Teenagers make up 1.8 billion of the world’s population, yet not many expect anything extraordinary from teenagers. However, contrary to what society thinks, teenagers have done some amazing things, and can affect the world in ways other than creating new methods of sass and making meme jokes.
Recently, Target’s credit card system was hacked by an unknown person. When the creator of the malware used was announced, many were stunned, because, rather than the designer being a highly experienced and educated adult, the designer was a 17-year-old Russian boy. This software affected over 110 million Target customers in 2013 from Black Friday to mid-December.
Although the teen shouldn’t have done it, making a computer program to hack into a major company’s finances and manage to puzzle police and government associations for over half a month is extremely impressive. Even though he was only 17, he managed to grab the world’s attention for more than a few seconds, do something memorable, and gave Target a good learning experience.
Senior Roberto Ojeda said, “On one side I commend [the teen that hacked into Target] for his wit, but I do not commend stealing people’s money and I think he should be using those skills to infiltrate somewhere that would be better for the government or something.”
It’s not horrible that Target was hacked into a by a 17-year-old either; some of the world’s teens are smarter than adults who have lived for decades. Many seem to think because teenagers are younger they are less able, that no matter how descent of a point one makes, if they’re younger it isn’t viable; people can impact the world at any age.
Freshman Jeremy Ecker said, “[I think teens are as impactful as adults] because if they set their mind to it, they can do anything that can help the world.”
Although teenagers do some not so commendable things, they also do quite a few positive things.
Quizlet is a site used globally by teachers, students, and schools alike. Many Seminole teachers have their own classes and students have created groups to study with their friends. Few know that Quizlet was created by 15-year-old Andrew Sutherland for his French class. Sutherland built the website from scratch on his own just to study with friends online. That’s determination, and he had enough patience and intelligence to create an entire website only to study. This drive, though perhaps rare, indicates that teenagers are capable of more than their age suggests.
“I feel like adults may not trust [teens] enough and it’s because of our age. I feel like they are restricted [because] adults think they’re less able,” said freshman Sabrina Chowdhury.
There are also many people under 18 who are worth millions of dollars, such as Ashley Qualls who created WhateverLife, a website that provides free Myspace layouts and HTML codes, and is currently worth $4 million. She created the website at only fourteen to share her designs.
Coding tutorials are offered free online in video form on places such as Youtube, and in class form on websites such as codeacademy.com.
Teenagers easily do extraordinary things and their talents are not recognized by society; without all these small advancements teenagers contribute to the world, society would be very underdeveloped and many ideas would not have been introduced into the world.