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DON'T STOP TILL YOU GET ENOUGH
The other night I was in one of those Big BoxMart department stores, picking up some medicine and groceries for my mother. As I passed by the media section, browsing the DVDs and whatnot, I heard what sounded like an 8- or 9-year-old girl's voice saying, "Look, it's Michael Jackson!" She wasn't referring to me, of course -- that's one celebrity I've never been confused with (as opposed to Rasputin, Dostoevsky, Sam Beam from Iron and Wine, Rupert from Survivor of around five years ago, one of Maurice Sendak's Wild Things, etc.) -- she was no doubt referring to some Jackson product or display or another.
But that got me thinking about the pervasiveness and power of mass media. Because I rather doubt an 8- or 9-year-old would really have heard much at all about Michael Jackson before his recent death and the ensuing media barrage of saturation coverage, retrospectives, analyses, tabloidage and so forth. I mean, the man's era of ubiquity (not counting his earlier, childhood work with his brothers) was in the 1980s and early 1990s -- and in the 1990s it was more for personal pecadillos and scandals and such like. At any rate, I don't think he was a Ubiquitous Major Star anymore after, say 1995 or 1997 or such -- I don't think a girl who's 8 or 9 or so would have picked him up through our cultural osmosis, the way she would have picked up Britney Spears or the Jonas Brothers or maybe Justin Timberlake and his peers. It's possible one of her parents or other older relatives are Jackson fans, and she was exposed to him that way -- after all, my friend Jamie's young-teenage kids are probably conversant in Dylan and Bowie; and![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
wormquartet's young son no doubt knows the whole Weird Al catalog. But I think it more likely that over the past several weeks, the mass-media culture has driven the iconography of Michael Jackson into the kid's brain, not unlike a high-power drill.
I'm not saying that's necessarily a good or bad thing, and I'm probably doing way too much riffing over the fact that a child recognized Michael Jackson's face after he's been in the news for about a month post-mortem. But it's a reminder of the psychological and sociological power of mass media. Could it be Bad? Could it be Dangerous? I can't say. So I'll just Beat It.
Words: Recently finished Stephen Lawhead's Avalon and started Isaac Asimov's I, Robot
Sounds & Images: Music of My Mind (Stevie Wonder)
State O' Mind: It's a thriller, thriller night
But that got me thinking about the pervasiveness and power of mass media. Because I rather doubt an 8- or 9-year-old would really have heard much at all about Michael Jackson before his recent death and the ensuing media barrage of saturation coverage, retrospectives, analyses, tabloidage and so forth. I mean, the man's era of ubiquity (not counting his earlier, childhood work with his brothers) was in the 1980s and early 1990s -- and in the 1990s it was more for personal pecadillos and scandals and such like. At any rate, I don't think he was a Ubiquitous Major Star anymore after, say 1995 or 1997 or such -- I don't think a girl who's 8 or 9 or so would have picked him up through our cultural osmosis, the way she would have picked up Britney Spears or the Jonas Brothers or maybe Justin Timberlake and his peers. It's possible one of her parents or other older relatives are Jackson fans, and she was exposed to him that way -- after all, my friend Jamie's young-teenage kids are probably conversant in Dylan and Bowie; and
wormquartet's young son no doubt knows the whole Weird Al catalog. But I think it more likely that over the past several weeks, the mass-media culture has driven the iconography of Michael Jackson into the kid's brain, not unlike a high-power drill.I'm not saying that's necessarily a good or bad thing, and I'm probably doing way too much riffing over the fact that a child recognized Michael Jackson's face after he's been in the news for about a month post-mortem. But it's a reminder of the psychological and sociological power of mass media. Could it be Bad? Could it be Dangerous? I can't say. So I'll just Beat It.
Words: Recently finished Stephen Lawhead's Avalon and started Isaac Asimov's I, Robot
Sounds & Images: Music of My Mind (Stevie Wonder)
State O' Mind: It's a thriller, thriller night