Remember 8 Mile, the sad story of a neglected trailer park teen from Detroit – supposedly pretty close to the story of its creator, rapper Eminem?
I kept thinking about it as I watched Men, Women and Children, the profoundly moving story of a different kind of alienation at least partially enabled by the Internet. Nobody’s mom was an abusive alcoholic, but one mom fled her family so completely 
that she blocked her son Tim from her Facebook account, one sold slightly risqué images of her cheerleader daughter online and yet another intercepted and read every online communication to and from her daughter Brandy and tracked her movements with a tracker on her phone; Brandy was so stifled that she created a secret online identity just to get away once in a while.
It’s a beautiful film, a survey of young people so much on their own ; life online allows so much distance from parents and any love or wisdom they might offer. And even though they make mistakes beyond the web, the same technology seems to have trapped their parents, too.
Reitman chooses to move beyond individual dramas, however, and take us beyond his own observations as he closes the film with Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space – with a hopeful description that connects us all to one another: enemy or friend, alive or dead, present or past, online or off:
“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
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Cynthia Samuels
Cynthia Samuels is a long-time blogger, writer, producer and Managing Editor. She has an extensive background online, on television and in print, with particular experience developing content for women, parents and families.
For the past nine years, that experience has been largely with bloggers, twitter and other social media, most recently at Care2's Causes Channels, which serve 20 million members (13 million when she joined) and cover 16 subject areas. In her three years at Care2 monthly page views grew tenfold, from 450,000 to 4 million.
She has been part a member of BlogHer since 2006 years and has spoken at several BlogHer conferences. Among her many other speaking appearances is Politics Online, Fem 2.0 Conference and several other Internet gatherings.
She’s also run blogger outreach for clients ranging from EchoDitto to To the Contrary. Earlier, she spent nearly four years with iVillage, the leading Internet site for women; her assignments included the design and supervision of the hugely popular Education Central, a sub-site of Parent Soup that was a soup-to-nuts parent toolkit on K-12 education, designed to support parents as advocates and supporters of their school-age kids. She also served as the iVillage partner for America Links Up, a major corporate Internet safety initiative for parents, ran Click! – the computer channel - and had a long stint as iVillage's Washington editor. In addition, she has developed parent content for Jim Henson Interactive and served as Children’s Book Editor for both Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble.com.
Before moving online, she had a long and distinguished career as a broadcast journalist, as senior national editor of National Public Radio, political and planning producer of NBC's Today Show (whose audience is 75% women) where she worked for nine years (and was also the primary producer on issues relating to child care, education, learning disabilities and child development), and as the first executive producer of Channel One, a daily news broadcast seen in 12,000 U.S. high schools. She has published a children’s book: It’s A Free Country, a Young Person’s Guide to Politics and Elections (Atheneum, 1988) and numerous children’s book reviews in the New York Times Book Review and Washington Post Book World.
A creator of online content since 1994, Samuels is a partner at The Cobblestone Team, LLC, is married to a doctor and recent law school graduate and has two grown sons who make video games, two amazing daughters-in-law and three adorable grandsons.
View all posts by Cynthia Samuels
Remember 8 Mile, the sad story of a neglected trailer park teen from Detroit – supposedly pretty close to the story of its creator, rapper Eminem?
that she blocked her son Tim from her Facebook account, one sold slightly risqué images of her cheerleader daughter online and yet another intercepted and read every online communication to and from her daughter Brandy and tracked her movements with a tracker on her phone; Brandy was so stifled that she created a secret online identity just to get away once in a while.