Main Piece:

The following is transcribed from a conversation between the informant and the interviewer.

Interviewer: So did your parents used to tell you any funny things growing up to get you to behave?

Informant: they still do haha they think I’ll actually believe a lot of that stuff even though I can just look it up on my phone.

Interviewer: haha yeah I guess scare tactics don’t work as well if you can look up the truth a second later. What kind of stuff do they tell you?

Informant: Well my mom loves to tell me to not make funny faces or else my face will get stuck like that, but I know that’s not true so I just do it more now and it’s way funnier haha

Background:

My informant is a teenager living in Southern California, currently attending highschool. He is the last one of his siblings to still be living at home, and his Dad travels a lot for work, so it is mostly just him and his mom at home. 

Context:

I talked to my informant over a facetime call during the 2020 Coronavirus Epidemic. I was going to meet with him in person, however, the quarantine made that impossible to do. 

Thoughts:

I thought it was funny how different my informant reacted to what his mom would tell him than how people my age would. It’s only a 4-5 year gap, however, my age group didn’t have iPhones growing up so we couldn’t research everything on the spot. I trusted what my parents said as the truth until much later in life, and even after getting an iPhone, I never thought to fact check everything they’d say. Maybe it’s a rebellious teen thing to want to prove your parents wrong or something like that, and iPhones have made that easier than ever.