I’ve got a milestone birthday coming up in the not-so-distant future, and as everybody gets older, they start to reflect on the past a little more. I tend to focus not necessarily on my past, per se, but on how our technology and culture has changed in my lifetime. (I guess you could say that’s my inner anthropologist.)  In the past couple years I have come to some startling realizations, including the fact that today’s teenagers don’t know what life is like without the internet.

That alone blows my mind, but at the same time, I have a hard time thinking that I could live without it, either. Yet, I remember the 1990s and the excitement I had when I got my first bag phone, and I remember when my 16-bit Sega Genesis was the most advanced video game system money could buy. I spent hours upon hours trying to beat Sonic the Hedgehog until the day I finally did, then started all over again. The predecessors of social media are hardly anything to shout about now, but remember when that stuff was cutting edge?

Today, thanks largely in part to the internet, our technologies and ideas are advancing so quickly that some are quick to dismiss yesterday’s social media before the rest of the world (believe it or not) catches onto them. I do consider myself an early adopter, but I also have a hard time letting go of the comforts of the past. Which brings me back to my teenage years in the ’90s, and I’m wondering if my main writing outlet* back in those days, is, in fact, a true thing of the past — the notebook.

In every decade prior to the internet, prior to blogs, prior to “online journaling” in the late ’90s, prior to the term “emo” being commonplace, every introspective, the-entire-world-doesn’t-understand-me, angry teenager (usually wearing black) had one. At any given time they would be seen scribbling their deepest thoughts, dreams, desires, and bad, teenage poems in their notebook, whose plain-colored cover was speckled in lyrics by their favorite musicians (“you made me throw it all away/my morals left to decay…“), doodles, stickers of their favorite bands’ logos, and other miscellany. Coffee-stained, tear-stained pages between tattered covers, these sacred teenage manifestos were carried to school, to coffee shops, to the library — literally everywhere — until the very last blank page had been filled with ink.

These were our blogs.

Only, the difference between our teenage notebooks and today’s blogs is that if somebody read our notebook, it was a devastating, embarrassing invasion of privacy that would seem like the end of the world, only to be chronicled in our next notebook in exaggerated detail of how that traumatic experience changed our already-skeptical outlook on humanity to an even more jaded, cynical state. There was an unspoken code between teens who wrote in notebooks that you do not read somebody else’s notebook unless they chose to share something in it with you, at which occasion said two (or three) teens were then on a much deeper level of friendship.

I don’t think this happens anymore.

Granted, my window to the world of the American teenager is limited to my quiet, 14 year-old nephew and a 17 year-old blond girl who plants and sells pumpkins for college money, a former espresso-slinging coworker and “friend” of mine on MySpace, a platform I rarely use anymore. But she is very into MySpace, and admitted to me she rarely reads, so I doubt she has a notebook like I and many of my peers did.

Our culture has shifted to one where teenagers want to share everything online (sometimes too much), whose lives are willingly open books, and sometimes regrettedly so. Pew Internet & American Life Project reports that “93% of teens are online, and 64% of online teens ages 12-17  have participated in one or more among a wide range of content-creating activities on the internet, up from 57% of online teens in a similar survey at the end of 2004.” (Pew Internet & American Life Project: Teens & Social Media, 2007)

The same report also reveals that about two-thirds (66%) of all teens with an online profile restrict access “in some way” with girls being more protective of their posted images overall than boys, and most teens being protective of their personal information by purposely using false information and/or not revealing last names. While this is reassuring from a privacy/safety standpoint, and the entire report is fascinating, they focus on numbers when talking about the content created, not the actual quality or subject matter of said content, which is not something easily measured.

My point is that because teens are so willing to share their created content with the world, it’s more “Hey, look at me!” and less “If anybody reads this I’ll DIE.” With the birth and the propagation of the internet came a dramatic shift in our culture and the way we communicate which is to be celebrated, but at the same time also came the death of a longstanding medium of American adolescence–the notebook–and thus, a part of our teenage culture’s past.

Am I wrong? Is the teen-angst notebook still alive and well, or is it truly extinct? Did you have one? Do you know any teenagers who still carry out this custom?

*I also wrote for the teen section of The Flint Journal, but I wouldn’t consider that a “main writing outlet,” as only a handful of high schoolers in the county did that.

**Photo by austins_irish_pirate