It's Complicated

introduction

One evening, in September 2010, I was in the stands at a high school football game in Nashville, Tennessee, experiencing a powerful sense of déjà vu. As a member of my high school's marching band in the mid-1990s, I had spent countless Friday nights in stands across central Pennsylvania, pretending to cheer on my school's football team so that I could hang out with my friends. The scene at the school in Nashville in 2010 could easily have taken place when I was in high school almost two decades earlier. It was an archetypical American night, and immediately legible to me. I couldn't help but smile at the irony, given that I was in Nashville to talk with teens about how technology had changed their lives. As I sat in the stands, I thought: the more things had changed, the more they seemed the same.

I recalled speaking to a teen named Stan whom I'd met in Iowa three years earlier. He had told me to stop looking for differences. "You'd actually be surprised how little things change. I'm guessing a lot of the drama is still the same, it's just the format is a little different. It's just changing the font and changing the background color really." He made references to technology to remind me that technology wasn't changing anything important.

Back in Nashville, the cheerleaders screamed, "Defense!" and waved their colorful pom-poms, while boys in tuxes and girls in formal gowns lined up on the track that circled the football field, signaling that halftime was approaching. This was a Homecoming game, and at halftime the Homecoming Court paraded onto the field in formal attire to be introduced to the audience before the announcer declared the King and Queen. The Court was made up of eight girls and eight boys, half of whom were white and half of whom were black. I reflected on the lack of Asian or Hispanic representation in a town whose demographics were changing. The announcer introduced each member to the audience, focusing on their extracurricular activities, their participation in one of the local churches, and their dreams for the future.

Meanwhile, most of the student body was seated in the stands. They were decked out in the school colors, many even having painted their faces in support. But they were barely paying attention to what was happening on the field. Apart from a brief hush when the Homecoming Court was presented, they spent the bulk of the time facing one another, chatting, enjoying a rare chance to spend unstructured time together as friends and peers.

As in many schools I've visited over the years, friendships at this school in Nashville were largely defined by race, gender, sexuality, and grade level, and those networks were immediately visible based on whom students were talking to or sitting with. By and large, the students were cordoned off in their own section on the sides of the stands while parents and more "serious" fans occupied the seats in the center. Most of the students in the stands were white and divided by grade: the upperclassmen took the seats closest to the field, while the freshmen were pushed toward the back. Girls were rarely alone with boys, but when they were, they were holding hands. The teens who swarmed below and to the right of the stands represented a different part of the school. Unlike their peers in the stands, most of the students milling about below were black. Aside from the Homecoming Court, only one group was racially mixed, and they were recognizable mainly for their "artistic" attire — unnaturally colorful hair, piercings, and black clothing that I recognized from the racks of Hot Topic, a popular mall-based chain store that caters to goths, punks, and other subcultural groups.

Only two things confirmed that this was not 1994: the fashion and the cell phones. Gone were the 1980s-inspired bangs, perms, and excessive use of hair gel and hairspray that dominated my high school well into the 1990s. And unlike 1994, cell phones were everywhere. As far as I could tell, every teen at the game that day in Nashville had one: iPhones, Blackberries, and other high-end smartphones seemed to be especially popular at this upper-middle-class school. Unsurprisingly, the phones in the hands of the white students were often more expensive or of more elite brands than those in the hands of the black students.