It was during a recent attempt attempt to watch Glee or old Peep Show episodes on 4OD that I was confronted by a rather exciting-sounding advert for a ‘dream boyfriend’. My curiosity was sustained for a while, as what appeared was a live video of a guy in his bedroom, asking you to give him orders to obey. I suggested ‘play air guitar’, made him ‘jump’ and ‘strip’; I asked him to ‘run’ and he got really angry. Then the fun stopped. A depiction of an abusive attack followed, and I came to the speedy realisation that this was not a fun, if not slightly perverse, distraction from the joys of streamed online television, but rather a government campaign to raise awareness of abuse. I asked myself, not for the first time, are these campaigns reaching the youngest generation of adults in Britain? And even if they are, do they have any effect?
To answer this question I first turned to friends, asking them what they thought about dreamboyfriend.co.uk. Some found it ‘hilarious’, some ‘too horrible to be funny’, some ‘wildly inappropriate’. In short, whilst the reviews were mixed, nobody seemed to say that it made them contemplate abuse or their role in identifying or preventing it.
Other campaigns aimed at minors and/or young adults include DrinkAware and various anti-smoking initiatives. Again, there seems to be an emphasis on either ‘new’ (Twitter et.al.) or visual campaign modes which inevitably tackle these delicate subjects in an embarassingly inadequate way. DrinkAware publishes a ‘Fresher Perspective’ blog where ‘Sophie will be giving a frank portrayal of university life and the role alcohol plays in it’. This week we find out the dark side of drinking on consecutive nights in a row, as Sophie confesses ‘I ran out of wick by Sunday morning, spending the next couple of days disorientated from lack of sleep’. Hardly surprising stuff; the kind of thing you could read in an actual student blog as opposed to one written by someone who is effectively employed by the Government to pretend to be a drunken teenager.
Presumably the reasoning behind these campaigns is not ‘let’s patronise these kids’ but rather an attempt at addressing crucial issues in a form both familiar and easily accessible to an increasingly unimpressionable generation. But this is missing the point: the fact that the current generation of teenagers and young adults is the first to grow up using the Internet, and consequently communicates information faster and in greater quantities than ever before, does not mean that merely communicating to them via the same medium will equate a message well received. The immeasurable increase in information to which this generation is exposed also means a heightened cynicism which results in a dormant sense of social responsibility where we laugh at abuse, binge drink – and more – at apparently unprecedented levels. This is not because the youth of today is unaware of the risks of drinking or the existence of abuse in a statistical sense, but rather because we have been over exposed to it via the mediums above described.
A society which is less naive as a result of the heightened possibility of communication must also acknowledge the effect this will have on the most naive members: its youth. If the government wants to reach our generation it needs to stop trying to involve us in a superficial interaction the way the entertainment industry (rightly) attempts. They need to provide facts in a stern and dry fashion, because the realities of abuse or binge drinking etc. are similarly stern and dry.
The statistics may seem ‘readily available’ since they are published online, but realistically our generation needs a pop-up advert you can’t ‘skip’ before Glee for our attention to be successfully maintained for longer than three seconds – and this is the one thing current campaigns have grasped about our generation: we need to be surprised into attention.
The campaign itself, however, need not be sensationalist once our attention has been grasped. Two women a week are killed by a current or former partner: there’s no need to be sensationalist or ‘approachable’ about it. It’s a reality which many more than we think will have experienced first-hand; it thus needs to be communicated in the most straightforward way possible, lest it not be understood as the straightforward atrocity that it is.
