The Notebook Girls
This is why adolescent literature is so interesting to me. The genre is getting more and more ballsy, as publishers put out books that seem to accurately depict the world of teenagers, without censoring language or experience. This book is taken directly from the notebook passed between four girls at NYC’s Stuyvesant High School and looks just like that. The pages have been printed in their handwriting (I think you can see an example at the website above) and include the doodles and obscenities just like most of us wrote in our high school notebooks. This one just happened to be printed and comes with its own accompanying website.
That’s the interesting thing, really — that this was published as a *book* and not a LiveJournal or myspace page. I mean, these girls took this all the way to the point of getting it published as a paper text, which still carries much more cachet than a webpage, no matter how many Facebook pages are out there. In publishing a paper version, they were able to capture the look and almost the exact feel of the original, thereby giving the reader something of the sense of reading a private diary shared between four girls, a more individual, traditional reading experience than that of reading a LiveJournal or myspace page littered with links and blasting music. On the other hand, this book wasn’t cheap and isn’t nearly as easily available to as many people.
It’s so interesting to me the kinds of media decisions that have to be made by teens today about how they want to communicate a message — and the kinds of media available to them. Perhaps those decisions aren’t the best ones; certainly teens are playing with the boundaries of public and private in ways that can be both exhilarating and dangerous, but the metacognitive implications shouldn’t be ignored. Teens have the ability to think through the decisions they make and the range of options open to them in complex, savvy ways — if we push them to do so.
May 27th, 2006 at 8:55 pm
sound very cool. I love adolescent girls. I could become a stalker. (A real one; not just a cyber stalker.)