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Colonel Fazackerley
by Charles Causley
Colonel Fazackerley Butterworth-Toast
Bought an old castle complete with a ghost,
But someone or other forgot to declare
To Colonel Fazak that the spectre was there.

On the very first evening, while waiting to dine,
The Colonel was taking a fine sherry wine,
When the ghost, with a furious flash and a flare,
Shot out of the chimney and shivered, ‘Beware!’

Colonel Fazackerley put down his glass
And said, ‘My dear fellow, that’s really first class!
I just can’t conceive how you do it at all.
I imagine you’re going to a Fancy Dress Ball?’

At this, the dread ghost made a withering cry.
Said the Colonel (his monocle firm in his eye),
‘Now just how you do it, I wish I could think.
Do sit down and tell me, and please have a drink.’

The ghost in his phosphorous cloak gave a roar
And floated about between ceiling and floor.
He walked through a wall and returned through a pane
And backed up the chimney and came down again.

Said the Colonel, ‘With laughter I’m feeling quite weak!’
(As trickles of merriment ran down his cheek).
‘My house-warming party I hope you won’t spurn.
You MUST say you’ll come and you’ll give us a turn!’

At this, the poor spectre – quite out of his wits –
Proceeded to shake himself almost to bits.
He rattled his chains and he clattered his bones
And he filled the whole castle with mumbles and moans.

But Colonel Fazackerley, just as before,
Was simply delighted and called out, ‘Encore!’
At which the ghost vanished, his efforts in vain,
And never was seen at the castle again.

‘Oh dear, what a pity!’ said Colonel Fazak.
‘I don’t know his name, so I can’t call him back.’
And then with a smile that was hard to define,
Colonel Fazackerley went in to dine.

I was having a (face-to-face) conversation with an old friend who is also a teacher about devices and adolescents today. He mentioned how teens in his school don’t talk to each other, but instead use a device and usually a social networking site (SNS) to communicate with others. I explained to him briefly what my view was, but wanted to use this forum to make it clearer and more concrete for myself.

My vision begins with a dose of psychology. While working with one of my university professors on a research project, Erik Erikson’s concept of an adolescent’s identity crisis came to me. This was a term I knew, but didn’t understand enough, so I read a little more, and learned about the context in which the identity crisis occurs. Erikson says teens take a break from “real life” and experiment with different identities and values. This is called a moratorium. What I came to understand and believe is an identity crisis is not when an adolescent (or adult) is simply lost or confused, but when they are actually experimenting and trying to see what adult they want to be.

Continued work on teens and social media led me to the sociologist, Erving Goffman. Erving Goffman used the concept of stages, frontstage and backstage (and off stage), in his work The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Simplified, frontstage is a known “performance,” or presentation, for an “audience” and for approval. Backstage the “performer” or person sheds their “role” and is more authentic, though this does not mean there is no audience. The audience is smaller, and the “performance” is not quite as rehearsed, or it is a rehearsal for a future frontstage performance.

So, there is duality to both Erikson and Goffman. “Real life” and a moratorium, and frontstage and backstage respectively. Therefore, I believe we can (and should) overlay Goffman onto Erikson. Teens need to experiment and try on new roles and identities (backstage) before choosing one for “real life” (frontstage).

Moving from the theoretical to the practical, this backstage experimentation would have been done face-to-face for previous generations. The opportunities for experimentation were limited to the social circles and situations adolescents would encounter. Today, SNS and handheld devices provide a plethora of social circles and situations for teens to experiment with and in. Each SNS (mostly) has a different set of values and characteristics which allow the adolescent to enter and exit from them (almost) whenever they choose.

This freedom of choice through SNS and ease of access with a handheld device make face-to-face interactions restricting and uncomfortable for teens. Most face-to-face interactions become a frontstage performance and more “real life” than adolescents wish to have, so they avoid them or are uncomfortable and unprepared to perform easily in them. A handheld device becomes the limited and chosen audience for the backstage and the discarding of roles which permits comfort and encourages experimentation (even though the audience is larger than any frontstage face-to-face performance would be).

What does this all mean? It means schools, teachers, adults, parents, media, institutions, etc. must make teens aware of what is happening when they use devices and SNS, and more importantly, create opportunities for young people to interact face-to-face frequently without adult supervision to create a backstage environment for experimentation.