Title: The Influence of Influencers: Navigating Modern Career Aspirations
Introduction:
In today’s digital age, children have growing exposure to social media platforms and the concept of being an influencer. This phenomenon has sparked concerns among parents regarding the potential impact on their children’s values and future aspirations. This article delves into the complexities of this issue, exploring historical precedents, fears, and the need for parents to guide their children through the evolving landscape of career options.
The Cycle of Concern:
Throughout history, new forms of media have raised anxieties about their influence on the younger generation. Whether it was the fear of television corrupting morals, the degeneration of Hollywood, or the advent of social media, each wave of technological advancement has incited worry. It is essential to acknowledge this historical context to avoid dismissing concerns as baseless, while also recognizing the cyclical nature of societal apprehension.
Examining Influencer Aspirations:
One of the main objections parents may have regarding their child aspiring to be an influencer is the perceived shallowness and unreliability of this career path. The competitive hierarchies, concentration of wealth at the top, and the commodification of personal brand can be valid concerns. Furthermore, the influence of social media may lead to a loss of community-oriented engagement and independent thinking.
A Deeper Fear: The Nature of Influence:
Parents play a significant role in shaping their children’s values, ethics, and aspirations. However, as children interact with various influences in their lives, including social media, parents may feel a loss of control over their child’s direction. The very notion of influence can be unsettling, reflecting fears that their values may be diluted or superseded. This fear raises questions about the origin and validity of the parents’ own beliefs.
Navigating the Evolving Landscape:
Acknowledging the fears and uncertainties surrounding the influence of social media and the aspirations of being an influencer is crucial. It is important to recognize that artists and idols of previous generations faced similar criticisms and concerns. However, this understanding should not lead to fatalism but rather encourage parents to identify enduring values and impart them to their children, irrespective of the changing world.
Preparing for Influence:
Parents can focus on instilling lasting wisdom in their children, regardless of their chosen career path. These lessons may include empathy, critical thinking, resilience, and social responsibility. By imparting these broader life lessons, parents equip their children with the tools to navigate the complexities of influence and adapt to the evolving professional landscape.
Conclusion:
In a world where digital platforms and the notion of being an influencer are prevalent, parents must grapple with the potential impact on their children’s values and aspirations. By acknowledging historical precedents and their own fears, parents can approach the issue with a balanced perspective. By instilling enduring wisdom and values, parents can help their children navigate the evolving landscape of career aspirations and find fulfillment in the pursuit of their dreams.
Summary:
The article explores the concerns surrounding children aspiring to become influencers in the age of social media. It acknowledges historical anxieties regarding new media forms, but also delves into the deeper fears of parents about the nature of influence. The article emphasizes the importance of instilling enduring values in children and preparing them to navigate the evolving professional landscape. By imparting broader life lessons, parents can help their children find meaning and fulfillment, regardless of their chosen career path.
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“Every time my 6-year-old son When her daughter is asked what she wants to be when she grows up, she says: “An influencer.” The thought of that scares me. That I have to do?”
-Under the influence
Dear Bass,
Your question made me think of Diana Christensen, the main character in Paddy Chayefsky’s 1976 film. Grid, played by Faye Dunaway. Christensen is a young news network executive who aims to represent the moral bankruptcy of a generation that grew up on television (one of her characters calls her “the incarnation of television”). While she is charismatic and very capable, she is also wildly amoral, fiercely competitive, and so obsessed with ratings that she famously orgasms while she talks about ratings. The character clearly stirred widespread cultural anxiety about the corrupting influence of television, although with a little distance it’s hard not to see the film’s depiction of her as moralizing and heavy-handed. As The New YorkerPauline Kael’s Pauline Kael put it in her review: “What Chayefsky is really complaining about is what barroom philosophers have always complained about: the heartless worshipers of false shrines: the younger generation.”
