Breda O'Brien
“I would love if someone were to do some serious research on what being Irish means in this virtual world”, writes Breda O’Brien
While the country has spent weeks discussing every aspect of 1916 and the implications for today, much more recent anniversaries, such as the 11-year anniversary of YouTube, or the nine-year anniversary of the first Apple smartphone, probably have had far more influence on our young people. One obvious impact is on their vocabulary.
My daughter and I had a jokey argument the other day about the hair accessories known as clips, which she assures me are called bobby pins. Given that she was not born in the US, I told her that they are definitely clips.
Just like most teenagers, my daughter spends a lot of time online, and when she was in her early teens she loved a harmless little YouTube channel called ‘Cute Girls’ Hairstyles’. She is very good at braiding hair as a result, but sadly, the collateral damage is that she is under the misapprehension that clips are called bobby pins.
Subscribers
That “harmless little YouTube channel” has 2.8 million subscribers, by the way, and has had one of their characteristic hairstyles featured in one of The Hunger Games movies. It is a full time career for the McKnight family who run the channel.
YouTube came into being in February 2005. Now some people can make a very comfortable living from it.
L.P. Hartley might have declared in 1953, that “the past is a foreign country – they do things differently there”, but it is the present that is a foreign country to many people over the age of 40.
The pace of change has accelerated to an extraordinary degree. It makes the experience of commemorations and anniversaries utterly different for the younger generation.
It amazes me that my father, Lord rest him, was born a year after the Rising. He lived as a child through the First World War, experienced the declaration of the Irish Republic, and rationing during the Second World War.
The changes that my parents witnessed were phenomenal – from an agricultural economy based on small family farms where organically grown food eaten in season was the only option, to the age of the internet.
Yet the pace of change was slow for the first half of their lives. It has now become frenetic.
It was easy to maintain a cultural identity in a small, homogenous society like Ireland in the 20th Century. Civil War politics were very real in my family, and even determined what undertaker you were likely to use.
Yet Civil War politics mean nothing to my children, and it is a source of puzzlement to them why two parties like Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael cannot coalesce.
Yet young people, too, are experiencing a homogenous culture, except that this culture is online. It is a culture characterised by liberal, individualistic values.
It is important not to be too negative about it, but also important not to be naïve, and to fail to see another revolution happening under our noses.
I would love if someone were to do some serious research on what being Irish means in this virtual world. Despite adopting American expressions, I know that distinctive ways of using the English language are seen as an important marker of being Irish.
Videos of Irish people trying to explain common expressions like ‘having the craic’ are very popular.
However, how much does the Irish language itself mean? Not as much as the leaders of 1916, that’s for sure, although there are pockets of enthusiasts who use it on a daily basis.
What about the ‘Faith of our Fathers’? Some young people have a powerful antidote to the negative aspects of online culture, because they experience a Catholic counter-culture influenced by the Church’s social teaching in their immediate and extended family.
However, despite the excellent work of organisations like Youth 2000, most young people do not experience a strong alternative culture to the one they experience online.
But perhaps life-changing faith was always a minority pursuit, with the majority of the Irish passively accepting it as a major cultural influence for centuries, just as some young people today passively accept a very different set of cultural influences.
Generation
Every new generation is a new continent to be won for Christ, as St John Paul told us. We cannot return to some mythical isle of saints and scholars which never really existed in the first place.
Some people are doing sterling work venturing into the difficult waters of the online world. However, the answer is not to focus on merely becoming adept at new means of communication, although that is important.
It is even more important to attempt to embody the mercy that Pope Francis speaks so often about, and thereby offer a strong, life-affirming alternative to the virtual culture where most of our young people spend their days.