from 80's TV to Facebook

Looking back at the 80’s and noting all of the movies I watched, I realize I was not always raised by parents. Like many other children who came of age after the all-engaging TV screen was invented, in many ways, I was raised by TV. In my case, perhaps I had it a bit worse (or better, depending on your perspective). Until I was four, I had to share the TV screen with my older brother Kyle and with my mom. Then Kyle went to live with his dad, and when our mom died, my dad and I were lucky (or unlucky) enough to have cable and two separate televisions. With my mom, I watched some shows here and there that I never would have chosen on my own: Phil Donahue and Richard Simmons. After her departure, I was a child master of the remote control.

While from the outset this seems like it will be a sad story, I think my story also sheds light into the cultural influences of the 80’s and their ramifications on my generation. Many people disparage the junk food that 80’s pop culture and its commercial influences were for youth. And it’s true that I became obsessed with Barbies, Barbie-standards of beauties, Hi-C “fruit juice,” Kool-Aid, and their latest commercial varieties. But it’s also true that my television addiction in the 80’s and half-way into the 90’s resulted in emotional expectations and ways of being that I share to various extents with other members of my generation. And I would posit that our addictions are not all bad.

A list of the movies I watched in the 80’s reveals to me in retrospect much of my development. Though my dad was often watching his own cultural choices (or junk food) in the living room while I camped out on his bedroom floor, he also set positive examples of literacy and community engagement away from the television screen. But I didn’t fully put his modeled modes of literacy into effect until the end of high school, and primarily in college, when for four years, I watched no TV and learned from books, professors, friends, and community volunteering. In essence, I traded one group of influences for another. However, during all of my years (with the exception of my public schooling), I was the one holding the remote control (and even in school I could zone teachers out). In my television watching, in the college courses I took, and in the friends and experiences I chose, I was the one deciding where I would focus my interest, and I chose the sorts of emotional experiences I wanted to have.

At the age of four, my TV watching was mostly limited to Nickelodeon (a children’s network), on which I watched a somewhat educational variety show called Pinwheel. I also watched Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers on PBS. A friend of mine who is a professional family counselor identifies Mr. Rogers as the show that changed our culture. Mr. Rogers was child-centered and promoted vast and pervasive self-esteem. He said we were all his friends and neighbors. While my friend, born in the late 1940’s Baby Boomer generation, sees problems resulting from the Mr. Rogers model, I see a different set of emotional expectations in my generation, and in many respects I would posit that these expectations are positive and conducive to vast levels of human connection the like of which human civilization has never experienced before. Such rapid change does not come without its consequences. But I think the potential for good is enormous, and in this essay, I will liken 80’s pop cultural influences to its ramifications in today’s social nexis, particularly as we see through the new all-pervasive screen: the computer, the internet in place of cable, and the limitless potential of social networking through technological platforms such as Facebook.

The 80’s were a feel-good era. They were following the openings of social boundaries created in the 60’s and the 70’s, and feel-good programming was being created for children on such levels that a child like me could experience something as traumatic as her mother’s suicide and could still emotionally coast by on the babysitting of cable’s programming. As an 80’s single-parented kid, when I wasn’t having dinner with my dad (or eating food in front of the TV paid for my dad), I was socializing in droves at daycare, coming home to all-engaging TV babysitting via cable, and during every other weekend when I wasn’t being babysat by my Grandma (and the television choices we collaboratively negotiated), I was in control of (and addicted to) the remote control.

