Teen fiction isn’t generally on PSFK’s radar, but a recent perusal of the Young Adult section at the bookstore got us thinking: teenage girls are growing up in an age where constant communication and gadgets are as everyday as lip gloss and rumors. How has technology changed the way teens interact, socialize, live? We talked to Shallon Lester, one of the writers of Hot Mess, Random House’s most recent teen fiction release, to learn a bit about how technology has shaped the lives and angsting of teenagers today. Shallon, the resident Gossip Girl at the NY Daily News and herself an avid video blogger, offers some insight on what’s making teen girls go “OMFG”:
What’s Hot Mess about?
Hot Mess is a saucy tale of two teenage girls from suburbia on the loose in Manhattan for the summer. Sensible Emma and naive Rachel subtlet a room from party girl Jalya, who’s bedded half the bold-face names in the gossip columns and tries to teach them a thing or two about life in the big city. But when Emma’s awful internship turns out to have a blonde-haired, broad-shouldered silver lining named Colin, one little lie soon turns the summer into one giant fiasco.
How are the characters in your novel a reflection of teenage girls today and the technology they use? How does technology/constant communication play a role in today’s teenage girl’s life?
Unsupervised in the city, the characters are experimenting with adulthood for the first time, which means having to be more saavy about the way they socialize and communicate. There aren’t recesses where all your friends will congregate and big football games to ensure you’ll run into your crush. They realize they have to be more thoughtful about their texts and emails, since people you meet don’t have anything to contrast you against.
What makes a teenage girl today different than one 5 years ago? 10 years ago?
Five years ago I don’t think teenagers had grasped that they could abandon the making phone calls altogether and just text incessantly–it was still the Age of Confrontation, not like today. Ten years ago no one even had cell phones. But AIM was going strong, as it was a decade ago, but since file sharing wasn’t yet perfected, it was hard to share pervy photos or incriminating videos. Some might say this was a good thing for the collective innocence of America, but I think it just made people virgins longer. And nobody likes virgins. Trust me, I was one once. And I, like, never got laid.
How much is pop culture today affected by the internet, pervasiveness of mobile devices/communication, new forms of entertainment? Can you give a few examples of how this comes up in your book?
To try and extract pop culture from technology is impossible; they’re one in the same. The old addage is true: it’s not the message, it’s the medium. Would people still read Perez Hilton if it were a weekly magazine instead of a blog updated every two hours? Probably not, since the guy is about as funny as a box of severed hands. Children’s hands. A faster exchange of information ups the demand and so we find ourselves making celebrities out of nobodies (i.e. The Hills) just to have something to fill our insatiable hunger for entertainment. This sad fact is highlighted in the book, in one instance, as the characters get their picture taken for Jossip.com who they describe as “kind of the paparazzi.” In another scene, Emma confirms that she and her ex are truly over after he fails to leave her a happy birthday comment on her MySpace page–the final straw.
Watch Shallon’s videoblog about the book here.
Hot Mess: Summer in the City
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