Friday, June 8, 2012

Another Brick in the Wall?


The year that twitter began, and FB first branched out beyond the Ivy League, I was teaching Media in Society at a small career college in Massachusetts. It was my first semester teaching, and I was teaching largely to senior sports majors and was way beyond my comfort zone... 
but it was all fascinating. We went on a media diet -- we kept a media journal -- we watched the ways that the ads that popped up in our e-mail accounts mimicked our own e-mail use and our internet use in general... 


Tonight, a friend was talking about how, on so many different forms of social media begin to appear. This is also recognized as collective consciousness; zeitgeist, mob mentality...

I am interest in when does what we notice intersect with what we create.

As an editor, I see the same thing. I edit a small independent literary magazine. In waves, poems all come in about a certain topic, or using a certain device. Three years ago I got a slew of film inspired poems -- I'm embarrassed to say there are three phobia poems in my forthcoming issue. 

There is some conjecture that this has to do with schools of creative writing -- but I read the bios -- I think it delves deeper than that -- into a true collective subconscious.

There is a way that this is very sweet, and very spiritual almost... where we all meet and co-mingle in the ether...
At the same time, 
I worry about this. 

Is it becoming harder for our children to be their own people?

I'll let you in on a little secret -- part of the reason I started all of this was because I used to watch a friend of mine's son on FB. He was the first kid I know to go on -- and he was exactly the age that I was when I met his father. The whole thing was fascinating to me. 

I watched him for a full year -- and the most striking thing I saw was a small bout of homophobic comments on his wall -- from friends... now, I happen to know this kid -- I know this kid's story. His grandfather is gay -- and did not have a terribly easy road of it all. So I watched to see what this would mean for my friend's child...

Well, it amounted to little. My friends' kid said nothing -- a friend came to a bit of a defense -- but mostly it went the way of the newspaper -- disappeared until de-archived... 

But I had to wonder...

Isn't the playground bigger? Isn't the voice of the common appeal louder? For those of us who were ashamed but want to keep our mouths' shut -- is that furthered when it plays out on our own walls? 

On the other hand, if we have a balcony seat to watch what is playing out for our kids, do we suddenly have recourse to talk to them -- to have the conversations and give them words and courage and safety?

No comments:

Post a Comment