When PBS and Nickolodeon were not providing my favorite brain-candy, I changed the channel to movies or asked my dad to take me out for some rented VHS so I could find full emotional fulfillment surpassing what I often found with the few kids who were playing outside in our neighborhood. I started with an addiction to Disney, then took on Jim Henson creations, and found fulfillment in the stories of Annie (an orphaned little girl who lives a fantastical life with an older, single dad), Punky Brewster (same story, only older dad wasn’t filthy rich), and then moved on to stories such as: ET; The Star Wars series; The Secret of NIMH; The Fox and the Hound; All Dogs Go to Heaven; An American Tail; Adventures in Babysitting; Back to the Future; Karate Kid; Beetlejuice; A Christmas Story; The Goonies; Stand By Me; Ernest Goes to Camp (and everywhere else); Ghostbusters; Big; The Never-Ending Story; The Princess Bride; Fame; Gremlins; The Little Mermaid; Little Shop of Horrors; Honey, I Shrunk the Kids; Pee Wee’s Big Adventure; Teen Wolf; The Toy; and Willow.

Unsupervised and unregulated, I also watched many films by the time I was 12 (in 1990) that were beyond my life experience and maturity level but were entertaining to me: The Jerk; 9 to 5; Bachelor Party; Heathers; Pump up the Volume; When Harry Met Sally; Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure; Breakfast Club; Sixteen Candles; Can’t Buy Me Love; Pretty Woman; The Color Purple; Crocodile Dundee; Dead Poets’ Society; Dirty Dancing; Driving Miss Daisy; Elephant Man; Ferris Bueller’s Day Off; Footloose; Good Morning Vietnam; Lean on Me; Hoosiers; L.A. Story; 3 Men and a Baby; Mr. Mom; National Lampoons; Police Academy; Pretty in Pink; Rain Main; Roxanne; Say Anything; Smoky and the Bandit, Splash, Stand and Deliver; Steel Magnolias; Tootsie; and Top Gun.

Now before parent readers who religiously read parenting magazines, supervise and participate in their children’s media experiences, and provide alternative activities to TV get their stomachs all tied in knots, let me point out that I write from a perspective which is not completely traumatized. TV was an escape for me when I was dealing with childhood trauma that I was far from having the resources to understand. Yes, I was probably self-medicating with mostly positive emotional experiences. But, I did learn a lot about American culture in the process. While I didn’t have a regular nuclear family experience which I could use to connect with other kids, I’m sure I watched many of the same TV shows and movies, which gave us a common language.

I learned about American conceptions of romance, popularity, adventure, rejection, success, and relationships of all kinds. I was wise beyond my years in addition to being overly exposed. And I developed an aesthetic that led me not to Freddy Kruger movies and slashers but films that emotionally buoyed me and made me hopeful about marriage and the future.

In total, I think my television and movie viewing engaged me deeply emotionally, if only through a screen. I became comfortable with a familiar cast of an “American family” which I shared with the rest of the culture: there were the Huxtables (of the Cosby’s), the community of “Cheers,” and what kid didn’t dig the Smurfs? We had a vocabulary and sense of cheerfulness in common, and we were fed these emotions with the unstated charge of “now make these feelings a reality in your world.” While we came from various degrees of nuclear family normality and functionality, we watched families like the Cosby’s deal with life’s complexities in a connected, nurturing, and comedic kind of way. We learned about the greater possibilities of human interaction, and I think were humanized in the process.

Granted, watching such simulated happiness could also have deepened the pain of those whose realities who did not or could not meet such idealized depictions. Many (if not all) of us may have felt separated (as we naturally were, through the screen and reality) from these happy, healthy people. And if we felt shy about pain, this could have caused us to feel further alienated. But we also saw that such positive feelings and interaction were in fact, theoretically possible.

Many of us who grew up in the 80’s and 90’s (and I can’t speak for those who went before us because I wasn’t there) have since gone to college, where we connected over our interests (or the classes we chose and signed up for) in greater droves. From TV to daycares to colleges, we are probably a generation who grew up feeling more socially connected and fully emotionally engaged than any generation before (well, with the exception of kids playing in the street or on sports teams, but those options weren’t available to us all). Or at least we were socially connected and emotionally engaged with greater numbers of people, if you include TV and film families and characters.

