They want to keep under-sixteens off social media, and I have a fifteen-year-old fan, a drummer who is barely older, and a long memory of school
Wednesday, After Work, the 149
We have a fan. I mean a proper one. She is fifteen and her name is Dee and she comes to every all-ages gig we do with a friend who looks terrified. She stands at the front on the left. She knows the words to songs we have not recorded. She made her own T-shirt with a marker pen because we only had mediums and she is tiny.
After the Stoke Newington gig she asked if she could run a page for us. On one of the apps. She said we are “invisible online,” which is fair, because the bass player does our posts and she puts one up every two months with a blurry photo and the wrong date.
I said yes, of course. And then I saw a headline.
The Headline
The drummer again. NewsThump, on the page where they keep the politics: “Under-16 social media ban heralds return of locally sourced, artisanal teenage bullying.”
I laughed so hard a man on the bus moved.
I had half known about the ban. It has been talked about for ages. Australia did it. Now it is coming here, or has come, I am not clear which. No accounts on the big apps until you are sixteen.
The joke is that people think this will end bullying. And the headline says: no. It will just go back to how it used to be made. By hand. In small batches. In the corridor outside the science block.
I Remember the Artisanal Kind
I am thirty-six. I left school before any of this. There were no phones that did anything. If someone wanted to make your life miserable, they had to do it in person.
And they did. They were craftspeople.
There was a girl in my year called Kelly-Ann who could destroy you with one word, said quietly, in the dinner queue. She did not need a platform. She had timing. I had a bad haircut at thirteen that I had done myself with the kitchen scissors, and she gave it a name that followed me until I left.
Notes passed in class. Your bag emptied in the toilets. Nobody sitting next to you on the coach. A rumour that went round the whole year in a morning, by mouth, with no technology at all.
It was slow, compared with now. But it was thorough. And there was no block button.
What the Phone Changed
I do not want to be the old woman saying it was just as bad in my day. It was not the same. I have talked to Dee about this and she set me straight.
When I got home from school, it stopped. I shut the front door and Kelly-Ann was not in my bedroom. I had until half eight the next morning.
Dee says it does not stop. It is on the phone, and the phone is in your hand, in your bed, at two in the morning. The whole year group is in your pocket. Something is said about you and by breakfast two hundred people have seen it, and there is a screenshot, so it is for ever.
She said a girl in her school left because of a group chat. Just left. Moved schools.
That is worse. I am not going to pretend it is not. The cruelty is the same cruelty. The reach is different.
So Is the Ban Right?
I have gone back and forth all day, which is not like me. I usually know what I think and say it too loud.
For it. Those apps are built to keep you looking. Grown adults cannot put them down. I cannot. Giving that to a twelve-year-old is like giving her a fruit machine. If a ban buys kids a few more years of being bored and looking out of windows, good. I wrote my first songs because I was bored.
And parents want it, mostly. It is very hard to be the one mum who says no. If it is the law, nobody is the odd one out.
Against it. Dee.
She is fifteen. She lives in Enfield. She is, I think, a bit lonely at school. She likes loud music made by women twice her age, which is not what the other girls are into. Where did she find us? Online. Where did she find the three other kids in north London who like the same bands? Online. The friend who looks terrified at gigs is someone she met in the comments under a video.
For the odd kid, the one who does not fit, that is where your people are. They are not in your school. They are in Leeds and Glasgow and you find them with a phone.
Take that away and you have not saved her from the bullies. The bullies are in the corridor. You have just taken away the place she went to get away from them.
What We Had Instead
I should say how we did it, the odd kids of my day, because it is the one thing I know.
Fanzines. A few sheets of paper, typed or handwritten, cut and pasted with actual glue, photocopied at somebody’s dad’s work, stapled. You sold them at gigs for fifty pence or swapped them. In the back there were addresses. You wrote a letter to a girl in Hull who liked the same band and three weeks later she wrote back.
It was slow. It was brilliant. You had to want it. I am still friends with the girl in Hull. She is a midwife.
And all-ages gigs. Afternoon shows, no bar, three quid in. That was where you saw that other people like you existed, in a room, in the flesh.
A Small Plan
So I have made a decision, without a vote for once.
Dee is not running an app page for us. Not because I think she cannot. Because if the law says she should not have one, I am not going to be the reason she does.
She is going to make us a fanzine. I told her tonight. I said: paper, scissors, glue. Write about the bands you like. Interview us if you want. We will pay for the photocopying and sell it on the merch table next to the tea towel, and she keeps the money.
She said, “Like, on paper?” I said yes. There was a pause. Then she said, “That’s actually sick.”
And we are going to do an all-ages matinee before Ireland. Three o’clock, a Sunday, no bar. The drummer is nineteen and looks twelve, so he will fit right in.
Thursday
Dee has sent me a photo of a front cover. She has drawn the bass player with her fingerless gloves. It is better than our actual artwork.
I read the London Prat at lunch to see how the grown-ups were handling it. Its English satirical news on teenagers and phones notices that the people passing the law cannot put theirs down either, and its UK satirical news about school bullies has a Kelly-Ann in it, I would swear. My flatmate says Bohiney Magazine covers the American version, where they would sooner ban the school.
Kelly-Ann, if you are reading this: the haircut was a statement. I stand by it.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
