Why Adults See Almost None of It

The presence of an observer changes the thing observed, and here the change is close to total.

The culture of the young is not hidden in the sense of being deliberately concealed, though some of it is. It is hidden structurally, because it exists only in the absence of adults, and an adult who arrives to look at it has by arriving ended it. This is not evasiveness. Some of the material is simply irrelevant when an adult is present: the elaborate procedures for settling a contested outcome are unnecessary when someone can be asked to adjudicate, so they are not performed, and an observer concludes they do not exist. The apparatus is real but conditional, and the condition excludes the observer.

There is also a filtering effect. What the young present to adults is a selected version, edited for the audience, and the editing is not deceitful so much as ordinary. Everyone edits themselves for their superiors. The consequence is that adults form their picture of the young from a stream of material that has already been shaped for adult consumption, and then treat that picture as complete. The parts most characteristic of the culture, its private jokes, its cruelties, its rituals, its long running narratives, are precisely the parts least likely to survive the filter.

The honest conclusion is that adults know less about this than they think, and that the gap is not closeable by better observation, because the observation is the problem. What can be done is to hold the picture loosely: to assume that a great deal is going on, that it has structure, that the structure serves purposes the participants understand, and that any account offered by an adult, including this one, is necessarily a reconstruction from fragments and memory. The remembered fragments are real evidence. They are just not evidence gathered from outside.