I have hooked up with generations of my family through Facebook. Nephews, nieces and cousins that I would never otherwise hear from are now part of my daily intake on this social networking site.
What amazes me most is the amount of information that I gain from the younger generation.
Case in point. Yesterday, my nephew who is a federal government worker made the statement that rentals of the movie Little Nikita would be increasing. Just that. Just those few keystrokes.
Now, I'm not a news junkie. But I'm married to one. Since DH is a news addicted viewer, I usually absorb enough news by osmosis that I don't need to watch much on my own. But DH is out of town for a short trip. So, I haven't seen any news. Okay, I haven't seen any news that's not on E!.
I jumped to my favorite news site www.myway.com and searched on Little Nikita. And the news stories popped up. The federal government busted several couples who were 'deep cover' Russian operatives ala Little Nikita. Since this movie was somewhat obscure when it came out, and it came out more than a decade ago, I realized that my nephew's comment was tied to the applicability of that label to these modern spies. There will be an entire generation of adults who may not have seen the movie, so they won't understand the news media's insistence on using that as a pop culture reference.
Fascinating, really. I'm not sure if I had read that news story that I would have come to the same conclusion as my nephew. I did see Little Nikita when it came out. I knew what it was about. I'm also a child of the cold war. The Manchurian Candidate and several other big screen movie plots all dealt with foreign countries spying on American soil.
The next generations didn't have the same political experience, it was all glasnost and 'the wall's coming down' for them. His observation that the Little Nikita reference might be flying over the heads of many readers was spot on.
Pop culture references are generally frowned upon in hard news stories. At least they were back in the age of real news. What we have now is more like 'infotainment' and can't be expected to follow the journalism 'best practices' that used to keep this kind of thing from happening.
I've got to keep checking Facebook daily. Who knows what those kids will come up with next?
--Sandee Wagner
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2 comments:
Speaking of pop culture... Craig's cousin's son (18yr old college freshman) had a status post last week that made me laugh out loud. it was in quotes, so not his words, but still: "Girl, you so hot you turn my software into hardware."
Look Mom, Anon gave you a clue!
Emm,
Craig's family is full of characters, isn't it? This cousin sounds like a hoot. spw
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