is perhaps the highest profile alliance to date between a public company and a celebrity whose exposure is almost completely limited to social media. Mota has had a few brushes with established media entities: She has been featured in "Teen Vogue" and contributed to chat and makeover shows on the tween-centric YouTube network AwesomenessTV. But she remains very much a phenomenon of social media: a celebrity whom Us Magazine will never have to assert is "just like us" because, for all intents and purposes, she is us. Uncoached and self-taught, she's the strongest indication yet that what teenagers really want to watch is themselves.
See our picks for Bethany's best videos of all time "
If successful, the Aéro deal could pave the way for other social media stars to cash in on their notoriety without the institutional filter still imposed by the mainstream media. The idea behind Mota's partnership deal, says Mota's agent Max Stubblefield of the United Talent Agency, "was, by design, to prove the model." If it works with consumers, get ready for a defiantly prosaic new microfame golden age that makes reality shows like "Jersey Shore" and "The Hills," with their trumped-up feuds and pseudo-cliff-hangers, seem as stylized as classical ballet.

Greeting Her Public

I arrange to meet Mota at the Westfield - a mall in San Francisco - on the Friday after Christmas. It never occurred to me we'd have company. But Mota had tweeted to her million-odd followers that she'd be making an appearance, and I arrive to find her surrounded by several dozen girls.

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"She's super famous and super pretty," Meleina McCann, 15, of Oakland, Calif. says. "She's super sweet and so relatable. Her videos are so personal. It feels like she's speaking to me."

"She's always laughing and smiling," adds McCann's friend Ella Philips.

Nearby, a teenager with braces and an Aéropostale "Motavator" T-shirt, mutters "Oh my god!" and fans herself as if she's about to faint, urging a friend into the scrum while she fights off an apparent anxiety attack.

Turns out the girl has nothing to worry about. Mota, wearing a dark pink skater skirt, wedges that playfully riff on work boots, and a backless sweater from her collection, receives everyone with hugs, smiling for their selfies (or more accurately, usies) and signing autographs.

Following these brief encounters, some of Mota's throng are too dazed even to check their phones. They wear face-cracking grins and babble as if they've just seen the risen Christ. After meeting her idol, the nervous young woman prances in place and graciously thanks Mota's father for having given the world his daughter.

Once Upon a Time

As Mota tells it, she discovered YouTube's beauty community after a friend started bullying her online.

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"I didn't want to talk to anyone. I didn't want to leave my house," Mota tells Business Insider. YouTube "was kind of an outlet for me to be myself and not really worry about what anyone thought."

The production values in Mota's first video, a Mac and Sephora makeup haul from June 2009, which she made by balancing a camera on a stack of stuff because she didn't have a tripod, don't meet her current standards. But even at 13 the girl knew her makeup.

The angst-ridden teen found a new community online. As her viewership numbers grew, reading the comments on her videos and tweeting with her fans became a dependable pick-me-up.

Since then, Mota has starred in hundreds of videos, which she also edits. Her shopping hauls remain her primary focus, but she has created videos on DIY crafts, hair and makeup tutorials, and interior decoration. In 2010, she launched a second YouTube channel, Bethanyslife, which is supposed to be more personal. It has attracted a mere 1.6 million-plus subscribers. Mota declined to comment on her earnings, but estimates by several sources familiar with YouTube advertising suggest that she's easily pulling down $40,000 a month from her videos alone.

Some teens in her position would be embarrassing themselves on TMZ, but Mota still describes herself as a homebody. "Whenever I have free time I love to just lay in my bed and watch YouTube videos, watch movies," she says. "Just basically do nothing."

Still, as her renown has spread, travel videos have become a recurring theme. She has made appearances in Asia and hopes her next overseas trip will be to Paris, where she'd "probably take a lot of Instagram pictures," she says. The cuisine could be a hurdle however. "I'm not normally very adventurous with food," she admits, "but I would try my best."

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At home, "I always eat mac and cheese," she adds. "That's what I'm known for, just very simple food: sandwiches, french fries, very unhealthy, but yeah that's what I eat."

She's done videos on nutrition but isn't about to abandon her favorites. "I'm not like, 'No I can't eat the french fries because they're full of grease,'" she says. "I do like sending out that message that girls don't have to eat a certain way to feel confident."

On camera, Mota is relentlessly upbeat and bouncy. She clowns around and talks in silly voices. More than anything else, she is a virtuoso of positivity. Her videos are often litanies of praise for stuff her audience might want to buy. During her recent video detailing her Christmas presents, she raves about a catalog of items, including Lady Gaga's Fame perfume ("The packaging's gorgeous and the scent is absolutely in-credible"), a Michael Kors watch ("I don't even want to touch it because it's just so gorgeous"), green-tea-flavored mints ("I'm obsessed with green tea and so I'm very pumped to try these") and a dress "that is literally me. It is perfection. ... When I saw this I kind of squealed."

Mota's videos evoke a 13-year-old girl's G-rated fantasy of life at 18. On camera, she barely touches on school, work, friends or any of the other things that probably still preoccupy recent high school grads. And sex? No way. Instead, last year's Valentine's Day video showcased some heavy petting with Target. Starbucks got a peck on the cheek.

Love For The Haters

Back at the galleria, far too many tweens have swarmed the Aéro store to permit a sit-down interview, so we trek to the other side of the mall with the store manager and Mota's father, Tony. He enthuses about many aspects of his daughter's improbable rise, from what a great role model she is, to the shrimp he ate in Singapore when Bethany had an appearance there. Tony, who is dressed in a gray sweater and faded jeans, says he works in dairy service and now helps to manage Bethany's career. Asked whether his daughter's fame has turned into a paying gig for him, he politely declines to comment.

Eventually we find a coffee shop under the mall's large dome, where Tony buys a slushy orange drink for Bethany and a coffee for me. I ask Mota to describe her personal style. "Definitely bohemian, so it has that laid-back kind of free-spirited vibe," she says. "It's also girly and very comfortable. Once in a while I can be a little edgy."

Emphasis on "a little." While other stars of the street-style blogosphere tend to favor more unique or au courant looks, Mota shops mainly at mall stores like Forever 21, Urban Outfitters, H&M and Aéropostale, outlets her fans already know and find relatively affordable.

