REAL LIFE CAN BE PRETTY AS A PICTURE

THIS week my daughter went on a surf camp.

Forty teenage girls went to the coast for five days. No parents, no boys and, more importantly, no mobile phones.

Imagine that. No Instagram, no Snapchat, no TikTok, no YouTube. No calculator, no Google Maps, no email, no internet, no Hot or Not app.

My daughter and her friends were looking forward to a week without phones. They were upbeat, knowing they would be forced to have real conversations rather than pass their time Snapchatting “I love you heaps BFF xxxx” to girls they met at a party three years earlier.

“It’s OK not to have phones, as long as no-one’s got them,” she said. “In fact, it’s more fun.”

Welcome to the world of Gen Z, where they’re partying like it’s 1999.

They’re going back to the future in more ways than one.

Before my daughter left, she wanted me to buy her a waterproof disposable camera because Gen Zers know things don’t really happen unless they are captured on camera.

As someone who’s only ever taken a photo on a smart phone, she was stumped with her Fujifilm QuickSnap

Superia 800 Marine 27 Exposure Camera.

“How does it work? What do you need the film for? How do you know what you are taking photos of? How do you know if your photos look good? Why can you only take 27 photos? 27! What do you do after that?” she asked me.

“Well,” I told her. “You take one shot at a time and hope for the best. You only know what you’ve got a photo of when you get it back from being developed.”

She looked at me with the kind of pity teenagers reserve for their tech-challenged parents.

“And how does it take selfies?” Sigh.

Disposable cameras were invented when I was about her age. Back then, they had names like “Fling 35”, “Funsaver” and “Imp”.

Before the internet was invented, we were forced to find fun wherever we could.

Kids her age don’t use real cameras, even disposable ones. Instead, they use apps on their phones to make their photos look as if they were taken with disposable cameras. The apps make their digital photos look old-school and grainy, with light streaks and an orange date stamp in the bottom corner from the year 1998.

On one app you have to take photos through a tiny pretend viewfinder and can only see the results of your photos at 9am the next morning. Young people love these products because they’re “authentic”.

Thus far, Gen Z’s contribution to world culture includes using “verse” as a verb, texting with their thumbs and their love of “authentic” products that make new things look old and thus inauthentically authentic.

It doesn’t take much to challenge a teen these days.

Just take away their phone and ask them to find a way to take a photograph, make a phone call, amuse themselves for a few days. Who knows? They might even get into the hang of doing things IRL* for a change.

(*That’s Gen Z talk for in real life.)