I recently did some reflecting about the uniqueness of culture today for young teens. Here are some things I came up with:

A Culture of Information
We all live in a culture of information; so in a sense, this is not unique to middle schoolers. What is unique is that this reality is shaping them during their early adolescent development in ways that wasn’t true prior to the last decade. Furthermore, they have always lived in a culture of information.

Almost every bit of information needed (and excessive quantities of information that are not wanted) is available with the click of a mouse in ways that shape our worldview. This is about access to information as much as the onslaught of information. The access of information shapes middle schoolers’ culture of immediacy, their sense of entitlement and their work ethic. The onslaught of information has a numbing effect. Because everything a middle schooler needs to know is readily available, and because they constantly are bombarded with suggestions and data of every sort, they are less attentive to all information.

A Culture of Immediacy
Consider the things you had to wait for as a middle schooler to which today’s middle schoolers readily have access. You take a picture on your camera or phone and see the immediate result. You hear a song on the radio and can instantly download it to your computer or phone. Considering a purchase? Browse instantly online and get others’ input via user comments. If you want, make an instant purchase and wait, at most, a day or two for the item to arrive.

If you’ve ever been “stuck” somewhere without your cell phone and tried to find a pay phone to make a call, you have been reminded of this shift.

Sure, most of us have access to all this immediacy; but we didn’t grow up with these conveniences as the norm. Today’s young teens never have known a world without instant everything. Doesn’t it strike you that our idea of old-school hominess includes making bread in a computer-enabled machine that does all the work?

Here’s a great example of this shift: For adults, e-mail communication changed everything. We were able to send and receive written communication without writing by hand and going through the “hassle” of using the postal system. Written communication became almost instantaneous, but no one predicted that teenagers would dispose of e-mail as too slow and clunky, opting for the intensely more immediate communication pathway of text messaging. We adults saw text messaging as a utilitarian means of quick planning. Teenagers turned it into a social phenomenon.

Middle schoolers don’t have a willingness (or the ability) to wait for anything. Our culture has trained them to expect everything instantly. Patience is a rough one, “delayed gratification” is a foreign concept, and slowness can have a deeply profound impact on their lives as it’s something they simply do not experience daily.

A Disposable Culture
Along with everything being accessible instantly, we live in an era of disposability. Some things, such as disposable contact lenses and printer ink cartridges, are only interacted with as throw-away items. Many more things have a sense of disposability to them, from cell phones to iPods to laptop computers. Even an MP3 file seems more disposable than a physical CD.

This “use it a bit, then toss it” mentality has, as we said with other aspects of the middle-school world, been the norm for kids their whole lives. So, it naturally flows into other realms of their thinking in ways that are new to this generation.

Relationships, knowledge, beliefs, affiliations, trust and truth all have a sense of disposability to them, also.

The subconscious thinking is: If something new is going to be replaced next week anyhow, why should I be attached to this now?

A Culture of Consumerism
It’s time for us to own our complicity in the culture middle schoolers currently live. This is most true regarding consumerism.

A significant portion of the still-forming identity of today’s middle schooler is just that: I am a consumer. They have learned this from the obvious places, such as advertising everywhere. (Do you remember when major sports arenas weren’t “sponsored” or the era before ad revenue as the primary fuel of the Internet? Do you remember when “product placement” was a term you didn’t know?).

Schooling in being a consumer comes from more sources than the marketing world. Almost everything and everyone in the life of young teens treats them like consumers.

Treating young teens like consumers (ready for the “ouch”?) is what most of our churches and youth ministries do, also.

This is one of those “less neutral” parts of middle-school culture that we can work to undo, or at least we can be intentional about not adding to it!

An Intense but Temporary Culture
Some of this is developmental. In their effort to sample and discover, middle schoolers often immerse themselves in an interest, affinity group or value system. They try these things on as if it’s the last they’ll ever try on, as if they’re going to give their life to this new direction.

Adults tend either to try things on more tentatively or immerse ourselves in something we will stick with for a long time. Not so, usually, with middle schoolers. Middle schoolers give themselves to the interest, relationship, choice, value system or belief that’s in their faces; but they easily discard them for the next sampling exercise. This is a cultural issue in addition to a developmental issue, because it’s what they observe all around them, especially in other young teens. It’s considered normative.

Adults might think, “Why don’t you ever stick with anything long enough to really know if it’s for you?” Their peers sure aren’t saying that to them.

A Networked Culture
Obviously, this is a huge shift in young teen culture. The fact that most young teens (not all of them) have cell phones that instantly connect them with parents and friends is a whole new world of networked relationships. Text messages, MySpace, Facebook and other social networking tools have created a middle-school culture that exists in bits and bytes.

This is a fascinating shift. While relationships are as important as ever, these relationships are more dependant than they have ever been—or in all of history, for that matter—on the written word! Friendships are no longer primarily dependant on physical proximity, audible vocalization and listening. Friendships and social networks of middle schoolers are more dependant on networks played out over transmitted data.

As such, the idea of “who’s in your network?” question of identity and affinity is more than a company’s marketing tag. Young teens leverage online and text as the foundations and the buttresses of their relational cathedrals.

A Driven/Sedimentary Culture
This is an interesting, paradoxical tension in today’s middle-school culture. On one hand, the pressures on middle schoolers haven’t been as great in recent years as they are now. Today’s young teens are often driven in ways that are almost scary. Some of this driveness comes from their own choosing, but most of it is an external driving that comes from parents and schools.

Not all kids play sports, but for those who do involvement in sports is less and less about having fun and getting exercise and more about the future. What doors will this effort open in the future? Sports are seen in a utilitarian sense, as a means to get somewhere in life. In other words, the pursuit of the American dream (of financial freedom and career success) is more competitive and fleeting than ever. Sports are seen as one of many Lego pieces that will build an edge over others, increasing the likelihood of “success.”

Sports is only an example. We see this driven reality play out in the lives of countless non-sporting middle schoolers. The message seems to be: You must be the best at something if you hope to be successful in life.

This plays out academically, also. Not every kid is college-bound, but the pressure to succeed academically permeates much of teenage culture. We’re pretty sure there was no such thing as SAT-prep for middle schoolers when we were that age.

With all of this pressure and driveness, there’s an odd tension at play in their lives; and it’s this: They are more sedentary than ever. They don’t move as much. They watch more TV, sit at computers, sit in their rooms and text friends, sit in front of gaming systems for hours on end. The notion of a pick-up game of stickball in the street has an old-timey Norman Rockwell vibe these days.

So? As middle-school youth workers, we have to “exegete culture,” just like a good preacher exegetes a Bible passage. We’re called to minister to young teens in the midst of the real world in which they live. So these little ruminations are just my attempt to put into words some of my attempts to understand the world of the kids with whom I’m working.

Portions of this article are excerpted from the author’s upcoming book, “Middle School Ministry” (Zondervan/Youth Specialties, 2009).