Digital Age and Children

¶ … Beautiful Life and the Impact of Too Much Sharing: What Happens to Young Persons When They Have No Guidance Daisy's and Jake's spiral downward does not begin with the Internet video that Daisy shares with Jake, who forwards it on to a friend. It begins earlier -- on the evening of their "hook up" in a house where there is no adult supervision.

The Internet video is simply the manifestation of this "hook up" in the Digital Age, wherein information is shared instantaneously and privacy and publicity are blurred into one and the same thing.

While the problems presented by Daisy's video are compounded by many variables -- the school's administration's reaction, the mainstream media's need to further exacerbate an issue for ratings, the pornographic rabbit hole on the Internet -- the real problem can be found on a much more fundamental level: Daisy being 13 and Jake being 15 need more adult supervision in their lives. They are essentially without guidance, without leadership, without real friendship. They are adrift from the very beginning, left to try to figure life out on their own.

So it should be no wonder that they make mistakes. The real tragedy is that the adults in their lives so badly mismanage their children's lives that there is no real possibility for anyone to overcome any of the issues they face throughout the novel. There is only the sad, lonely feeling of isolation that lingers for all the characters at the end. This paper will show how the problem of the novel is the issue of isolation and a lack of true parental guidance.

Daisy and Jake are sexually attracted to each other early in the novel, even though Jake does not really like Daisy. They both just want to experiment in their sexual awakening. The problem here is that they have received no guidance on what sex is all about, what happens when sex becomes a real thing between two people, what the ramifications are. Their parents are completely out of the picture and nowhere to be found.

They have their own lives and seem to have forgotten that young teens need direction -- they are exposed to all sorts of traps in the modern world that can hurt them; parents should not be far away letting their children to stumble on their own. Thus, it is difficult to blame Jake or Daisy for their misadventures. Jake does not know what to do when Daisy sends a video of her striptease.

She does not even know why she does it really other than that she is feeling "sexy": Schulman writes that "the next part was hard to watch" (2) because what follows in Daisy's video is something that is so innocently done yet so crudely conceived that it is difficult for anyone to react appropriately to it. In fact, as Schulman notes, everyone will watch.

This is part of the problem too: there are too many voyeurs -- too many people willing to stand by and let young persons destroy their image, their reputations like this. Why, for instance, does the principal of the school feel the need to play the video again for Jake and his mother? What is the point? It is another inappropriate response -- one that hurts more and more people.

Why does the New York Post print a story about it? Why do news helicopters show up at the school? It is a preposterous reaction -- completely overblown and one that shows a complete lack of decorum and sensibility on the part of the all the adults involved. One wonders what would have happened had anyone stood up and denounced the entire spectacle as more obscene that what the 13-year-old girl did on camera if that would have prompted the whole circus to suddenly stop.

Probably not -- but one wishes it had happened. The problem is that the adults do not know what to think. They have lost touch with reality. They do not know the world in which they live. They do not remember what it is like to be a young person, growing into one's body, experiencing sexual attraction -- and all of this is even more problematic in the Digital Age because there is the danger of too much sharing.

What Daisy and Jake do is inappropriate -- but when the adults get involved, the entire thing turns into a farce: they make it ten times worse. Instead of trying to understand their children and not make a big deal out of what has transpired, adults in other places let it blow up into a huge scandal. All are responsible, from the headmaster to the media to Jake's father's workplace environment -- even to Jake's own parents.

Why were they not there in earlier days to provide guidance for Jake for this type of thing? When Jake's mother returns and Jake feels the need for guidance, she is nursing a hangover. What kind of responsible adult is this? It should be no surprise that the children in this novel are left to their own devices -- to modern devices that can fall into the wrong hands and ruin lives.

Jake turns his attentions to Audrey in an attempt to normalize his life and have something like real affection, yet even this is a dead end, for Audrey is also impacted by the emptiness in their lives and the lack of guidance any of them receive. As Schulman writes towards the end of the novel: "She started walking away from Jake and all the idiot boys, walking away from the prison of her youth and beauty and into the hard-fought-for loneliness of her future" (161).

Poor Audrey, like all the other characters, finds herself alone, detached, bewildered, oppressed, without a bright spot. In a world where people want to share, no one knows how to share or what to share. People judge, condemn, fight, obsess, and do all sorts of terrible things to one another because they do not know how to forgive, how to view one another as brothers and sisters, as friends, as people who should be helped rather than harmed. The world of the adults in the novel is all about exploitation.

When Daisy is exploited on the Internet, it is a shock to Jake's mother -- but she herself is failing to take responsibility for the world that she lives in. It is her world, her husband's world, the headmaster's world, the media's world. They inherited it and built it into what it has become.

Daisy and Jake and just now coming into it -- and the tragedy of it all is that they have not been adequately prepared to handle it: they have not even been adequately prepared to handle themselves or their own bodies. Their hormones are alive and screaming -- yet the adults seem to have no concern to give them the guidance they.