Humans have natural tendency to “blend in”, without which, we wouldn’t have the transparent trends creeping across the internet right now. Not all trends are bad. In fact I love some of these styles. Let’s take a look at those in the 12-20 demographic in The Internet Epidemic, Site Types and How to Recognize Them (A Field Guide).
Epidemic: Teen-bopperitis
Symptoms
- Giant celebrity grungy collage or blend header
- Because most of this age group can’t go into bars yet, they instead have two bars on their layout, one for the navigation and all that jazz and another for the content
- Block navigation that changes colour on hover
- Vast empty spaces to the left of the right
- Cutenews cutenews cutenews, WP causes too much headache for these suffering victims
- A huge list of tutorials all seem to be made in a hallucinationatory state, which probably occurred
- Expect words like Blend, PSDs, Celebrity Icons, Scribbles, OMGZGLITTERZ, [Stolen] fonts and
- No-Stealing Rules
Warning signs: If you see these on the sidebar - a scroll box of button rotations, an enormous list of affiliates, and About the Girl box that uses bold, italics, and underlines at a frequency of greater than 45%, a so-called admin panel that says “DO NOT CLICK” - please contact local pest control authorities immediately
Mutations: The teen-bopperitis may mutate into two forms: Good and Bad. Good contains relatively stylistic and complementary colours while Bad includes enormously long loading time and clashing colours that may bring anyone closeby to their knees (seek medical help ASAP!)
Treatment: Vows to give up their former ways and conversion to Maturity (Wordpress optional, convertees usually ditch the teen-bopper layouts because it’s too much of a pain to code it in WP and therefore resorting to simple minimalism Web 2.0)
Contagious level: Very high, mainly through affiliation
Citations, see these symptoms in their natural habitats: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8
Popularity: 3%
I'm Crystal, a Canadian who thinks she can take on the world simply by getting up each morning. They call me the caffeinated IBer wandering on the Internet. 
16 Responses
I did the overuse of underline, italic, and bold in the About Me on the sidebar two years back. I noticed a lot of people used that in entries, too. I thought it was way too hard to keep on using all those without meaning it, so I gave it up. I think people in their younger teens use it more so than the older teens.
LOL. Aaaand righteous indignation from swimshit & co. in three… two… one…
Flying under the radar Jordie, just flying under the Swimshit radar :blush:
I totally agree Yingna. Once people reach a maturity level (alas, some never do), they go through an extreme-do-over and change their standards as to what’s acceptable and what’s to be laughed at.
These are so fun to read, Crystal!! :] Haha.
Did you know…that if your content has a lot of underlining, bold, and italics, that it makes loading time MUCH slower? I learned that (the hard way) when I visited this MySpace site…njdsfhkasdhfjd.
^^
Haha, funny series! :3
Ahh, CuteNews, those were the days.
Insulting the websites of other individuals definitely shows a great deal of YOUR maturity.
@ Carrie - Thanks! Wow I didn’t know about the italic/bold/underline slowness, that’s odd isn’t it?
@ Sam - *points to the Holier-than-Thou sign above my head* What can I say!
Haha, this is hilarious. I think I’ve once went through this phase.. oh those were the days. :biggrin:
Ohhh you gave it a name :cute: I think I suffer from one of the symptoms but I think I’d die is someone called me a teenybopper. But it’s ok though.
Well, at least now I know there’s a name and a treatment for it. And there I was thinking I was diseased and hopeless.
Haha! I love this article :biggrin: Blending seems like the trend in blogsites now,I have to admit,I’m not good at it yet
If only they put up a tutorial on how they blend the header images instead :biggrin:
I’d be more than happy. : :blush:
I’m gonna proceed to the nest article! I’m already got excited!
I think I found my new read for the internet. You have made my visit so enjoyable. Everything was on point… which makes my jaw drop in amazement because I don’t know where you have been hiding all these times that I have been terribly bored.
To simply put my feelings into words: AMEN!
“Because most of this age group can’t go into bars yet, they instead have two bars on their layout, one for the navigation and all that jazz and another for the content ” haha!
and I agree when you said about the overuse of underlines, bold, italics, and even strikethrough. It’s so hard to read that!
I couldn’t understand some parts of this article Internet Epidemic: Part One, but I guess I just need to check some more resources regarding this, because it sounds interesting.
I think I went through Teenage Bopperitis xD.