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While her unscripted videos project energy and spontaneity, in conversation she is calm and measured. Home-schooled throughout high school and during much of her childhood, she has little to say about her friends or how they perceive her Internet celebrity. She doesn't know if the bully who catalyzed her career is aware of her success, but she wishes her well.

Of course, there are plenty of bullies on the Internet, and Mota has had to contend with her share of free-floating anonymous bile. Initially, she found that the trolls validated her online presence. "The first hate comment I got on a video, I was really excited about it," she says. "I was like 'Yes, I got my first hate comment!'"

The online rancor soon grew tiresome, but it taught her some things about people. "There are different reasons that people leave hate online and most of the time it's not personal," she says. "Most of the time they're having a bad day and they could be like 'I'm going to make this girl's day a little bit worse.'"

A couple of years ago she discovered a "constant hater, who was always saying anything negative about my video or my appearance that she could pick out."

Mota messaged her. "I don't know why you don't like me," she wrote. "I don't know what I did to you, and I just wanted you to know that I don't have anything negative towards you and wish you nothing but the best."

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The message resonated. "She was like, 'I'm so sorry! I don't know what I was thinking.'" The hater became an ally, defending Mota in the comments.

"Some of them just want attention," Mota says. "You have to treat them nicely or don't respond at all."

Bethany, Inc.

Mota's immense fan base requires constant cultivation. "I don't want to leave my viewers hanging with no new content to watch," she says. "Making new videos for them, always tweeting, always posting Instagram pictures, interacting with them and really getting to know them is a big priority to me. I think that's like my responsibility. Without them I wouldn't be here so I want to give them what they want to see."

She details a social strategy rigorous enough for a business school case study. In addition to being on Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube "all the time," she delights fans by calling them on camera, and she stages lavish giveaways.

In a video this holiday season she offered up three prize packages, including a MacBook Pro with a Marc Jacobs case, an Alexander Wang purse that retails for about $900, and hundreds of dollars in gift certificates. Entering the contests required giving Mota some social media juju. One, for example, required subscribing to her YouTube channels, giving the video a thumbs-up and leaving the name of a favorite Christmas song in the comments, "Because I'm obsessed with Christmas music and I really want to know what your favorite song is."

Mota insists that she pays for these gifts with her own money. "There's just something to me about actually going out and buying a prize," she says. Surely one of the great delights of starring in shopping videos is all the free swag that arrives, unbidden, on one's doorstep. But Mota is ambivalent about featuring sample products in her videos. "I think it's important to have an open mind about it, but I'm also very picky," she says. "What I show in my videos is what I like, bottom line."

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She says that it's a rare event when she features a product that she received for free, and in those cases she adds a text disclaimer to the video. (This is in keeping with Federal Trade Commission guidelines for disclosure, though the agency says it does not monitor bloggers for violations.)

When the adults on team Bethany - her lawyer, father, agent, and friends at Aéropostale - talk up her "authenticity" - which they do constantly - they mean, at least in part, her energetic evangelism on behalf of the brands she loves. "Fans would sniff out if she were hawcking product," says her agent, Max Stubblefield. Mota's lawyer Jon Moonves agrees: "Those girls have a pretty good B.S. meter."

Whether or not this is a pose, it's certainly smart positioning. Mota is such a natural marketer, goes the implication, that she doesn't need to be paid to stump for corporate America. Her enthusiasm is utterly genuine, and therefore more valuable.

While Mota has done a few small partnerships in the past, including with Forever 21 and JC Penney, she now plans to focus on deals that she thinks have long-term potential. "I don't want to do something unless it feels organic ... true to me, who I am and what my channel represents," she says.

A Mega-Brand Takes Notice

Aéropostale reached out to Mota last year, after her videos caught the attention of its social media and client services teams. When Christine Miller, an Aéropostale executive, first spoke to Stubblefield about a collaboration, he told her that Mota wanted her own fashion line but that he knew that getting such a deal would require a gradual courtship.

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First Aéro built a Mota-curated "Bethany's Faves" section of its website. And in late August Bethany appeared at the Aéro store in Times Square, drawing 1,500 fans. Mota then paid a visit to Toronto. (This astonishing footage shows her fans thronging the Eaton Centre). By her third appearance, outside Chicago, the principals were drawing up plans for a licensing deal.

Mota's first line, which all parties say Bethany worked with the company's design team to create, arrived in stores in early December in time for Christmas. She'll be releasing more collections for this year, according to Aéropostale.
Business Insider/Alex Halperin

"I have the freedom to pick the colors, the patterns and how I want to do it," Mota says. "They're very open to my ideas. It's not like, 'This is what you're going to do.' It's more of me telling them what I want."

Despite her youth, Stubblefield insists his client has a real knack for fashion design. "Bethany has shopped more and dissected and deconstructed clothes and shoes and handbags probably more than anyone else her age," he says. "She's got a little savant in her."

Mota and Aéropostale declined to comment on the terms of their deal. While licensing arrangements vary in structure, Aviva Rosenthal, a partner at Los Angeles-based Act III Licensing said one common approach would include an advance and a guaranteed payout, with the licensee collecting 10% on the goods' wholesale value or about 6% of retail.

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Licensing, Rosenthal adds, depends on "huge knowability," which is why few Internet sensations have scored such deals. One other exception: The Internet meme Grumpy Cat, who reportedly has movie and book deals and a beverage line in the works.

"This is starting to happen," Rosenthal says.

The partnership does not restrict Mota's social media activity or prevent her from endorsing other brands in her videos. "To assume that our consumer - and Bethany is a customer of ours - only shops in one place is old-school thinking," Aéropostale CEO Thomas Johnson tells Business Insider. "We are completely comfortable with her doing what she does. It's who she is. It feeds into her authenticity. If she was only doing a commercial for Aéropostale or Bethany Mota, her customer base would understand that quickly."

Mota, who has not yet applied to college, plans to focus on her work for the time being. She admires the career arc of Lauren Conrad, former star of the MTV reality show "The Hills," who has worked in fashion and created several clothing lines, including one for the retailer Kohl's (KSS). Conrad, 27, who happens to be another client of Stubblefield's, has also published several bestselling young-adult novels about being a young and famous reality TV star in Los Angeles, and she now has an online lifestyle portal.

