Meet the Teens

12 March 2015

What’s it like being a teenager today?

We asked a group of teenagers to reveal their digital lives - their texts, tweets, Facebook updates, videos and phone calls in the year they turn 17. These twelve teens are brave enough to open up their phones, giving us a real insight into how they live and relate to one another in the ‘real’ world and online. 

Seventeen is a time when lives change fast, with new relationships, fluctuating friendships, pressures at school and trouble at home. They’ll soon be adults but for now they are just seventeen.

Smartphones, social networks and microblogging have revolutionised the teenage experience, supercharging the daily drama, gossip and heartbreak of adolescent life. The contributors span a wide range of teenage cliques - from popular sporty girls to geeky computer nerds - and the series will examine how these teen social hierarchies function and affect those caught up in them.

Filmed over a school year, Teens is a high-energy documentary series exploring classic rites of passage of teenagers today. With constant coverage from their mobile phones we have access to every moment of drama - drunken misadventures, relationship meltdowns, falling in love for the first time and revising for exams. The multi-media content is seamlessly integrated into the documentary to enhance, contextualise and reflect the lives of the Teens – just as it does in real life.

 

Harry M

Harry lives with his mum and two older brothers, and has a very frank and open relationship with his mum. He is confident, cheeky and not afraid to let anyone know what he is thinking. Harry has recently met a girl on Twitter, a concept that his mum just doesn’t understand.

Harry’s biggest passion in life is flying; he is so obsessive about his life-long ambition to become a pilot that it often takes precedence over anything else – something which frequently causes friction with girlfriend Rebecca.

Harry is the archetypal teenage boy – freezing up when his girlfriend tells him she love him, ignoring text messages and teasing his mum about the first time he has sex. We follow him as he experiences classic teenage rites of passage – meeting a girlfriend’s parents for the first time, sleepovers, falling in love and juggling school work with his social life.

 

Rebecca

Rebecca lives at home with her Mum and Dad, and spends most of her time at the local stables surrounded by horses – she hopes one day to become a veterinary nurse.

We first encounter Rebecca via her relationship with Harry M, after meeting on Twitter they made the brave transition to meeting in real life – and it doesn’t take long for the romance to blossom and the Facebook relationship status to become official.

Rebecca is bright and bubbly, and on the surface appears to be full of confidence. However, like many girls her age, she is deeply insecure about her appearance, particularly her acne, which has a tendency to reduce her to tears.

Shauna

Shauna converted to Christianity four years ago, an action which has set her apart from the rest of her family. She puts faith before anything else in her life and is amused that it’s her love life that everyone seems to focus on. Her parents want to know when she’ll bring a boy home, and are encouraging her to find a boyfriend. But Shauna hasn’t had her first kiss yet, she is saving this for a boy that she’d be happy to marry.

Shauna gets a glimpse of some of the excesses of student life when she visits her sister at University, but will she stay true to her religious convictions or be intrigued by their partying lifestyle? Back home she meets a nice boy called James, with the added bonus of shared faith. But now Shauna realises it's not just her religious beliefs standing in her way, but her low self-esteem is a big barrier too. She texts a friend: ‘I can’t expect a guy to like me when I can’t like myself.’ Will she have the courage to answer James's calls and go on a date? Or will her nerves get the better of her?

 

Louisa

Louisa lives at home with her Mum, her sister Rachael no longer lives at home and her Dad works abroad in Qatar – he comes home regularly but most of her communication with him is via Skype.

She met her boyfriend Jake at the stables, where she spends most of her time. Jake is five years older than her, which initially caused her parents some concern. However, if you are to look at the number of selfies on her phone it is clear that their relationship is definitely on the more ‘serious’ end of the spectrum.

Whilst most of our Teens can only speculate about what love feels like, Louisa and Jake exchange "I love you”s all the time. However, Jake's precarious health - he had a brain aneurysm at 17 and still suffers the effects - means the future they imagine together could be suddenly snatched away.

 

Harry D

Like most seventeen year olds, Harry doesn’t know what he wants to do with his life. As the new boy at school, he’s more interested in being popular and getting followers on twitter than focusing on his A-Levels.

He wants to go to University and is under pressure from his parents to knuckle down and get good grades. But it’s hard to concentrate when there are girls to talk to on Instagram, viral videos to be made and when your favourite thing in the world is twitter beef.

It seems that Harry’s penchant for ‘twitter beef’ is getting him a bit of a reputation at school and is definitely one way to get noticed by his peers.

 

Jess

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