After such vicarious emotional development and expectation for connection in the adult world, we graduated from college and made our way into the marketplace, which for many, particularly in a recession, has proven to be a much different reality. Instead of moving right into families where we’re the adults like Cliff and Claire Huxtable (of the Cosby’s), we find ourselves trying get jobs often as receptionists, behind desks, and in cubicles, and find ourselves exhausted by a lack of live social and emotional engagement. When we go to find other young people to connect with, Cheers does not exist. Instead, everyone’s busy with their jobs and listening to music in their cars, and unless one finds a comfort level with a particular bar and group of people, we often find ourselves back in our apartments, without our parents, with the remote back in hand. Mr. Roger’s promise of being neighbors, validating our self-esteem, and connection, for many of us has been hard to come by.

Some of us have the support of family to make our way into a world of a particular specialty where we make contacts. Many others, though, drift as they try to find a work environment as emotionally fulfilling as what they’ve experienced in films and TV. This, however, is the reality absent one new element of our generation: a new form of social engagement, the new cable: the internet.

In the late 90’s, email was just becoming a social tool. My freshman year of college, I used it to keep in touch with my close friends from high school. I used email to carry on a long-distance relationship for a year (in addition to the phone, though I had to pay for it) with the man who would later become my husband. My best male friend from high school came out as gay for the first time ever over email in the late 1990’s. He still hasn’t told his evangelical Christian mother this fact of his identity, but he told me over email and was crushed when I no longer had access to my college’s computer network and documentation of that important written moment of his life.

In this new century, we’ve gone beyond email. First, there were chat rooms scaring parents over the content and recipients of their children’s confessions and connections. But now, there are safer sites where we verify our identities more carefully and reconnect with people we’ve actually known. The two most popular of these social networking sites are MySpace and Facebook. MySpace is more multi-dimensional, complete with the options of designing one’s page and “branding” oneself with images and a song that automatically accompanies a hit to your page. Facebook, however, is the more utilitarian and rapidly growing social networking tool.

The impact of Facebook and MySpace cannot be understated. A friend of mine found the daughter she gave up for adoption on MySpace quicker than any detective agency might have been able to locate her. On MySpace, I apologized to a friend whose boyfriend I crossed boundaries with over a decade ago. She forgave me and relieved me, told me of her current health problems. I’ve also connected with people from junior high and high school I thought I’d never see again. Even as a teacher, I’ve “made friends” with students who were resistant to me when I was their instructor, trying to get them to focus on Spanish and not their latest social dramas.

I don’t mean to overstate the importance of these sites. But what they do for social networking is remarkable. A friend in her 60’s tells me about her step-daughter who’s starting a Master’s degree at the Clinton School of Government Policy. I simply email her later and ask for the step-daughter’s first name, and I’ve tried to "friend" her and add her to my instant connections. Some of my friends also do leg-work for me. I can find old friends or acquaintances within their friends, or I can find new people among their friends based on our common location, interests, or names. One of the most shocking “adds” I received was from my namesake Heather Hunter, a porn star who a professor of mine discovered long ago, to my dismay, when he Googled me and found hit after hit of Heather’s sexy poses. Luckily, I married my high school sweetheart and appended his last name to mine, saving me from Google embarrassment eternally.

What does it mean for us that we’re becoming increasingly cyber-connected? It means if someone crosses my mind or thoughts for whatever reason, I can quickly not only send them an email but can start an instant chat. On Facebook, at any given time, I click on the lower right hand corner and can see a list not only of my friends but their up to the moment statuses. For example, right now: a former student from the first college class I taught has listed her status as “probably doesn’t have her priorities straight—Facebook first?” A high school student, who I met student teaching her high school sophomore English class is announcing: “Everyone should download their NHD photos.” When I missed Father’s Day with my families (mine and my husband’s) because I was attending a writer’s conference, my sister-in-law Alyssa immediately uploaded pictures of their new puppy, so I could see. Another friend of my husband and I, Bones, has downloaded his recent volunteer work in the Democratic Party and has pictures of himself with all of the Nebraska Democrat public figures. I saw these in a video he made of his friends, which included photos from my wedding and him hugging me as my husband’s best man. Suddenly, not only is an important day for me memorialized, but I feel more connected to specific figures of my state-wide political party and am thus more humanized and empowered.