As for Mota's next step, it remains to be seen. "She's 18," Stubblefield says. "I think she's still discovering what her dreams are."

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***

After Bethany drains her slushy, I suggest we head back to Aéropostale to take a closer look at her collection, but when we arrive, dozens of fans are still there.

Crowd control becomes a concern as they surrounded her. "Bring out the stanchions," the store manager says, and the mob of girls gradually forms a line extending out of the store and into the mall atrium. Curious passers-by begin to gather, wondering what all the fuss is about.

Amid the chaos, Mota is a picture of serenity. She stands beneath a banner printed with four pictures of herself and greets her public.
Alex Halperin is a freelance reporter living in Brooklyn. You can follow him on Twitter @alexhalperin.
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Read more of Business Insider's long-form features "

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THE BIG HAUL: Teenage YouTube Superstar Bethany Mota Has More Fans Than Vogue And A Fashion Line Of Her Own

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Any discussion of Bethany Mota, 18, social media goddess and ascendant fashion icon, needs to begin with her metrics. Mota's most popular YouTube channel has more than 4.8 million subscribers - more than Lady Gaga's. As of this writing, upward of 2.2 million souls follow her on Instagram- more than Vogue, Elle, Marie Claire, Glamour, and Cosmopolitan combined.

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Bethany Mota: the teenage YouTube star of bubbleheaded consumerism | News | The Guardian

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Bethany Mota: the teenage YouTube star of bubbleheaded consumerism | News | The Guardian

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Bethany Mota: the teenage YouTube star of bubbleheaded consumerism

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We once worshipped heroes, sports stars and literary geniuses, now fame and fortune have smiled on a teenager who makes videos in which she discusses her latest purchases

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Voxburner | 10 online subcultures you won't believe exist

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Voxburner | 10 online subcultures you won't believe exist

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list of subcultures that have developed and exist in a variety of online platforms. Facebook, game websites, chatrooms, Youtube etc.

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▶ How To Make Your Video Blog Not Suck - YouTube

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▶ How To Make Your Video Blog Not Suck - YouTube

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this 'tutorial' video highlights that video blogging, or 'vlogging' is almost like putting on a performance for your audience.

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Ten tips on making a kickass video blog, by SF Weekly social media advice columnist Anna Pulley. Edited by Ellie Kaufman. Read the Dear @nna column here: http://blogs.sfweekly.com/exhibitionist/2011/05/how_to_make_your_vlog_not_suck.php

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Instagram And Snapchat Becoming More Popular Among Kids, Facebook Considered Less 'Cool'

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Instagram And Snapchat Becoming More Popular Among Kids, Facebook Considered Less 'Cool'

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The rise and fall of facebook - how alternative social media platforms are becoming more used by members of different age groups. How fashion and trends run in sync with this fluctuation in use of different media sites.

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Instagram users are young and Facebook users are old - CNET

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Instagram users are young and Facebook users are old - CNET

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'users under 35' - does this mean that users over the age of 35 are old? Use of social media adding pace to day to day activities - thus placing users over 35 in the 'old' category?

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Instead of exuberant rejoicing over the announcement of Facebook's mega-acquisition of Instagram yesterday, there's been a lot of woe-is-me among the photo app's users. One of the reasons may be because the two social networks cater to different groups of people.

Instagram's users, on the whole, are quite a bit younger than Facebook's, according to a study done by consumer behavior research group Experian Hitwise.

"The audience for Instagram is relatively young, with over half of the visitors to the Instagram website are under the age of 35," research director at Hitwise Heather Dougherty writes in the study. "This is an interesting contrast to the visitors of Facebook's website, which reflects a more mainstream audience with a higher share of older users."

The study shows that over the last four weeks, the majority of Instagram users were between the ages of 18 and 34, whereas Facebook's two largest user age groups were between 25 and 34 and 55 and over.

When Facebook bought Instagram for $1 billion yesterday, the wildly popular 2-year-old startup had roughly 33 million users. User activity on the app takes place within the confines of a smartphone, while Instagram's Web site is secondary. Nevertheless, according to Hitwise, Instagram had more than 10 million U.S. visits in March, which shows a 1000 percent increase in site visits since December.

Experian Hitwise

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Instagram users are young and Facebook users are old

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Instead of exuberant rejoicing over the announcement of Facebook's mega-acquisition of Instagram yesterday, there's been a lot of woe-is-me among the photo app's users. One of the reasons may be because the two social networks cater to different groups of people.

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Table of data highlighting popularity of instagram amongst todays youth.

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It's well established at this point that Instagram's users skew young, and recent research suggests that it is now teens' most important social network. New data from a Shareablee and comScore webinar shared with MarketingCharts confirm Instagram's popularity among young adults, indicating that 18-34-year-olds spend more time on Instagram than on Twitter and Tumblr, combined. Interestingly, though, while Instagram's smartphone audience skews heavily towards younger age groups, the age composition of the platform's tablet audience reveals a slightly different pattern.

According to the data, which is from comScore's US Mobile Metrix in March 2014, roughly 6 in 10 adult Instagram users on smartphones fall into the 18-24 (30.6%) and 25-34 (29%) age brackets, with fewer than 1 in 10 users aged 55 and older.

But the tablet audience skews relatively older: a relatively smaller 46% of Instagram's adult tablet audience is aged 18-24 (25.5%) or 25-34 (20.3%), while almost 1 in 5 are in the 55-64 (14.9%) or 65+ (4.1%) brackets. In fact, one-third of Instagram's tablet audience is aged 45 and older.

Of course, Instagram likely has a much larger audience on smartphones than tablets (it's the 9th largest smartphone app by reach among adult iOS and Android users), such that its overall audienceÂ is more heavily tilted towards youth.

And in fact, as of November 2013, comScore data indicates that Instagram has a wider penetration among 18-34-year-olds than Twitter (46% vs. 39%), and is second only to Facebook among social networks with at least 1 billion combined desktop, smartphone and tablet minutes. In the 35-54 age group, Instagram's penetration rate (27%) trails LinkedIn (33%) and Twitter (32%), as well as Facebook (of course). And among the 55+ crowd, it also trails Pinterest.

The platform will draw more users beyond Millennials in the years to come, according to eMarketer estimates, which project Instagram to have more than 50 million US users by 2016.

