ABSTRACT
In 2006 we re-partnered with two of the New Zealand advertising planners we had worked with on the trans-Tasman identities project discussed in Chapter 5. Our collective goal in this project, as it is in this chapter, was to explore the social constitution and expression of emotions among young adults in the United States, United Kingdom, and New Zealand. The genesis and intellectual impetus of the project came from our partners as well as ourselves and incorporated anthropological and advertising concerns, both theoretical and practical. On our side of things, we had been toying for a few years with the question of "When did boring become an emotion?" This question had captured our imaginations in the course of a 2003 project on teens and chocolate. 1 As part of this study we had asked varied teens to keep the wrappers of all the candy they ate for a ten-day period preceding the time of our ethnographic visits. We asked them to make notes on each wrapper telling us where they were, the time of day, what they were doing, with whom, and what their mood was at the time. To our surprise, even given an ingoing expectation of teen expression of restlessness or anomie, was the number of times that teens—quite independently of one another—wrote "bored" as their mood. "Bored" was written as the accompanying mood while eating chocolate and reading a book alone, while playing Sims with friends, when in a store with parents or in a car with parents and siblings, as well as when eating alone in the kitchen. What they wrote as their mood was bored, bored, bored. While "happy" was unquestionably another pole of emotion, expressed at other chocolate times by the teens, bored stood out for us. We wanted to think more about it. We could not help but wonder if there were connections with ubiquitous technologically mediated stimulation. Was it the presence of the Internet, e-mail, IM-ing, cell phones, video, digital games, and television in the lives of teens that produced this sentiment? Working on this project promised us the frame and fodder to think further about it. 2
