Words Are Like Weapons, They Wound Sometimes: The Cher Prophecy
Was she a prophet? In 1989, a Cher song about time perfectly predicted the tribal snarky social media era of today
Published in
5 min readJan 4, 2022
Cher lit up Twitter, sharing an encounter with a beautiful young couple. So captivated by their love, she asked to photograph them together.
No one knew (until the photo appeared on Twitter) that the 75-year-old masked photographer was the legendary Cher, a pop idol since 1964. Her gesture was an example of social media at its best, but she knows both sides.
The good can be great, but the dark side of social media? Now new research from Germany shows excessive smartphone use during the pandemic led to:
- Poor self-control.
- A growing fear of missing out (FOMO).
- A tendency to “dwell on negative news.” The World War II generation sang, “You’ve got to accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative.” Today, we do the opposite, regularly whining or blaming “the other.”
“Problematic smartphone use is fostered by the interaction of loss of control, fear of missing out, and repetitive negative thinking,” researcher Julia Brailovskaia concluded.