Growth isn't limited to the user base, either: while comScore notes a 73% year-over-year rise in mobile unique visitors between March 2013 and March 2014, it also reveals a 35% year-over-year growth in time spent with the platform in mobile browsers and applications. Moreover, engagement levels for brands continue to rise, with the total number of actions per brand jumping by 286% over that yearlong period and the number of uniques per post growing by 66%.

Indeed, when comparing Facebook, Instagram and Twitter engagement, the comScore and Shareablee presentation shows that while Instagram commanded 16% share of combined engagement on those platforms in Q1 2013, that share had risen to 28% by Q1 2014, mainly at the expense of Facebook.

No wonder top brands are investing more time on the platform.

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How Popular is Instagram With Youth? - Marketing Charts

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It's well established at this point that Instagram's users skew young, and recent research suggests that it is now teens' most important social network. New data from a Shareablee and comScore webinar shared with MarketingCharts confirm Instagram's popularity among young adults, indicating that 18-34-year-olds spend more time on Instagram than on Twitter and Tumblr, combined....

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▶ What A Teenage Girl Buys [HUGE Haul] - YouTube

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▶ What A Teenage Girl Buys [HUGE Haul] - YouTube

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A typical example of a video bloggers haul.

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Download The Hunt app: http://bit.ly/1cr2Kur My Hunt Profile: just search #Hunt4RclBeauty to find my hunt! "HUGE Haul: TopShop, Forever21, Pacsun + More!" Can this get to 10,000 likes :O?

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The young vloggers and their fans who are changing the face of youth culture | Technology | The Guardian

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The young vloggers and their fans who are changing the face of youth culture | Technology | The Guardian

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The popularity of independent young video bloggers, the "vloggers" who film their thoughts and observations for thousands of followers to enjoy online, is already setting the future shape of marketing and advertising. But it is also becoming an important route into traditional careers in print publishing or television, according to Alfie Deyes, the vlogger with more than three million subscribers who was mobbed by 8,000 fans at his book launch earlier this month.

Speaking to the Observer after the publicity furore surrounding the publication of his first volume, The Pointless Book, which already tops the Amazon bestsellers list, Deyes, 21, said he would consider moving into the world of conventional, networked television and radio if he was in charge of the content.

"Having creative control, as well as carrying out the whole process myself - shooting, editing and post-production - of all my videos is important," he said, "but I would not completely reject TV. If something were to come up where I had enough control and it was suitable for my fanbase, I would consider it."

Television might seem like a step up from YouTube, but Deyes sees it as a completely different public platform, though one where you may be no more than a face or a voice to someone else's script. The vlogger from Brighton made his name on the YouTube channel Pointless Blog, on which he and his friends set each other silly challenges. He began his videos, which included titles such as Girls Are Confusing, when he was 15.

Deyes is also the boyfriend of one of the most influential vloggers in the young female market, Zoe Sugg, known as Zoella, and the couple sometimes vlog together under the name of Zalfie.

With a relaxed, chatty style, young vloggers such as Sugg, who has more than six million YouTube followers, and the beauty expert Tanya Burr, 25, who has around 10 million views per month on her channel, are now seen as the key to reaching younger audiences, not just for commercial advertising but for the orthodox broadcasting and book publishing businesses.

Sugg's book about the life of a young girl who has a blog is published by Penguin this November and on Thursday she will also launch her beauty range at a party venue filled with pink balloons. She set up her blog and YouTube channel in 2009 from her Brighton bedroom and quickly specialised in shopping advice. Now she has a line of beauty products with packaging bearing images of her beloved guinea pigs, Pippin and Percy.

Some high-profile video bloggers are thought to earn up to £4,000 for mentioning a specific product on one of their entries and may be paid up to £20,000 for advertisements on their YouTube sites, according to an estimate from the digital marketing firm eight&four.

While Deyes says he has no plans to move into television for the moment, he does have a one-hour slot on BBC Radio 1, on which he appears alongside other vloggers including TomSka, Tyler Oakley and Caspar.

"Social Talent is definitely the new celebrity," said Dominic Smales, Managing Director of Gleam Futures, a company that manages emerging digital celebrities such as Deyes and Sugg. "Far from being a 'flash in the pan' this is the result of a total shift in the way a whole generation consumes their entertainment and selects their influences."

But Deyes is determined to counter the idea that vloggers have an easy life and just got lucky. The notion they shoot a video, post it online, go to the beach and then watch the click statistics fly high is wrong, he feels.

The pressure is intense because a dedicated vlogger has to keep watching the sites. "Everything changes so fast and there are always opportunities coming up on YouTube, you just have to be there when it happens," he said.

The scale of the reception to his book signing at Waterstones in Piccadilly was overwhelming, Deyes added, but vlogging is not a way to get famous quickly. "It's a powerful outlet in itself," he said. The drawbacks include the prolific internet trolls who attempt to undermine vloggers who are trying to make a living online, but Deyes says that he is surrounded with so much positivity that negative comments do not bother him.

He was also keen to point out that this new breed of lifestyle "mega vloggers" are not all school drop-outs. Deyes studied science at A level he said and the psychology graduate Lily "Superwoman" Singh, who hit six million followers on her YouTube channel on Wednesday, is a case in point. "Education is essential as a way to give you every opportunity to explore what you may love to do in the future. For me it was was YouTube," Deyes said.
Topics

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The young vloggers and their fans who are changing the face of youth culture

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The popularity of independent young video bloggers, the "vloggers" who film their thoughts and observations for thousands of followers to enjoy online, is already setting the future shape of marketing and advertising.

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Half of teen, young adult car crash deaths involve pot or alcohol | Fox News

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Half of teen, young adult car crash deaths involve pot or alcohol | Fox News

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Half of the teen and young adult drivers who die in car crashes are under the influence of either pot, alcohol, or both, suggests a new study done in states where toxicology screening for accident victims is routine.

What's more, the increasing legalization and availability of marijuana does not seem likely to push alcohol use aside, the researchers said. The crash victims in the study who were over age 21 (and of legal drinking age) were more likely than younger victims to have used both marijuana and alcohol prior to their crash.

