“Whenever my 6-yr daughter is asked what she wants to be when she grows up, she says, “Influencer.” The thought of it drives me crazy. What should I do?’
“Under the influence.”
Dear Under,
Your question made me think of Diana Christensen, main character in Paddy Chayefsky’s 1976 film. networkplayed by Faye Dunaway. Christensen is a young network news executive who is supposed to represent the moral bankruptcy of a generation raised on television (one character calls her “television incarnate”). While she’s charismatic and highly capable, she’s also wildly amoral, viciously competitive, and so obsessed with ratings that she orgasms while discussing viewership. The heroine clearly sparked a widespread cultural anxiety about the corrupting influence of television, though with some distance it’s hard not to see her portrayal in the film as moralizing and crude. like The New YorkerPauline Kael said in her review: “What Chayefsky really complains about is what bar philosophers have always complained about: the soulless worshipers of false shrines—the younger generation.”
I mention the film only to remove the most obvious objection to your freaking out, which I’m sure you’ve already considered, namely that every generation fears that new forms of media are “false sanctuaries” corrupting the youth, and that these fears they are, after all, short-sighted, reactionary, and meant to look in retrospect like so much unwarranted hand-wringing. Before Diana Christensen, there were studio bullies in Norman Mailer’s novel The deer park (1955), which featured the degeneracy of Hollywood and ruthless newspapermen in Howard Hawks’ film His girl on Friday (1940), which are called “inhuman”. If you want to go back even further, consider the bewilderment often experienced by modern readers of Mansfield ParkJane Austen’s 1814 novel, whose dramatic climax centers on a father’s outrage when he returns home to find that his children have decided to put on a play.
Rest assured, Under, that I am not trying to dismiss your question by appeals to historical relativism. Pointing out that a problem has antecedent causes does not compromise its validity. It may be that humanity is, after all, in steady decline, that each new technological environment and the professions it spawns are increasingly soulless than the last. Many journalists who cited the 2019 survey claiming that 30 percent of children in the US and UK wanted to become YouTubers when they grew up often compared this figure to the dearth of children who want to be astronauts (11 percent ), as if to highlight the diminishing ambitions of a society that no longer “reaches for the stars” but instead strives for the baser comforts of stardom.
If I were to know your objections to influence as a future profession for your daughter, I suppose they might include the fact that the profession, for all its vaunted democratic appeal .anyone can be famous!—hides its competitive hierarchies; that its prey is unreliable and largely concentrated at the top; that it requires becoming an empty mascot for brands; that it fails to claim a meaningful contribution to the community; that it requires blurring between personal and professional roles; that mandates for likes, shares and followers equate to a life of rabid people-pleasing and social conformity that inevitably destroys the ability to think independently.
I’m also willing to bet that beneath these seemingly rational objections lies a deeper fear – which, by the way, has to do with the very notion of influence. After all, parenting is an extended experiment in influence. You hope to instill your values, politics, and moral and ethical awareness in your children, but as they make their way in the world, it becomes clear that there are other influences at war with your own. It has been noted that in this age of epidemics, influence shares a root word with influenza, an etymology that reflects the popular notion that ideas are free-floating pathogens that one can catch without giving their conscious consent. I think this is how many parents view the social technologies their children use as hosts of various contagions that need to be fended off with more conscious moral instruction given at home. To realize the extent to which these digital platforms have captivated your daughter is to feel like you’ve failed to vaccinate her.
Or maybe your anxiety runs even deeper than that. If I may turn the issue back on you, perhaps your instinctive revulsion at your daughter’s aspirations has raised more penetrating questions about the source and validity of your 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, untested assumptions shaped by the era in which you grew up. Are the artists you grew up idolizing—musicians, filmmakers, writers—less shallow and narcissistic than the TikTok and YouTube personalities your daughter idolizes? The answer to this question is not a given. But if you think about it honestly and hard, I suspect you’ll find that you’re not an isolated moral agent, but porous to the prejudices and blind spots of the decades in which you grew up.
Such realizations can easily inspire fatalism, but they can also lead to a more expanded and meaningful understanding of your own fears. My intention in reminding you of the anxieties of previous generations—all that collective anger about television, movies, newspapers, and theater—is to help you see your situation as part of a lineage, a rite of passage that all generations must go through. (If we believe Plato Phaedruseven Socrates fell prey to the popularity of writing, a means he feared would “produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not exercise their memory.”) Let us see this problem in A historical background can also prompt you to consider, as a parent, what kinds of life lessons transcend the particularities of an economy.
I’d like to believe that among all the ephemeral inherited assumptions we absorb in our youth, there are some pearls of timeless wisdom that will remain true and valuable for generations to come. Ideally, these more enduring truths are what you want to pass on to your daughter, and it will help her make an impact no matter what she chooses to do.
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