Between fashion and risk: weak signals in the new youth cultures

When is a youth trend simply culture, and when does it begin to turn into a security challenge?

“Aura battles,” memes, viral challenges, new ways of speaking, aesthetics that appear and disappear within days, video games, influencers and artificial intelligence. To many adults, some of these expressions may seem strange or hard to understand. Yet behind these trends lies a much deeper transformation: they are changing the ways in which new generations build identity, belonging, recognition and relationships.

For citizen security, the question should not simply be why young people adopt these fashions, but when a cultural trend begins to generate conditions of vulnerability or new risks for people and for coexistence.

The answer requires avoiding two extremes: criminalizing what is different or unfamiliar, but also ignoring social transformations that may anticipate new risk scenarios.

A youth trend is not a security problem, but it may contain signals that anticipate new challenges.

A generation that lives online

In Argentina, the Kids Online Argentina 2025 study, carried out by UNICEF and UNESCO, shows that 95% of children and adolescents aged 9 to 17 own a mobile phone with Internet access. The average starting age is around 9.6 years. More than half use artificial intelligence tools.

Digital life is no longer a space separate from everyday life. It is where friendships, identities and communities are built, but it is also where conflicts, situations of violence and new forms of victimization can spill over.

The contributions of Castells (2006) on the network society, of boyd (2014) on the social practices of adolescents in networked publics, and of Jenkins et al. (2009) on participatory culture help us understand that young people are not simply consumers of content: they also produce, transform and circulate meaning.

The mass self-communication described by Castells and the logic of spreadability analyzed by Jenkins, Ford and Green (2013) show that this circulation is not a passive contagion, but a deliberate practice of cultural appropriation. That is why an apparently superficial trend can express something deeper. An “aura battle,” for example, may simply be a game, but it also reflects new forms of recognition, belonging and identity construction in a culture where visibility carries growing value.

From fashion to weak signal

Strategic foresight allows us to introduce a different view. From this perspective, some youth practices can be observed as weak signals: small or incipient phenomena that will not necessarily turn into threats, but that may reveal social transformations in the making.

The sequence could be summed up as follows:

Signal → Trend → Transformation → Emerging risk → Scenario → Prevention

A viral challenge may be only entertainment. But if it incorporates dangerous behavior and begins to spread massively, the scenario changes. A virtual community may be a space of belonging, but it can also become a recruiting ground. An image manipulated with artificial intelligence may be a game, but it can also be used to humiliate, extort or create a false identity.

That is why the challenge is not to determine whether a trend is “good” or “bad,” but to understand how it evolves and with what other factors it may combine.

Citizen security: understand before intervening

Here a necessary transformation in the police function appears. The police should not become a body in charge of controlling youth fashions. Their role is to protect rights, prevent risks, preserve coexistence and act in the face of concrete situations of violence, crime or harm. But to prevent, they need to understand the context in which those risks arise.

The traditional logic can be summed up as:

It occurs → it is reported → it is investigated → action is taken.

Security with anticipatory capacity adds an earlier stage:

Observe → understand → analyze → identify signals → explore scenarios → prevent → intervene.

This requires strengthening capacities in digital intelligence, trend analysis, foresight, community prevention and coordination with schools, families, universities, municipalities and specialized agencies.

It also requires listening to young people themselves. It is not possible to design security policies for a generation without understanding how that generation interprets its relationships, its digital spaces and its own risks.

Toward anticipatory security

The future of youth security will depend not only on how many crimes occur, but also on the institutional capacity to understand the transformations that may produce new forms of vulnerability.

Foresight makes it possible to look beyond the accomplished fact and to explore different scenarios: one in which institutions manage to keep pace with the digital transformation; another in which technology advances faster than the capacity to respond; and a wagered scenario in which the State, the community, education and security forces develop capacities for anticipation and prevention.

In this last scenario, the police do not chase trends: they understand them. They do not criminalize cultural differences: they identify concrete risks. They do not merely wait for the problem to occur: they develop the capacity to anticipate it.

Young people have always created their own codes. What is new today is the speed with which those codes can turn into mass phenomena.

An “aura battle” may simply be a game. A meme may be only a meme. An aesthetic may be simply a form of identity. But some signals may announce transformations we do not yet understand.

That is why the question for citizen security should not only be:

What crime happened yesterday?

It should also be:

What signals are appearing today, and what might they mean for the society of tomorrow?

Because to anticipate does not mean to police the future of our young people. It means preparing ourselves to protect it.

References

• Castells, M. (Ed.). (2006). La sociedad red: una visión global (F. Muñoz de Bustillo, Trans.). Alianza Editorial. (Original title: The network society: A cross-cultural perspective).
• boyd, d. (2014). It’s complicated: The social lives of networked teens. Yale University Press.
• Jenkins, H., Clinton, K., Purushotma, R., Robison, A. J., & Weigel, M. (2009). Confronting the challenges of participatory culture: Media education for the 21st century. The MIT Press.
• Jenkins, H., Ford, S., & Green, J. (2013). Spreadable media: Creating value and meaning in a networked culture. New York University Press.