You say you "can't imagine ever saying obvious racist things," but that's not really the point I'm trying to make.
I'm not defending this young chap and his friends. I'm simply saying that teens (like people of any age, but even more so) tend to do, and say, things that, in the past, have always remained buried in their teenage years.
Maybe it's just me but I grew up in an environment where I, and all my friends, had a whole range of different personae appropriate to different circumstances and social settings, which we tried to keep well apart. Parents and family saw various versions of me (somewhat edited, in that there were things about me my mother knew but not my father and vice versa), and my friends, school saw other versions, and different friends even more different versions, and there were various moments of high drama and low farce as different social settings and personae collided.
That's all part of being a teenager.
For me and my friends, though, most of the time we could keep all these different roles and social worlds apart, as we struggled to learn the rules of the wider world we were gradually discovering and learning to negotiate, and what happened in private generally stayed there, gradually lost to everyone's memory as time moved on.
Fourteen- or fifteen- year-old me was pretty much an historical figure for seventeen- or eighteen-year-old me, and I would have been as horrified to see her suddenly reappear in my life two or three years later as I would have been to meet a ghost.
That's gone now, though. Telescreens in 1984 were part of a dystopian nightmare. Now we voluntarily carry them round with us all the time, tracking and recording our movements and communications, and using them to conduct -- and thus record for posterity, whether we intend it or not -- so many conversations and social interactions, and all the while pretty much unwittingly pumping out masses of personal data about ourselves that companies and others use -- and sell to each other -- to know us better than we know ourselves.
Heavens, I can remember when the Berlin Wall came down and the full extent to which the security services of their respective countries spied on their citizens and the records they kept -- on paper, of course, in files they were desperately trying to destroy as the regimes fell.
Now, some 30-odd years later, we most of us voluntarily build up a more or less public archive on ourselves than the East German Stasi could never have dreamed of amassing, and which
the authorities in some countries can now demand we turn over to them as a condition of entry.
It's a completely different world. I've seen this particularly with the law relating to social media and so on -- here in the UK (and I would imagine in most other places, too) we've had to struggle with applying existing laws on harassment, disorderly behaviour and so on to situations that were undreamed of when the laws were written, with the result that, at least in the UK, people have found themselves sued for libel, or in court for grossly offensive or threatening communications as a result of passing on rumours and stories, or making bad jokes and tasteless remarks, as if they were gossiping with friends after too much to drink rather than broadcasting to a world-wide audience.
Laws that were perfectly reasonable and fit for purpose when they were written, and people communicated face to face or by phone or by letter, are constantly having to be revised and rewritten to take into account texts, social media and so on.
That was my real point, I think -- that the whole environment in which any sort of social transaction now takes place is so different from what it was only 20 or 30 years ago.