"Given the rapid changes currently underway in marijuana availability and permissibility in the U.S., understanding the effects of drug control policies on substance use behavior and adverse health outcomes, such as fatal motor vehicle crashes, has never been more important," study researcher Katherine Keyes, of Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health, said in a statement.
Under the Influence
Car crashes are the leading cause of death of 18- to 25-year-olds in the U.S., and driving under the influence is a major cause of accidents. Not every state conducts routine toxicology tests on car crash victims right after the accident, but those that do have come up with alarming results. For example, a 2012 study in the journal Addiction found that 57.3 percent of the drivers in this age group who died were on some kind of mind-altering substance, usually alcohol. [ The History of 8 Hallucinogens]

For Keyes and her colleagues pulled data on 16- to 25-year-olds from the Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS), a federal database of fatal crashes. They focused on California, Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Washington and West Virginia, because each of these states tests at least 85 percent of its fatal car crash victims for drugs and alcohol within an hour of the accident.

The researchers found that half (50.3 percent) of the young drivers who died were drunk or high at the time of their fatal crashes, the researchers found. In total, 36.8 percent tested positive for alcohol alone, while 5.9 percent tested positive for marijuana alone and 7.6 percent had been using both.
Mixing alcohol and marijuana
Next, the researchers wanted to know whether at-risk youth were using pot and alcohol as substitutes for one another; if so, the results might suggest specific policy changes. For example, they wrote in the open-access journal Injury Epidemiology, a large coalition of university presidents recently recommended lowering the legal drinking age to 18 in the hopes that access to alcohol would make other illegal drugs less appealing to 18- to 21-year-olds. That policy would only work, though, if young people tend to drop one drug in favor of another, rather than just double up.

Looking at the 16- to 25-year-old age range enabled the researchers to see how drug use changed in accident fatalities at the 21-year mark the turning point when alcohol becomes legal. They found that at age 21, the likelihood of finding alcohol alone in the crash victims' systems went up 14 percent. At the same time, the likelihood of finding pot alone went down 24 percent.

But there was a catch: In victims over age 21, the chances of finding both alcohol and marijuana in the victims was 22 percent higher than in those under age 21. Ultimately, the researchers concluded, the availability of alcohol has little effect on young people's use of marijuana.

It's possible that young people who tend to use only one substance do switch from marijuana to alcohol at age 21, they wrote. But for others, who tend use more than one substance, the legality of alcohol seemed to actually increase the use of marijuana, as well.

"Taken together, we found no significant substitution effect between alcohol and marijuana," study researcher Guohua Li, director of Columbia University's Center for Injury Epidemiology and Prevention, said in a statement. "Rather, increased availability seems to increase the prevalence of concurrent use of alcohol and marijuana."
Copyright 2015 LiveScience, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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Half of teen, young adult car crash deaths involve pot or alcohol

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Half of the teen and young adult drivers who die in car crashes are under the influence of either pot, alcohol, or both, suggests a new study done in states where toxicology screening for accident victims is routine. What's more, the increasing legalization and availability of marijuana does not seem likely to push alcohol use aside, the researchers said.

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Youth subcultures: what are they now? | Culture | The Guardian

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Youth subcultures: what are they now? | Culture | The Guardian

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List of youth subcultures in the modern period

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Down the phone, Helina is explaining what a haul girl is to me. "Basically, you go out shopping for clothes or beauty products," she says, "then you make a haul video and show viewers on YouTube what you got. You go through the items of clothing one by one. I guess what people get out of them is not showing off, like, how much money you've got or anything, but lifestyle: you get to see how one person lives, what their taste is."

If you're minded to sneer at a youth cult that involves making videos about your shopping, then Helina has a pretty intriguing counter-argument. "It's not just about showing what you've got," she says. "It's a whole creative process behind the videos as well, which is what I enjoy about it. Choosing the right music, going from the filming to the editing. Sometimes I even storyboard things, because I want certain shots, how I can present different items and things like that." Besides, she says, it's a genuine community. She thinks a lot of haul girls "turn the camera on because it's a way to talk to people without having to go outside and face their fears. I know that was the case with me: I turned on my camera because I was at home, signed off work, sick, and really bored. And it helped with my confidence in a way. There's this community where you can talk to like-minded people."

I've ended up talking to Helina because haul girls and their videos are currently a remarkably big deal - there are scores of the things on YouTube - and I'm trying to investigate the state of youth subcultures in 2014. It seems a worthwhile thing to do. You hardly need a degree in sociology to realise that something fairly dramatic has happened to them over the past couple of decades; you just need a functioning pair of eyes. When I arrived at secondary school in the mid-80s, the fifth and sixth forms, where uniform requirements were relaxed, looked like a mass of different tribes, all of them defined by the music they liked, all of them more or less wearing their tastes on their sleeves. There were goths. There were metallers. There were punks. There were soulboys, at least one of whom had made the fateful decision to try and complete his look by growing a moustache, the bum fluff result pathetic in the extreme. There were Morrissey acolytes, and even a couple of ersatz hippies, one of whom had decorated his Adidas holdall with a drawing of the complex front cover of Gong's 1971 album Camembert Electrique: a pretty ballsy move, given the derision that hippies had suffered during punk, and at the hands of the scriptwriters of The Young Ones.

And I seem to recall there were dozens of psychobillies, the dimly remembered 80s youth cult that opted for a cartoonish marriage of punk and rockabilly. That may be my memory suggesting they were more numerous than in reality, simply because they looked so striking, your average psychobilly having contrived to attain a look that was simultaneously utterly ridiculous and disquietingly hard and menacing. I definitely remember one of them turning up on non-uniform day wearing a giant banana costume and Doc Martens, presumably in tribute to psychobilly heroes King Kurt's then-recent single Banana Banana. It was fairly obvious who was who and what was what. You didn't have to be an expert in the finely nuanced semiotics of teenage dress codes to work out that the bloke with the vertiginous dyed quiff walking around dressed as a banana probably wasn't cut from the same subcultural cloth as the bespectacled cardigan-wearer carrying a copy of the Complete Works of Oscar Wilde. And that was just my school. Beyond its gates, style magazines were always reporting on weirder, more arcane youth cults: at one point in the 80s, the Face ran a slightly incredulous piece on "psychedelic scalls", scouse casuals with a love of dope-smoking and Frank Zappa. In the late 80s and early 90s, the music weeklies were always being accused of trying to invent youth cults for their own nefarious ends: grebos, romos, fraggles, teen-C.

