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Brighton5 t-shirt designs
Our teens designed t-shirts – don’t they look great printed!

We’ve been keeping an eye on the weather as Saturday approaches. It’s D-Day for filming our crowdfunder. We’ve been amazed at the huge amount of support people have given us, from directing the shoot, providing equipment and speaking on camera to photographing the events of the day and offering to make teas. (Thank you all!) Some of our teens have even signed up for getting up at the crack of dawn to get a shot of the sunrise on the beach!

We’ll be wearing our brand new Brighton5 T-shirts, all designed by our teens. (Suspect there’ll be a bit of a bun fight over who gets which one!)

We’ll post updates over the day on social media – Twitter, Instagram and Facebook – so give us a wave!

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The on-going revelations about Facebook and Cambridge Analytica’s doings has made me wonder how much attention teens are paying to what it all really means for them. When I asked my teen what she thought of it all when the revelations broke, she was non-plussed. What revelations?

And whilst we’ve seen myriad news and think pieces about the issues, how much of it is aimed at the heaviest users of social media – young people? Not much, I suspect.

We’ve seen old white men addressing Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg in Congress in the US last week showing just how much they don’t get about the platform and how it works. There’s been a discussion about “Facebook embeds”  (Facebook staff embedded in political campaign teams to help them optimise their strategies) which has huge implications for how the electorate in everything from the US election to the EU Referendum may have been manipulated. There has also been many accounts from people who’ve managed to download the umpteen gigabytes of data from their Facebook and Google accounts revealing just how much is tracked and kept – every link we click on, every map we search, every email… including news that mobile phone text messages had been scraped from Facebook user’s data (why was Facebook holding that data anyway??).

“The covert nature of persuasion on the social web means that effective marketing is no longer something you can see or even perceive, but something which through a thousand “touch points” might subtly change your behaviour without your noticing.” Emily Bell, The Guardian, 16 April 2018

My teen is of voting age. How many of them (and us) have been fed unscrupulous political ads from dubious “news” pages on Facebook and the like? How much personal information are our teens giving away from their ubiquitous use of social media? And more importantly, how much do they understand about the exchange of a “free” service for their data? Who has the power here?

Facebook seems to be cleaning up its act in a hurry. Their share price tanked in recent weeks (though it rose again after Zuckerberg’s Congress appearance). New European data privacy laws mean that they have to act in any case. It’s good to see they’ve drafted clearer terms and conditions (hands up who’s read any social platform’s T&Cs? Would your 13 year old understand them?) and last October they announced they were launching a public archive of political adverts  so we can all see (presuming we’re interested enough to go look) who’s behind what.

Let’s not forget that there are some brilliant people doing amazing work by using social media platforms to bring communities together. But we also need to teach our kids (and perhaps ourselves) to be sceptical and inquisitive about these platforms, to ask the questions about who owns what and what we’re exchanging for a so-called “free” service. We’ve put this one high up on the Brighton5 to do list. Watch this space.

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I have just read Molly Ringwald’s article in The New Yorker where she revisits the John Hughes teen flick through the #MeToo lens. The Brighton5 (adult) team had already started commenting on it on our WhatsApp group – comments like “it’s great to think about the content (for BTN5) in terms of legacy and how it might be interpreted in years to come.” It got me thinking about John Hughes’ ability to write content that so accurately reflects what it’s like being a teenager, and how hard it is to write scripted content and get it spot on.

The Brighton5 project is unconventional in so many ways – in meetings I often describe it as being just like teenager: it doesn’t work in straight lines (development), it has suddenly grown and bolted off down the road and I am constantly trying to catch it up! One thing I am learning as we go through the development phase is the power of listening. Our Brighton5 teenagers NEED to be heard. At the moment, Brighton5 seems to be writing itself, with careful guidance and positive spirit.

So, what about ‘The Breakfast Club’? My teenage girls LOVE that film. If I put it on the TV they are guaranteed to join me on the couch (a rare thing!). I asked my eldest teen why she loves it? “It’s relatable, Mum, it’s about kids accomplishing things without adults. At the end of the day, it’s a feel-good film.”

So there you have it. Three goals for Brighton5. Sorted. So far the development has been the most exciting and terrifying experience of my working life. But who said any of this would be easy? One thing is for certain, we will listen, so they can make.

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Something amazing happened in Washington DC on Saturday. After just 5 weeks of organising, Parkland students led a march of over 850,000 people calling for a change in gun laws after 17 of their fellow students and teachers had been shot and killed on campus.

They raised $3.5m from 42,000 people through a GoFundMe campaign for the march, and another $2m was given by celebrities. They used the press interest around the shooting to speak out and call for change. They’re also targeting the November elections to support those calling for gun law reform and vote out those who don’t.

It’s time – long overdue – that we give our teens a voice. A vote. A say in their futures.

The students eloquently summed up Saturday’s march in The Guardian:

“We Parkland students have a platform never seen before. We plan to utilize this voice, because it is our own, and because it is our right. We will use it to advocate for legislation that will not only stop the mass shootings, but also the gun violence in cities like Baltimore, Chicago, and DC.

The movement to end gun violence has been active for a long time, and there’s always a breaking point – a moment which changes everything. I hope Saturday will prove to be one of those moments. I believe it can be it. This is just the beginning of the galvanization of a movement that will transform the culture of America, hopefully into a nation where gun violence is not normal, and not OK.

On Monday, I will be back in Parkland. I will continue to go to class and sports games, continue to write for my paper. But I will also continue to fight, and so will others.

We are articulate. We have opinions. We demand change. And we are not going anywhere.” 

Rebecca Schneid, the co-editor in chief of the Eagle Eye, Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School’s newspaper in Parkland, Florida, writing in The Guardian.