ЛовиA GLOBAL TEENAGERMusic, television and movies do not respect national 1boundaries . Today one can hear rock-and-roll in the Chinese metropolis of Shanghai [0SBN9hai]. It is common to find people wearing Levi jeans or T-shirts in every place of the world. Japanese television shows MTV from London. US films are popular worldwide. American painters are influenced by European artists. Mexican-style fast-food restaurants or Japanese sushi bars can be found in different corners of the planet.What about a teenager? Everyone can see that English plays an important part in a teenager's world. It is the dominant language in youth style. English is a way in which teenagers across the world communicate with each other and share a common culture. The example of this is the existence of graffiti written in English in many different countries. Teens are more ready to learn English on the streets of cyberspace than in the classroom. Young people learn English from their pen pals and friends on the Internet and it is not always the same as the English they learn in the classroom. In fact, teenagers in Ukraine may feel he/shehas more in common with Internet friend in Norway than with other young people in their own country. Teens these days can chat online with their friends thousands of kilometres away. Young people around the globe are beginning to hang around together on the Internet as they used to on the street. The effect of the Internet on a teenage boy enables him to find thousands of people around the world whose preferences in music or reading are similar to his own. The strongest force in international youth culture today is pop music. Music has universal appeal. The popularity of the satellite TV channel MTV is the example of this: their pop videos play in every place of the planet, from Dallas to Stockholm, from Rome to Kyiv, and since most of the songs are in English, kids from all over the world learn to sing in English, too. A Ukrainian teenager knows that he may live in a small town of Horlivka but he is right in the centre of the main trend, he feels he is exactly in tune with all his/her unseen friends from the Internet. Though, young people are individuals and must be encouraged to celebrate together their individual and cultural differences. They express themselves, for example, in Weblish, the new shorthand English used in text messaging and in the Internet chat rooms. Weblish is a kind of 'slang' — idiomatic English which often breaks the rules of correct English. For example, capital letters are not used. 1 Here is a glossary of some of the key expressions and symbols used in chat rooms.