I mention the film only to leave aside the most obvious objection to your madness, one that I’m sure you’ve already considered: namely, that every generation fears that new forms of media are “false sanctuaries” that corrupt youth. , and that these concerns are ultimately short-sighted, reactionary, and bound to seem, in retrospect, an unfounded concern. Before Diana Christensen, there were the studio bullies in Norman Mailer’s novel The deer park (1955), which depicted the degeneration of Hollywood and the ruthless journalists in Howard Hawks’ film. Your Friday girl (1940), whom he refers to as “inhumans.” If you want to go back even further, consider the bewilderment modern readers of mansfield parkJane Austen’s 1814 novel whose dramatic apex is based on the indignation of a father upon returning home and discovering that his children have decided to put on a play.
Rest assured, Under, I’m not trying to dismiss your question by appealing to historical relativism. Pointing out that a problem has a history does not compromise its validity. It is possible, after all, that humanity is in constant decline, that each new technological medium, and the professions it generates, is progressively more soulless than the last. The many journalists who have cited the survey 2019 Claims that 30 percent of children in the US and UK want to be YouTubers when they grow up have frequently juxtaposed that figure with the dearth of children who want to be astronauts (11 percent), as if to underline the diminishing ambitions of a society that is no longer “We no longer “reach for the stars,” but instead aspire to the humbler consolations of stardom.
If I had to guess your objections to influence As a future occupation for your daughter, I imagine you might include the fact that the profession, for all its vaunted democratic appeal…anyone can be famous!—hides its competitive hierarchies; that their loot is unreliable and largely concentrated at the top; that requires becoming a bland mascot for brands; that does not require significant contributions to the community itself; that requires blurring personal and professional roles; that the mandates of “like,” “share,” and “follow” amount to a frenetic life of people-pleasing and social conformity that inevitably destroys the ability to think independently.
I’m also willing to bet that there is a deeper fear underlying those seemingly rational objections, one that is related, incidentally, to the very notion of influence. Rising children It is, after all, an extended experiment in influence. You hope to instill your values, your politics, and your moral and ethical conscience in your children, but as they make their way in the world, it becomes clear that other influences are at war with yours. Influence, has been observed in this era of epidemics, shares a root with influenza, an etymology that echoes the popular notion that ideas are free-floating pathogens that someone can contract without giving conscious consent. I think this is how many parents view the social technologies their children use, as hosts to various contagions that should be avoided with more deliberate moral instruction taught at home. Realizing the extent to which these digital platforms have fascinated your daughter is feeling like you haven’t managed to vaccinate her.
Or maybe your concern runs even deeper than that. If I can throw the problem back at you, perhaps her instinctive aversion to her daughter’s aspirations has raised deeper questions about the origin and validity of her own values. Any serious attempt to think about the dangers and possibilities of new technologies forces you to realize that many of your own beliefs are little more than amorphous, unproven assumptions shaped by the times in which you grew up. Are the artists you idolized growing up (musicians, filmmakers, novelists) less superficial and narcissistic than the TikTok and YouTube personalities your daughter idolizes? The answer to this question is not a fact. But if you consider it honestly and persistently, I suspect you will discover that you are not an isolated moral agent, but rather porous to the prejudices and blind spots of the decades in which you came of age.
This kind of understanding can easily inspire fatalism, but it can also lead to a broader and more meaningful understanding of your own fears. My intention in reminding you of the anxieties of previous generations (all that collective angst over television, movies, newspapers, and theater) is to help you see your situation as part of a lineage, a rite of passage through which all generations must proceed. (If we are to believe in Plato PhaedrusEven Socrates was the victim of complaints about the popularity of writing, a medium he feared would “produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory.”) Seeing this problem historically might also prompt you to consider, as father, what kinds of life lessons transcend the details of a given economy.
I would like to believe that along with all the ephemeral inherited assumptions we absorbed in our youth, there are some pearls of lasting wisdom that will remain true and valuable for generations to come. Ideally, it is these more enduring truths that you want to pass on to her daughter and that will prepare her for influence, no matter what she chooses to work on.
Faithfully,
Cloud
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