Engagement and Abstention

Abstract

Everyday life has also changed, and because we are involved in this process day in and day out, as time passes we cease to see how thorough it is, especially for today's children and youth. All of the Tinas and Svens, Markuses, Olivers, Tanias and Sashas are today growing up in an everyday culture that, to them, has always been thoroughly modernized. This is so self-evident for children that they see nothing remarkable about it. The thoroughly modernized everyday culture is a loose fabric consisting of themes, images, models of behavior and perception, fashions, and even the meaning of everyday objects. These have their effects as well: they integrate children and youth into their world. A magazine such as Bravo, for example, provides its readers with a broad range of subjectively significant behavioral and normative standards, especially in the compendious letters to the editors. It is especially clear among youth from immigrant foreign families how thoroughly they are socialized by the everyday culture: hairstyles, preferences for specific pop groups, stickers, and their manner of speaking, themes, styles of behavior, and group rituals comprise the building blocks of their pictures of the world and themselves and the way they present themselves to others in their peer groups. This modernized everyday culture is highly effective: it makes its way into the pores of lifestyles and mindsets and cannot be confined to one "domain," as, for example, leisure time. Nor can this socializing effect be redefined in all its aspects as a task of education. Everyday culture exerts its effect beneath and alongside the objectives of education and, naturally, not infrequently through them as well. To put it crudely, there is ever more socialization and less education. Young people are increasingly turning toward one another and less to traditional cultural aspects. Let me single out two characteristics of this everyday culture.