Program scripts from week of January 21, 2013
My name is Jay Phillippi and I've spent my life in and around the media. TV, radio, the movies and more. I love them, and I hate them and I always have an opinion. Call this the View from the Phlipside.
RIP Dear Abby
Most of us went most of our lives without knowing her real name. We knew her sister was in the exact same line of work. In fact in their prime the two sisters were their only mutual competition. Last week we lost a true American icon with the death of Pauline Phillips. The world knew her better as Dear Abby.
A lot of people are called icons but I’m not sure all of them deserve it. A quick check of my dictionary tells me that an icon is “A person or thing regarded as a representative symbol of something”. Dear Abby is iconic for her representation of middle American common sense. Her advice was honest but tempered by kindness. Women’s advice columns before Dear Abby tended to be formulaic and safe. There were some subjects that were not to be discussed. Dear Abby took on them all.
Behind the pen name of Abigail Van Buren was Pauline Esther Friedman (her twin sister who became Ann Landers was Esther Pauline Friedman) born to a family of Russian Jewish immigrants who settled in Iowa and ran movie theaters. Abby (let’s stick to that name since it’s the one most of us know here by) got started writing advice columns in San Francisco with typical blunt honesty. She got in touch with the editor of the San Francisco Chronicle and told him she could write better than their regular columnist. He gave her a handful of letters and a week to write up her replies. She handed them back 90 minutes later and he hired her. The column would go into syndication and become the most widely syndicated newspaper column in the world.
Dear Abby didn’t become an icon because she was famous. She became an icon because she represented an awful lot of what is best and unique about Middle America. A willingness to take on any subject, to have an opinion but to leave the mean spiritedness aside. We could use more Dear Abby today I think.
Pauline Phillips, the original Dear Abby, was 94 years old.
Cyber-bullying
If you work with teenagers as I do in my real life it is one of the top three topics of conversation these days. If you’re a parent you probably hear about it a lot as well. It’s called cyber-bullying, emotional and verbal abuse on the internet. Because our kids spend so much time online we’ve begun to wonder just how emotionally dangerous it may be. There’s no doubt that for a young person in the wrong emotional place at the wrong time it can be devastating. None of us want to see the young people we care about being abused. To that end a variety of states have passed laws against cyber-bullying.
The real problem is defining just what we’re talking about. Is just being mean the same as being a bully? I think most of us would say no to that. Kids are in the process of working out who they are and how they interact with others. That takes them to some mean places at times. Virtually all of us have been mean to someone else at some point in our lives. It doesn’t make us terrible people.
In pursuit of defining what cyber-bullying may be the folks at the Pew Research Center did a nationwide survey of teenagers and asked them about their experience online. The results can help us parse this complex issue.
First people may be surprised by the overall positive experience most teens say they have. While 88% say they’ve seen someone being “mean or cruel”, two thirds of those surveyed said that people are mostly kind online. 20% said they’ve been bullied (although the largest percentage note that it was in person rather than online) and 20% have admitted that they have joined in on cruelty to others.
What’s interesting to me is that most of the teens that Pew spoke with said they just ignore the negativity when it invades their lives. They’re pretty good at using the privacy controls offered them to limit who can see their posts on places like Facebook and Twitter as well. They also turn to friends and sometimes parents when they need support.
So in the end the Pew research gives a little better handle on the issue. Cyber-bullying does exist, it can be harmful. Our best reaction? To continue to help our kids defend themselves by giving them the tools they need in life and on the web.
On the Reality of Virtual Relationships
Last week I was introduced to a concept called Catfishing. If you missed it to “catfish” is to create a fake online persona for the purposes of a hoax, a joke or to generally deceive someone. This is different than having an online persona for your own personal use. Where it came up is with the story of Manti T’eo the senior linebacker at Notre Dame. It appears that he believed that he had developed a relationship with a young woman online. Turns out she was a catfish created by a young man who may done this to several other people as well.
I’m not going to get into the “what did he know and when did he know it” aspect of this discussion. That will come out slowly over the next month or so as more of the principal characters come forward. I want to talk about a response I heard several times from commentators about one media aspect of the story.
Several commentators have had great fun with the idea that you can’t have a “real” relationship just via the internet or phone. That it’s not possible to have a relationship with a person you’ve never met in person.
I think those commentators are showing their age.
Let’s remember that T’eo is not quite 22 years old. He grew up on the Internet. Young people are much more comfortable, in fact often too comfortable, sharing large portions of their lives and thoughts on line. Just the way you do with friends. They’ve had long conversations with people who live tens, hundreds and thousands of miles away from them. This is a normal and routine part of their social lives. So why wouldn’t they make friends there?
And who is to say that romantic feelings couldn’t bloom as well? Well lots of grumpy middle aged men for whom the Internet is a tool rather than an integral part of their lives have been trying to make that exact point. There’s a whole new generation that says they’re wrong.
Virtual communications can miss a lot of nuance and can make this kind of hoax all too easy. But before we simply mark this young man off as a fool for believing in a serious online relationship maybe we need to examine our preconceptions about the virtual world.
Call that the View From the Phlipside
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