Some of my greatest insights — which I’ve been sure could expand our understanding of human nature — have turned out to be, well, wrong. Yet I persevere. Shortly, I will offer you a novel view of how the digital revolution has coarsened human interactions.
First, though, in the interest of transparency, I’ll share a brief review of a couple of my favorite notions. I do hate to give up on some of these winning concepts.
Here’s a good one: For many years, I espoused what I came to call the Theory of Constant Coolness. It has to do with my own demographic cohort, the Baby Boomers, who sort of took over the country due to our sheer numbers. People born from roughly 1946 to 1964 created the biggest population bulge America had ever seen; at the boom’s height, one of us was born every seven seconds.
For a while, everything was done to accommodate us. Schools were built, suburban neighborhoods expanded, black-and-white TV sets rushed off the assembly lines. At our insistence, youth culture was glorified: Our styles and tastes dictated what was cool, whether it was denim jeans, which were previously worn mainly by farmers, or long hair on men’s heads and faces, which had been out of style for a century.
Grandly enjoying my place at the center of all this attention, and reasoning that Boomers would always be the dominant generation, I confidently asserted that whatever we did would always be considered cool. We had the numbers to dictate consumer trends, political choices and societal norms. We would be constantly cool because we could define cool.
This otherwise keen observation had but one flaw: It failed to recognize the inevitability of the Boomers’ offspring eventually being even more numerous than we were. Sure enough, Millennials surpassed Boomers in 2020 as the nation’s largest living population group. Unsurprisingly, marketers turned to them, and to Gen X, too. And “cool” is not always a function of numbers, it seems. My 27-year-old daughter’s hip musical tastes do not include anything created by anybody who remembers why “The Ed Sullivan Show” of Feb. 9, 1964, was huge.
Feb. 9, 1964. Anybody? Here’s a hint: “I Want To Hold Your Hand.” Anyway, so much for the Theory of Constant Cool.
Undaunted, I came up with another groundbreaking observation a few years later. It has been called the Mortality Reception Syndrome. Called that, of course, by me.
It’s based on the notion that with the rise of mass media — starting with television’s growth — the circle of people we might believe we know well would expand, owing to the many famous people in our faces constantly, thus changing some of our sensibilities. Among those: We would be less shocked and chagrined by human frailty, and even death, because it would confront us so routinely.
Consider this vital question: “Ginger or Mary Ann?” For a while, practically everybody knew that this referred to the female stars of “Gilligan’s Island,” a mid-60s sitcom. If you didn’t need me to tell you that just now, you probably also know that Mary Ann, known in real life as Dawn Wells, died a couple of years back. But, by the way, Ginger lives. Her name is Tina Louise, you know (of course), and she is 89 years old.
The Mortality Reception Syndrome posits that the demise of so many people we’ve come to know so well — know on screens, that is — would acclimate us to death in real life. You may debate whether or not that’s a good thing. You know, maybe the fear of death makes us choose to live better. But the ubiquity of celebrity surely has changed things, don’t you think? Plus, the drama we see on screen constantly has made real-life drama less tragic – at least, when it doesn’t touch us. Tragedy at hand? Next scene, please.
So I haven’t quite given up on the Mortality Reception Syndrome – which may be why I’m intrigued by the notion advanced by social scientists that it’s the fault of social media that we seem so dissatisfied with our lot these days. Whether it’s a Facebook post that suggests somebody’s life is better than ours or an infuriatingly misinformed tweet, we’re nowadays confronted with more that might upset us, and we’re able to respond widely. Back when it was only our close friends and family who heard our griping, society as a whole was much more civil.
Psychologists who have studied the effects of social media use have tracked unhealthy outcomes ranging from excessive credit card debt to sleeplessness, low self-esteem and the so-called “conformity effect” — people changing behaviors to match what they see on Facebook. I’d like for them, please, to test my theory that social media makes folks more grouchy generally – that is, outside the usual circle of friends and family who are just expected to put up with such behavior.
And while they’re at it, I’d welcome a review of the Mortality Reception Syndrome. I’m not quite done with it yet, even as I have been forced to give up on the Theory of Constant Coolness. Sadly, my time to be cool has expired.
Rex Smith, the co-host of The Media Project on WAMC, is the former editor of the Times Union of Albany and The Record in Troy. His weekly digital report, The Upstate American, is published by Substack.
The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this station or its management.