Tag: cell phones

Lost: a Rapper from 8 Mile and some Men, Women and Children from Austin

eminem 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 teens library mwcthat 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.

 

TEEN AGE GIRLS AND CELL PHONE STALKERS!

Scary_phone_call_1 You know all those amused, indulgent stories about teenagers texting and cell phoning at all hours?  And how great they are at multi-tasking?  Well if you believe this piece, running on AlterNet after appearing in the Christian Science Monitor, (and there is no reason not to) there is, as usual, a very very very dark side to this "cute" phenomenon.

Liz Claiborne Inc. teamed up with the National Domestic Violence Hotline and conducted a survey of teen cellphone use.  The survey, conducted by Teenage Research Unlimited, reported that "20 to 30 percent of teens who had been in relationships said their partner had constantly checked in on them, had harassed or insulted them, or had made unwanted requests for sexual activity, all via cellphones or text messages. One out of 4 reported hourly contact with a dating partner between midnight and 5 a.m. — in some cases, 30 times per hour. And 1 out of 10 had received physical threats electronically."

Even if half of that is true, it’s scary and sad.  You can just imagine a 14 year old girl, inexperienced in relationships, trying to handle this kind of overbearing behavior.  What I wonder though is WHY?  In an adult relationship we would call this emotional abuse and, often, a prelude to physical abuse.  AND I remember when I worked for a youth TV news program, doing several pieces on boyfriends abusing their teen girlfriends.  But this is so much easier to hide — and is so scarily omnipresent and unpredictable at the same time, that it just shakes you to your core.

There are days when I wonder what it’s going to take to get this man-woman thing right when even the boy-girl part is so often destructive.  And wonder, too, how we help these girls (and I suppose there are boys too) have the confidence to put a stop to it when it happens. Heavy thoughts for a snowy Tuesday.