In 2014, however, the only real teenage cults visible to an outsider, displaying their allegiances by their manner of dress, seem to be metalheads and emos. The former feels like the most deathless youth movement of all, still recruiting new young converts long after being a mod or skinhead has become almost exclusively the province of the middle-aged. The latter seems to have co-opted elements of most of the other spectacular subcultures - goth, metal, punk and indie - under one catch-all term. In the mid-noughties, it even managed to provoke a flicker of old-fashioned folk devil outrage when the Daily Mail proclaimed it the Dangerous Cult Of Teen Suicide. But that's about it.

Something has clearly changed, and over the past week, I've listened to a lot of hypotheses as to why, of varying degrees of plausibility. A sociologist at the University of Sussex, Dr Kevin White, tells me he thinks it has something to do with Britain's changing class structure. Elswehere, there's a rather grumpy "tsk-kids-today" theory that teenagers are now so satiated by the plethora of entertainment on offer that they don't feel the need to rebel through dress or ritual - and a deeply depressing one that people are too worried about their futures in the current financial climate to be creative. And I've had a long and fascinating conversation with historian David Fowler, author of the acclaimed book Youth Culture in Modern Britain, who has an intriguing, if controversial, theory that subcultures such as hippy and punk had very little to do with the actual teenagers who participated in them - "They were consumers ... they were sort of puppets" - and were instead informed and controlled by a slightly older, university-educated generation. "Youth culture as a kind of transformative, counter-cultural philosophy, it has to be shaped by older people and invariably it's by students," he says. Today, the lack of anything equivalent to the radical student movements of the 60s that fed into both the hippy movement and punk means a lack of ideas trickling down into pop culture.

Meanwhile, Dr Ruth Adams of King's College London thinks it might be linked to the speed at which "the cycle of production and consumption" now moves. "Fashion and music, they're much cheaper and they're much faster today," she says. "I think it's a lot easier to be promiscuous, subculturally speaking. When I was a teenager, you had to make more commitment to music and fashion, because it took more of a financial investment. I had a pair of gothy stiletto boots, which lasted me for years: I had to make a sort of commitment to looking like that, because I wasn't going to get another pair of alternative shoes any time soon, so I had to think about which ones I wanted. Now, it's all a bit more blurry, the semiotic signs are not quite as hard-edged as they used to be."

But the most straightforward, prosaic theory is that, as with virtually every area of popular culture, it's been radically altered by the advent of the internet: that we now live in a world where teenagers are more interested in constructing an identity online than they are in making an outward show of their allegiances and interests.

"It's not neccesarily happening on street corners any more, but it's certainly happening online," says Adams. "It's a lot easier to adopt personas online that cost you absolutely nothing apart from demonstrating certain types of arcane knowledge, what Sarah Thornton called subcultural capital. You don't have to invest in a teddy boy's drape suit or a T-shirt from Seditionaries."

Once you start examining subcultures online, things become blurred and confusing, compounded by the fact that a lot of online subcultures seem to come cloaked in layers of knowing irony. In search of latterday youth subcultures, I'm pointed in various directions by various people, but I invariably can't work out whether what I'm looking at is meant to be serious or a joke: never really a problem in the days when members of different youth cults were prepared to thump each other. There's plenty of stuff that seems weird and striking and creative out there, but there's something oddly self-conscious and non-committal about it: perhaps that's the result of living in a world dominated by social media, where you're under constant surveillance by your peers.

Either way, I have literally no idea whether a video by rappers Serious Thugs - YouTube comments: "THIS IS THE FUTURE", "chavvy meets hipster is happening!" - is a genuine attempt to reclaim the reviled "chav" image that might end up having wider impact, or whether it's just horrible tongue-in-cheek sneering at the way working-class kids dress. Is a Tumblr star such as Molly Soda - an American 24-year-old with dyed hair and a septum piercing, whose website is a curious mix of nostalgic imagery from the early days of the internet, glittery My Little Pony kitsch, softcore porn and photos of her pulling faces and occasionally exposing herself, and who recently seems to have translated her online fame into a visual-art career (an eight-hour video of her reading the contents of her email inbox was recently sold by Phillips in New York) - at the head of a subculture? On the one hand, it's a little hard to put your finger on what she does or stands for. On the other, she certainly has acolytes, who dress like her and imitate her Tumblr's aesthetic (indeed, she has them in such profusion, that they're parodied on another Tumblr called Molly Soda Try-Hards). Furthermore, her influence appears to be affecting mainstream culture: the clothing chain Urban Outfitters recently ran a blogpost telling customers how to achieve a Molly Soda-inspired "Tumblr girl look", albeit as - oh dear - a Halloween costume rather than an ongoing lifestyle.

And then there's seapunk, a movement that started out as a joke on Twitter, turned into a Facebook page, then gained traction to the point where it became a real-life scene, with a seapunk "look" that involved dyeing your hair turquoise, seapunk club nights and seapunk music. "Seapunk is the name of a mid-western club movement created by a group of turquoise-haired twentysomethings who like to drown warehouse breakbeats in a flood of sub-bass and watery Wu-Tang samples," ran one piece in style magazine Dazed And Confused. "The term was originally envisioned in a psychedelic GIF dream by Lil' Internet, but producer Fire For Effect has been responsible for turning it into a fully fledged lifestyle." Before you dismiss that as sounding like something made up by Charlie Brooker for a forthcoming series of Nathan Barley, it's perhaps worth noting that seapunk genuinely appeared to make an impact on mainstream pop: the seapunk look was variously appropriated by rapper Azealia Banks, Lady Gaga, Rihanna and Taylor Swift. In any case, I'm too late. One of seapunk's supposed core members, Zombelle, apparently declared the movement dead when pop stars started cottoning on to it, which perhaps tells you something about subcultures in 2014. They catch people's imagination, get appropriated by mainstream culture then die away: it was ever thus, but now it happens at warp-speed. Punk's journey from the first sightings of the Ramones and Richard Hell in New York to the front pages of the British tabloids took a couple of years, over which time it changed and developed and mutated. Seapunk's journey from internet gag to Rihanna using its imagery on Saturday Night Live took a matter of months.

