i've noticed an uptick in the last couple years of new outlets doings stories about the slang -- "kids are saying {skibidi, rizz, 67} now, here's what it means."

kids have always had slang, but i don't remember there being news reports about it in the past.

and i think the difference now is that parents get freaked out when some new slang takes over seemingly out of nowhere.

in the past, adults were aware of the media their kids were consuming. they overheard them talking on the phone with their friends. they saw kids hanging out together in real world physical spaces.

but now? kids an entire social life and media ecosystem is private and inside their phone. parents don't have visibility into "kid world" the way they used and it freaks them out.

they worry about bad things happening, but mostly they just worry that their kid has a whole private life that they don't know anything about and they're not part of it.

"Here's what the kids are saying and what it means" is a staple of slow news days.

Here's a fun example from the early nineties: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grunge_speak

Are you sure you haven't just gotten old enough that you're now in the target demographic for "here's what the kids are saying" stories? :)

> they worry about bad things happening, but mostly they just worry that their kid has a whole private life that they don't know anything about and they're not part of it.

i had a whole other life my parents knew nothing about, and this was way before unsocial media. the fact that we're willing to call "friends" online a social life is yet another example of modern times. so again, having "secret" lives from parents isn't new to being online. it's teens looking to push the boundaries, explore, and just do things different from the parental units. nothing about "kids today" is really different. Boomers had that damn rock-n-roll and hippies as an example. It's more of the same in a different shape.