The level of connection being made available through sites like Facebook is far surpassing anything we ever experienced in the 80’s (speaking from the perspective of having been a child then). We are not just connecting via our Hollywood acting family. We are becoming family, and meeting up online. I am “friends” with my nephews, nieces, and brothers. I instant message my 52-year-old brother at my leisure when he’s logged on to Facebook and Gmail and ask for updates about his law school experience. I can give him support. I went to law school and hated it, but he went at 50, and despite being the oldest person in his class, he loves it. He’s done the 20’s, 30’s, and 40’s stuff, and now he’s ready to focus. But he can still stay up-to-date with family while planning a career as a bankruptcy attorney in New Orleans. Hurricane Katrina and the Bush administration’s failure to respond created a needy market of bankruptcy filers in New Orleans, and rescuer or not, my brother is off to live a comfortable life in their service.

Which brings me to a good point. Not only am I able to heal my junior high memories of low self-esteem when a “friend” in Portland (who I haven’t seen in 10 years) tells me he always thought I was the greatest and felt out of place himself in junior high. But, potentially, we’re building a platform to solve the world’s problems. I don’t have to dial, pay long distance bills, and wait on the telephone line to learn whether someone is in a meeting or might return my voicemail before she leaves the office. We’re logging on after our spouses and kids have gone to bed, when we still have some social energy left for the night. We not only update but inspire each other. We give each other the connection to inspire us during the times when when we have no friends or colleagues to talk to.

While some people not part of Facebook may bemoan the hours we young folks are spending on the computer, they do not realize the literacy we are developing. We are developing a literacy of connection, which is exactly what we need to combat the isolating, alienating nature of our times so that we can collaboratively solve problems. We’re recommending jobs, mates, friends, and graduate programs to each other. We’re viewing up-to-the minute photos not just of each others’ weddings and kids, but of the trips we’ve taken to places like Borneo and Syria. We are literally placing the world on the screen ourselves instead of just sitting there with the remote and changing channels.

The explorers and aid workers among us will bring the problems to our attention. As we become networked with everyone in our town, our university, our past, and friends of friends, we will continue to expand our network. The people of my generation (and older) are hungry to expand their social connections. We have so much to learn and be inspired by. We may watch John Stewart spin the ailments of our world so we can laugh at night. But during the day, we’re connecting with each other and not feeling so hopeless about what we can achieve once we move off the secure social networks of college campuses.

So, is my message that Facebook is a panacea, that we’ve found utopia, and it’s online? Well, we can’t do everything on Facebook. We still get our food from a farmer’s market, store, or restaurant locally; we still have to go outside (whew!) or on a treadmill to get our exercise; and to those who hold out because they prefer face-to-face connection… We all do! But the reality is that we can’t always connect with everyone we’ve loved and known face-to-face. People are working a lot, and to connect with people, we usually have to schedule a coffee date or hope to run into them on the bike trail or out and about. But, what about the friends who move to California, to China?

I do get invitations to California and China, but of course I can’t always afford those trips. On Facebook, though, I was able to give my Pakistani friend in China with a new baby some simple tips to her question: how do I lose this baby weight? Eat fruit, I encouraged her. Take up yoga; it will lower stress. Of course, yoga comes from India, but someone got on a plane, brought it to California, it got to Nebraska through the Interstate, and now I’m regaling its benefits to her (in China).

So, no, we can’t walk our dogs on Facebook (though there might be a funny simulated application for that). But we can exchange tips about leashes, about dog training books and TV shows like The Dog Whisperer. Imagine the people back in the 1940’s who said they’d never get a TV. Imagine the people back in 1900-whatever who said they’d never drive a car. Imagine the people who said they’d never get on a plane. Those of who have done those things may be jealous of the regular meals they’ve had with their families, but do they have nearly as much to talk about?

