A hot minute has passed since I last entered the blog-o-sphere. No idle days for me - just another adventure digitizing my years of classroom materials. I really loved generating original curriculum, and my daughter suggested I put everything on a website she uses for classroom resources. The task has been a fun walk down memory lane but time consuming. And something else happened in the interim…
Andy Warhol said, “In the future, everyone will be world famous for 15 minutes.” Guess what?!? Surreal doesn’t even come close to describing my recent brush with fame. Bizarre might be a better descriptor.
I must paint the picture of a day in Death Valley for my audience to better understand “the moment.” As the mom of an LSU Golden Girl dancer, your day begins at whatever time the Golden Band fromTigerland practices. The band rehearses anywhere from two to four hours on game day then dresses for the Hill March. Parents go and watch the rehearsal so they will be able to locate their kiddo on the field during halftime because each show is different and finding the cherished young one up close and personal on the band field is a lot easier than during the buzz of a halftime extravaganza. Sometimes we get a momentary pass to slip off and tailgate, but we parents still become a pretty close knit bunch.
After the band is dressed, warm ups take place in the Greek Theater, approximately ¼ mile from Tiger Stadium. We meet back up with the group and take pictures and then the real challenge begins. After the football team arrives, the band follows down the hill into Tiger Stadium. At some random point along the police guarded fully barricaded route, they stop and perform those four golden notes that get your heart thumping, the momentum going, and the crowd roaring.
But here’s the problem. People start lining up along the hill HOURS before the march. At the 2019 Georgia game, a reported 280,000 people packed that ¼ mile stretch. People come to watch Hill March and tailgate and never go in the stadium! And the band parents weave and bob and push and cajole mostly to catch a glimpse of the top of their child’s head as they pass by. Or they give up the first part of the day and camp out on the hill to try to get a good view of the March. It's a conundrum. Which do you choose?
Fifteen times I went through this process. Fifteen times I made poor videos of the back of the girls’
heads or the side of one arm or maybe caught a picture of half an L (the LSU symbol the girls make with their arms). Then on that fifteenth attempt, for whatever reason, the crowd parted like the Red Sea, and somehow, I pushed to the barricade and then she stopped - right in front of me - and like any good Southern mama…I lost my ever loving mind.
I put the video on my Facebook for my parents to see and wow - I was impressed with my 500 views. Caroline put it on this platform I did not use or know anything about called TikTok just for kicks and giggles and well…11 million views later, my fifteen minutes of fame. So I guess now the 15th time is the charm?
Internet recognition, I refuse to call it actual fame, is so bizarre. What have I learned over this 15 minute journey? Social media can be a kind, supportive, uplifting, rewarding place but simultaneously rude, discouraging, dark, and emotionally dangerous. The medium that allows me to get a direct message from Brazil also provides the tools for me to copy and paste it into a translation program and read a loving and beautiful note. But this same technology coexists with the messages of hate spewing vitriol, also in many translatable languages, that elicit emotional responses whether you're prepared for them or not.
At first, I engaged some of the verbal berators. Big mistake. The anonymity of the media platforms emboldens the savage tongue. However, whatever part of me that wanted to engage the antagonism and attempt to be the peacemaker I am so programmed to be, kept me scrolling through comment after comment and message after message - zeroing in on the 10% filled with bitterness and outright hate.
I know this about myself. I am a fixer. I felt burdened for these heated and caustic people so much so, I was spending hours a day switching from Facebook to Instagram to Tik Tok then back again. A complex crisscross maze all under the pretense of “I need to know what people are posting” - All the while becoming hyper focused on my phone while anxiety began to fester under the surface. A sense of disconnect and isolation arose - every negative ping a dagger cutting one more millimeter of psyche away. No amount of positive feedback lessened the verbal blows.
My media habits definitely wriggled a prominent place into my daily routine, and what fruit developed from my time spent scrolling? I am grateful to God that He gives me enough insight into myself that I recognize my addictions. I can’t fix broken people on the internet with broken hearts and broken homes and mean spirits.
One morning as a paused on a particularly hateful comment, and I wasted my mental energy on a response, I glanced at my daily scripture flip calendar mocking me: Galatians 5:22 “But the fruit of the spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, and self-control.”
One of those God nudges. I can’t control people on social media, but I can turn off my phone. Instead, I focused on methodically combing through years of actual real work I had performed. File after file. Lesson after lesson. Memory after memory of standing in front of true to life human children and imparting, or attempting to impart, nuggets of actual wisdom. No Tik Tok videos. Real human interactions.
Social media pseudo-fame made me feel both exhilarated and uncomfortable. At 54, I was emotionally ill equipped for the largess of the 15 minutes of fame, but mature enough to step back, reassess, and reground myself in something meaningful, my life's actual work - something I really accomplished, not a random video I filmed that 11million or so people around the world watched.
So here’s the big picture question. Are you or someone you know negatively affected by media? If so, what are you going to do about it? (Notice I put media not just social media - a news media addiction can be just as destructive.)
If you haven’t read “Why American Teens Are So Sad” by Derek Thompson, I’m attaching the link. You get one free article from The Atlantic, and this needs to be it. But in case you can’t access the material, the four points are simple: Kids use social media - all the time. With social media use comes a lack of social interaction. Combine those two, and kids’ ability to accurately perceive themselves and others skews. Compile on top of that the constant bombardment by the media of every negative thing going on in the world and then follow up with an inability to cope with their own emotions or find assistance from others and WHAM - depression. And finally, parents don’t let kids be kids. Kids are so over involved in stuff and expected to over perform their media perfect peers - recipe for disaster.
Promoting my thoughts on social media regarding social media I understand is a paradox. But that’s the tricky business about being viral. If we have learned anything over the last two years, viruses are uncontrollable. But we can do a great deal to educate ourselves and our children on how to monitor and police our own behavior to mitigate consequences and contamination. So I ask the question again? Are you or someone you know negatively affected by media? If so, what are you going to do about it?
Of course I have some thoughts, so come on back to the Classroom Counts, and keep this discussion going…
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