Need your help with pre smartphone youth photos for new Rage Against the Screens campaign

[JustineMumsnet]

Hi all,
We’re looking for real photos from Mumsnetters’ gloriously pre-smartphone youths for a new Mumsnet ad campaign about getting kids off screens and back into real life (part of our wider Rage Against the Screen campaign).

We’re calling it Your Mum Thinks You Should Live a Little and the basic message to teens is:

1. Your mum was actually quite cool once
2. There’s more to life than staring at a screen and your mum wants you to go out and live it

It’s a celebration of the slightly chaotic, occasionally misspent, entirely offline lives we were living before social media arrived.
Think:

• blurry disposable-camera nights out
• giant trousers and tiny tops
• first festivals
• dodgy fringes
• snogging behind the bike sheds
• actual hobbies
• friendship groups that existed in 3D
• rave/goth/indie/skater/grunge pics
• terrible fashion choices
• chaotic holidays
• badly decorated teenage bedrooms
• anything that screams “1990s”

If you’d like to contribute, upload your photos here.
If we’d keen to use any as part of the campaign, we’ll of course contact you directly first.

We’ve shared a few examples below to get everyone started. Let us know what you think?
Thanks,
Justine

I'm seeing both "the problem there is there is nothing else to do!" and "there was nothing much to do" posts here. I would tend personally towards the latter side - I don't remember any of these mythical youth clubs and things when I was growing up pre-smartphone. We just went to each other's houses or to the park (or the landscaped green bit on the new build estate we mostly lived on). Is this a big city vs small town thing?

But also: going to the park or walking round town really wasn't that bad. I see plenty of teenagers still doing these things today! (Despite protestations on the internet that it's now too dangerous for anyone under the age of 16 to go outside.) Young people don't actually need their social lives to be mediated by phones or by adult-organised activities. I'm not saying the latter is a bad thing, but plenty of us grew up without either. And looking back historically, youth clubs and the like are a very recent development.

And looking back historically, youth clubs and the like are a very recent development.

I was at secondary school in the early 80s and the school youth club ran an evening a week for each age group. Village not far from a city.

We mostly hung out in pubs on Friday night at 15. Kids can't do that now, and can you imagine the threads on here if parents were OK with them doing so...