When I get together with my husband’s family, right away his younger sister and I start talking about their cousin’s fiancee’s most recently updated pictures of their new home in Iowa. “Did you see their house? Is their basement flooded? When's the date of their wedding?” Unfortunately, sometimes the downside in the short-term is that people are quicker to get online than pick up the phone. In my family, I’ve followed my nephews and nieces online to college, but their parents are organizing parties when they return, and we have more to talk about, if we think about it. Yes, we’re up to date on the pictures, but this is just a jumping-off context to everything else.

Does this mean human society has to speed up to constantly generate news? Well, it depends upon how we see things. I still get together with friends in California, sometimes in a group organized once a year. This would be much less convenient and possible if we didn’t have the internet to send out a mass free invitation and a travel search engine to help us find lodging (with pictures) and the best prices on tickets. We’re now very organized about our get-togethers, our investment in staying connected. But already we’re imagining new get-togethers. Sure, we can keep getting together and eating and drinking. But we can only tolerate so many days of that. Now some of us are talking about going on yoga retreats. And if we keep connecting, what will we organize next?

Many smaller groups of people, such as in churches, are organizing get-togethers with a higher purpose. People go on missions and raise funds for particular causes, like an orphanage in Haiti, that their church sponsors. Eventually, assuming we continue evolving as we become more connected, we’ll be trading more important tips. I’m not talking the stock market here. I’m thinking more along the lines of the videos people are making with their digital cameras. Yes, we continue to entertain each other, to amaze each other with our feats of marrying, reproducing, etc. But other images are trickling through to our consciousness. I‘ve connected on Facebook with Pieter, who I met when his Belgian friend Christophe married my American friend Kelly. Christophe came to Lincoln, to study film abroad. Kelly, also a film aficionado, met Christophe in a class.

On Pieter’s Facebook site, he has pictures of himself on the Iraq/Syria border. He’s wearing a turban in some pictures, jolly to be hanging out with people others would fear as terrorists. Another Belgian I know has a picture of himself in an African country, looking over a beautiful desert landscape. Being amazed by these images, not only will the tourist in us be roused. We will see new images that will take us to new levels of connection. Eventually, we won’t just be going to see the architecture and the landscape. And the Peace Corps won’t be for a select few. While oil prices might keep many of us closer to home, the tendency toward further connection is also going to expand the reaches of generosity.

So, is Facebook the magic ticket to world peace? Of course no one thing in itself is going to bring humanity together. But the technology we’ve developed can be used for good. There are only so many human beings on this planet. The more connection we feel with one another, the more responsibility we’ll take for our collective survival. We may start as tourists, and we may descend from conquerors. But creativity on Earth is making leaps.

We’ve had many brands in our planet’s history: there were the Romans, then the Discovery channel, and now we have the power of the Internet to emit our own frequency. Eventually, people look for something more than sexy images. We look for how we can give back, how we can emit a frequency that leads to more peace. While we can surely find peace in nature and away from computer screens, we can’t discount the power we have through technology to educate, connect, and help. When people say the power of grassroots, this is what they mean. When we see and can channel the power of our social network, we will identify our resources and spread the wealth of human connection and concern.

As for the fears that hold us back: “I don’t want to be sucked into the screen; I don't have time for that; I don’t want this new generation’s ways corrupting me; I don’t want to be rejected,” to you I say, maybe this isn’t for you—today. But when you realize you can connect with your kids while they’re away at college, at a new job in a different city, when you realize that you don’t have to buy a plane ticket or interrupt with a phone call to reach out and show you care, you may think again. We’ve already been emitting our own frequency in all of our relationships in our day to day lives… We've watched hundreds of channels beam down to us from satellites. Now we, as individuals, can be a channel on a global field to unify as well.