It's hard not to be struck by the sensation that, emos and metalheads aside, what you might call the 20th-century idea of a youth subculture is now just outmoded. The internet doesn't spawn mass movements, bonded together by a shared taste in music, fashion and ownership of subcultural capital: it spawns brief, microcosmic ones. In fact, the closest thing to the old model of a subculture I've come across is Helena and the haul girls. Their videos are about conspicuous consumption: a public display of their good taste, carefully assembled with precise attention to detail. When you put it like that - and at the risk of incurring a fatwah from middle-aged Paul Weller fans - they sound remarkably like mods.
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Down the phone, Helina is explaining what a haul girl is to me. "Basically, you go out shopping for clothes or beauty products," she says, "then you make a haul video and show viewers on YouTube what you got. You go through the items of clothing one by one.

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The 10 best British youth cultures | Culture | The Guardian

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The 10 best British youth cultures | Culture | The Guardian

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Subcultures used to be distinct to britain - skinheads and mods being a stereotypical british icon. However these days subculturws have globalised, especiualy those that operate on social media platforms such as haul girls - mostly of which are american.

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The Red or Dead co-founder picks his top music-led fashion fads

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British middle-class teenagers 'have lower IQ scores than a generation ago' | Daily Mail Online

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British middle-class teenagers 'have lower IQ scores than a generation ago' | Daily Mail Online

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Is this due to social media?? What other influences could be the cause of this?

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Middle-class teenagers are less intelligent than a generation ago due to the dumbing down of youth culture and school tests, a new study suggests.

IQ tests show that scores for the average 14-year-old have dropped by more than two points between 1980 and 2008.

For those in the upper half of the intelligence scale - a group typically dominated by the children of middle-class families - average IQ scores were six points down on 28 years ago.

The authority on IQ testing who conducted the study said the demands made on teenagers' brainpower by today's youth culture may be 'stagnating'.

Leisure time is increasingly taken up with playing computer games and watching TV instead of reading and holding conversations, he said.

Education experts said a growing tendency in schools to 'teach to the test' was affecting youngsters' ability to think laterally.

For the study, Professor James Flynn, of the University of Otago in New Zealand, analysed UK children's scores in IQ tests over time.

He found that IQs increased among children aged between five and 10 over the 28-year-period, at the rate of up to half a point a year.

He believes these gains are linked to changes to the home environment children experience when they are young, with parents increasingly providing stimulating activities.

But Professor Flynn also found that teenagers' scores had dipped slightly over the past generation.

It is the first time IQ scores have fallen for any age group during the past century, his research suggests.

Professor Flynn discovered the 'Flynn effect' which holds that IQ scores have been consistently rising, among all age groups and in most industrialised countries.

'It looks like there is something screwy among British teenagers,' Professor Flynn told the Sunday Telegraph.

'While we have enriched the cognitive environment of children before their teenage years, the cognitive environment of the teenagers has not been enriched.

'Other studies have shown how pervasive teenage youth culture is, and what we see is parents' influence on IQ slowly diminishing with age.

'Up until the age of nine and ten, the home has a really powerful influence, so we can assume parents have been providing their children with a more cognitive challenging environment in the past 30 years.

'After that age the children become more autonomous and they gravitate to peer groups that set the cognitive environment.

'What we know is that youth culture is more visually orientated around computer games than they are in terms of reading and holding conversations.'

He said previous studies have tended to show IQ increasing as teenagers move into adulthood, entering university or starting work.

Professor Flynn added that he believes the larger drop in IQ among the upper half of the ability range could be due to effects of social class.

He said: 'IQ gains are typically correlated by class, but the results in this case are very mixed. Maybe the rebellious peer culture of the lower half of British society has invaded the peer culture of the upper half.

'It could be the classes in the upper half were insulated from this rebellious peer culture for a time, but now it is universal.'

IQ, or intelligence quotient, is normally expressed as a single numerical score, with 100 being the average.

Previous studies have claimed that using text messages and email can temporarily reduce IQ by causing concentration to drop, while smoking marijuana has also been linked with a decline in IQ.

Professor Flynn's study, published in the journal of Economics and Human Biology, was conducted using a IQ test known as Raven's Progressive Matrices, where questions involve matching a series of patterns and sequences, so that even people with no education can take the test.

Dr Richard House, a senior lecturer in therapeutic education at Roehampton University and a researcher into the effects of television on children, said: 'Taking these findings at face value, it appears that there is something happening to teenagers.

'Computer games and computer culture has led to a decrease in reading books. The tendency for teachers to now 'teach to the test' has also led to a decrease in the capacity to think in lateral ways.'

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British middle-class teenagers 'have lower IQ scores than a generation ago'

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Middle-class teenagers are less intelligent than a generation ago due to the dumbing down of youth culture and school tests, a new study suggests. IQ tests show that scores for the average 14-year-old have dropped by more than two points between 1980 and 2008.

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Soaring youth crime is linked to rising inner-city gang culture | Daily Mail Online

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Soaring youth crime is linked to rising inner-city gang culture | Daily Mail Online

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Soaring youth crime is linked to rising inner-city gang culture

The number of under-18s getting into trouble with the police has soared by a fifth in five years as youngsters are lured into gang culture.

More than 93,000 youngsters aged ten to 17 received their first caution or conviction last year, up from 78,000 in 2002.

The official figures mask dramatic local variations, including a doubling in the youth offending rate in Brighton and Hove, a 68 per cent rise in Blackpool and a 65 per cent increase in Bristol.

The highest levels of offending by under-18s was in the North East of England, where up to three per cent had at least one brush with the law last year.

Ministers were accused of failing to do enough to stem the causes of crime, including rising gang culture.

But ministers insisted the figures, published yesterday, were evidence their policies were beginning to work, since offending rates fell between 2006/07 and 2007/08.

The number of first-time offenders had fallen from a high of 103,955 in 2006/07 to 93,601 last year, a drop of around 10,000, they said.

Ministers claimed their tough line on youth crime in the wake of a spate of stabbings would lead to further reductions.

Justice Minister David Hanson said: 'The Government's youth crime prevention work is beginning to have a positive impact, as these figures show. The challenge now is to maintain that trend.'

But Tory spokesman on children Tim Loughton said: 'The number of young people ending up in the criminal justice system has gone up in the last five years.

