It had to happen: after the blooming decades of the American teen movies - formed by the typical characters of a high school, emphasizing the power of the cliques - a new era has come to the (second) life of teenagers. The era of the manipulative, superindulged, Appletini-swilling private school kids.

Not so long ago teens were against anything that adults considered as basic principles of behaviour. But today, no movie teenager rebels against adult authority. It’s a teen world, where the enemy is not authority anymore; the enemy is other teens and the social system that they are forced to serve…

As the new TV show - called Gossip Girl has become the number one favourite by the youth of the 21st century, so has the presence of viciousness lurked into the walls of high schools. We know that most TV shows are fiction, the situations are fake, the scenes are edited, but the line between reality and fantasy gets blurrier and blurrier. Furthermore they carry the artifice to such an extreme that when these kids drink, hook up, and read gossip about themselves on their smartphones (that cost an arm and a leg), they seem like avatars instead of flesh and blood people.

In this show we can meet a wide range of characters including the severe, megarich playboy lusting for power, while on the other hand there is the self-centred, high and mighty mascot of the Upper East Side, not to mention the bunch of wannabes from Brooklyn…

„Most teenagers do not understand the realities of the world into which they are about to enter. The high schoolsociety is an exciting but tough environment.”

Apparently, there is a real life Gossip Girl at a campus gossip site. The site -juicycampus.com - reportedly features anonymous reports about real life students. The site mentions students by name in threads about popularity, weight and sexual encounters. Even uglier topics include anti-Semitism and homophobia – names are named.

Is a real life Gossip Girl too much?

The following is a true story proving that viewing violence in the media can influence an individual’s subsequent aggression.

The gossip began when Emma and Katie learned that another girl from school, Rachel, had been hanging out with Katie’s boyfriend. To get back at their classmate, the girls turned to MySpace and together posted a list of threats against Rachel.

“I told Emma that I wanted to slit Rachel’s throat.”

”As a result of my daughter’s online gossip, we could potentially lose everything,” says Megan, whose daughter, Emma, was convicted of a misdemeanor two years ago.
”The MySpace conversation was an inside joke” says Emma, “but to everyone else it was probably mean and violent.”
Katie reveals, “I told Emma that I wanted to slit Rachel’s throat. We were going to smash her head.”
”And Emma was just going along with it, kind of fueling her fire. It wasn’t good,” says Megan.
Another classmate saw the online conversation and brought it to the school.
“Emma and I got called down to the office and we saw our parents in there,” Katie recounts. “It was then that we realized that everything we had done was a lot worse than what we thought.”

Has Gossip Girl simply broadcast the students’ types to the world? Or has the drama so influenced the culture that students are now taking cues from its imaginary world?

Most teenagers do not understand the realities of the world into which they are about to enter. The high school society is an exciting but tough environment.They don’t realize that they are in a position of incredible power when they ask themselves questions like, “Who am I?” and “Who do I want to become?” They are the only ones who can answer these questions. The only ones who can choose exactly who they will become in the future…