[Tyrien]

This is where an interesting and very important question is raised. There's two sides to this.

There's the side that has people seeing what is in the media, then see teens acting a certain way and assuming it is because of the media. This is where we see an action we do not like in the media and purposefully look for this type of behavior in teens which effectively clouds any other actions we see them take.

Then there is the side where people see what is in the media, and how teens are portrayed in the media then assume that is actually what all teenagers are like.

Personally I feel most people take the side of the latter more often than the former. Neither are fair ways of passing judgement though. Both attempt to define an entire group of humans based on the few encounters we experience.

Every person commenting in this thread (and I'm guilty of this myself, it's just something we instinctively do) are referring to our personal experience with teenagers as "them". This suggests that we can fairly apply our limited municipal experience and scale it to a national level. That's not fair at all.

For the sake of argument let's talk about the numbers in the US - Just to tag a number to a population. There's roughly 300,000,000 legal US citizens. How often do we actually meet teenagers? How many different teens a day? In a week? In a month? In a year?

I'm going to go out on a limb and say for the majority of us here that number is less than 100 per year. Then the majority of that will be less than 50 a year. The majority of that will be less than 30 a year.

Then I want to ask how well we get to know these teens? Do we sit and get to know what's going on in their lives? Are they our class mates, or do we just meet them briefly out in the city?

I'm going to go out on another limb and say that the majority of us do not know anything significant about the personal lives of these. Then the majority of that won't even be able to tell us the teen's names.

So that leaves us with all these first hand accounts of how rude teens are, but is there really any substance to any of these? It doesn't really sound like there is. Especially considering the scale of a countries population. We're talking about annually encountering a number of teens that rests in the triple digits when the population of our countries rests in sextuple, septuple, or more likely octuple digits. It doesn't sound like our personal experience is giving us a very good grasp on reality.

It's very interesting to discuss this in generalities as we are, but it's nowhere near conclusive. We just don't have enough information to even hope to draw any accurate conclusions.

The problem lies in the media, we all feel like we know enough because we see people we do not know - people we have never and likely will never meet in the media. We have no insight on the personal lives of these people, but we draw lines based off those who preach their ideas on the media, then subconsciously treat them as our own. Slowly these people we see become our experiences.

eh... I should probably go to sleep.

tl;dr can't judge a book by it's cover.