It would be impossible to not pause and ponder the implications of the deaths of Farah Fawcett and Michael Jackson. Both were cultural icons tied to a specific time in U.S. pop culture. Their death forces us to deal with the passage of time and mortality (theirs and ours). It reminds us that we won't ever be that age or that person again. It would be hard to distinguish between people’s reaction to the loss of Fawcett or Jackson as symbols of the time, (not to mention success, beauty, creativity, innovation, and social change) versus what psychologists would call a parasocial attachment (i.e. feeling that they were your friend). Nevertheless, these individuals have created (or are at the center of) metaphors that trigger strong emotional responses for many of us. Love them or hate them, it's hard to separate icons of this magnitude from the experiences you have concurrently both personally and in society at large. … [Read more...]
Fawcett and Jackson: Mourning the Loss of Cultural Icons
The Native Tongue of Teens: Social Media
(This was posted June 5, 2009 on my blog "Positively Media" at PsychologyToday.com) Ralph Waldo Emerson said: "No man should travel until he has learned the language of the country he visits. Otherwise he voluntarily makes himself a great baby - so helpless and so ridiculous." Think of the tech-saavy younger generation as another country with a different language. Their lives are inseparable from technology and they are connected to each other and to information flows in ways many of us will never understand. We can learn to speak their language or we can look ridiculous and irrelevant. No where is learning to speak the language of technology more important than when you're trying to educate young people. At a time when one in five American students drops out of high school, we parents and educators need to work on our language skills. This is why I love to see educational institutions embrace media technologies. At Azusa Pacific University (APU), my friend David Peck is … [Read more...]