'Worryingly, it is some of the poorest areas that are being worst affected by the problem of children committing crime.

'We have to attack this problem at source by providing greater opportunities for young people in deprived areas, supporting families and giving teachers more powers to maintain discipline in the classroom.'

Separate figures show that six per cent of teenage criminals sentenced by the courts are sent to custody.

But the Government's Youth Justice Board is keen to drive this down and is suggesting the courts hand out more community punishments and ' intensive fostering' placements instead.

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Soaring youth crime is linked to rising inner-city gang culture

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The number of under-18s getting into trouble with the police has soared by a fifth in five years as youngsters are lured into gang culture. More than 93,000 youngsters aged ten to 17 received their first caution or conviction last year, up from 78,000 in 2002.

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Youth culture: teenage kicks in the digital age | Technology | The Guardian

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Youth culture: teenage kicks in the digital age | Technology | The Guardian

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The youth of 2011 are a posse of Adam Ant-alike hipsters in so-tight-they-could-be-painted-on trousers, geek-pie haircuts and Day-Glo stripes on their faces. They are sullen, moody and misunderstood. So far, so James Dean.

But is there actually something different going on? These kids get their culture, gossip and attitudes from Google and Facebook. They are constantly on, constantly promoting themselves and constantly connected. They think filming their mates slapping strangers and then putting the videos up on YouTube is hilarious. And, if you believe the reactionary headlines, this generation of digitally enabled, computer savvy youth is a menace to society, hacking into the mainframes of the most hallowed institutions in the world.

OK, take a step back and try to recall your own generational transgressions. Youth culture, superficially dominated by musical tastes, slang, fashion and objectionable hairstyles, is nothing but an artefact of growing up. Sociologists have documented these little rebellions since the 19th century when, as author Jon Savage describes in Teenage: The Creation of Youth 1875-1945, the notion of "youth as a separate, stormy, rebellious stage of life began".

Psychologically, "youth culture" is the outcome of the process that kids, navigating the tortured period of adolescence, go through as they seek a community that's distinct from that which has come before. It is a period rich in self-expression, catalysed by the negotiation of social boundaries. And, according to the UN, it is a culture that is currently being added to and subtracted from by the 1.1 billion people around the world between the ages of 15 and 24.

What makes them now unique is that they have a (mostly) open communication platform at their fingertips that allows them to connect on a global scale with people going through the same biological, psychological and social changes. So instead of creating a group identity in the playground or at the mall, they have the potential to do it on social networks, in networked computer games and via SMS. And, as anyone who's observed kids in action knows, those who have the means are constantly connected.

"The web has become the place where young people most find their opportunity to explore and express their identities and their social relations, and navigate their way through the values that are on offer around them," says Sonia Livingstone, professor of social psychology and head of the department of media and communications at LSE.

Professor Livingstone has studied media and its effects on young people for two decades. The greatest transformation she sees with the web compared with television, radio and print is that the technology puts the kids in the centre as culture creators rather than culture consumers. Not only does this upset traditional top-down marketing models but it also means that a single youth culture is now almost impossible to pin down. "Historically there has been a trigger - a music change or style change - that's prompted a variety of different youth adaptations," says Danah Boyd, co-author the MacArthur-funded research project book, Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out. But now, with so many technological touch points and interest-driven groups, there's no single social change that catalyses them. Boyd, who has been studying kids' activities on networks like Facebook and MySpace for almost a decade, believes it's now easier to define "youth" by looking at how we use technology. If it's for gossip and socialising, you're probably a teen. If it's for dating, you're likely to be in your 20s. And, Boyd observes, other life stages use it in other ways.

"What young people are doing on Facebook when they gossip and socialise is intensively monitoring what everyone else is doing and what everyone else is saying," says Livingstone. "It keeps them constantly updated on what other young people are thinking and doing. It is the height of reflexivity." The constant awareness of the peer group conversation is a cultural shift away from opting in to opting out. Young people are now living in a much more anxious, self-judging way than previous childhoods. "It would be interesting to talk with young people about silences," Livingstone says. "About the pursuit of personal hobbies."

What is most surprising about the findings of the research in this field is that, despite the much-hyped global network, there is very little evidence for a common global youth culture. Boyd argues that the way media is used by kids actually reinforces local connections. "Most young people interact with people they know in their everyday environments," she says.

This has implications for kids' development. "When you go on to Facebook with teenagers, they live in a world where they think everybody thinks like them," she says. Livingstone concurs. "We ever more surround ourselves by people like us who share the same beliefs and values, thoughts and anxieties," she says. "There's much less time spent muddling along with people who are really quiet different." So rather than a globally homogenised youth culture, there a lots of little tight-knit, homogeneous fragments.

Fundamentally, the processes that go into the development and expression of youth culture are the same, but the tools the kids use - whether they're social networks, blogs, games or YouTube - create more intensive feedback loops than have been experienced before. The effects of this are unknown. "Something transformative is happening," says Livingstone of the new media. "I don't think it's happened yet."

We are at a period in which our societies are coming to grips with the new technology. In many ways, we are experiencing a technological adolescence ourselves. Part of the process is watching how people who have never experienced anything else push the boundaries. The kids and their youth culture, constrained by our fundamental social and psychological processes, are our canaries in the digital coalmine.
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Youth culture: teenage kicks in the digital age

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The youth of 2011 are a posse of Adam Ant-alike hipsters in so-tight-they-could-be-painted-on trousers, geek-pie haircuts and Day-Glo stripes on their faces. They are sullen, moody and misunderstood. So far, so James Dean. But is there actually something different going on? These kids get their culture, gossip and attitudes from Google and Facebook.

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A Lot Of People In Lebanon Are Mad About An Instagram By Miss Israel - BuzzFeed News

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A Lot Of People In Lebanon Are Mad About An Instagram By Miss Israel - BuzzFeed News

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Instagram us such a widely used social media platform that one picture can upset an entire country. Is Miss Isreal really such an influential character that had she posted this picture publically OFF social media it wouldve caused such outrage? Did the ability to 'share' the picture and voice opinions about it make the picture more offensive than it actually was?

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A Lot Of People In Lebanon Are Mad About An Instagram By Miss Israel

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Miss Lebanon is denying she willingly posed for a photo with Miss Israel after an image of the two beauty queens sparked outrage.