Tuesday 12 February 2013

Yeah, I miss 'em too

A little clutch of articles on your twenties, the most influential (?) decade of your life:

The 'Girls' Gut Check: Racial Tension, Artistic Differences, and YouTube (The Atlantic)
I'm with Ashley on this one. Without YouTube, I wouldn't be a functional adult. (Sorry, mom and dad.) I can't even fold shirts without it. Still, I think it's silly to say that YouTube is "replacing" anything—it's more akin to an instructional booster than an out-and-out competitor.
The Mysteriously Memorable 20s (Slate)
A little-known but robust line of research shows that there really is something deeply, weirdly meaningful about this period. It plays an outsize role in how we structure our expectations, stories, and memories. The basic finding is this: We remember more events from late adolescence and early adulthood than from any other stage of our lives. This phenomenon is called the reminiscence bump.
You’ll Never Forget Your Twenties, Because That’s When You Become Who You Are (Jezebel)
But I have to ask — these are children who've seen television and magazines, which means they've been exposed to how our culture fetishizes the twenties. It's not like they dreamed up this stuff in a vacuum. Or, as all former children know, the twenties are the decade of first exposure to autonomy, so it makes perfect sense that children would regard with greater importance the first period of their lives in which they can eat as many cookies as they want and stay up all night, no questions asked.

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