Staying Aware of, and Learning to Deal with, the Unpleasant

Recently I finished reading The Filter Bubble: How the New Personalized Web Is Changing What We Read and How We Think by Eli Pariser. I started reading it because it discusses things relevant to my profession as a librarian, but it discusses issues that are relevant to all of us, in regards to our behavior online and offline.

One of the things Pariser discusses is the use of Facebook’s “Like” button. It’s hard to press a button called “Like” on an article about mass killings, for example. You can’t show that you’re interested in hearing about these issues without it coming across as “liking” them. Like is very different from interest. Because of the “Like” button, there’s a tendency for more positive items to be shared and for more depressing items to fall to the side. As Pariser says, “In a personalized world, important but complex or unpleasant issues — the rising prison population, for example, or homelessness — are less likely to come to our attention at all.”

This issue of screening out some of the more unpleasant issues is something that I’ve thought about before and that I’ve seen touched on elsewhere, so this isn’t a new argument. Even before online content started selecting for more positive information, television also tended to highlight more positive issues, giving more time to celebrity culture and selling us things to help “live it up” than was spent highlighting problems in our society. I like hearing about documentaries and news programs that help create awareness. One of my favorite things about The Daily Show, actually, is that Jon Stewart frequently has documentary film makers as his guests. That’s how I’ve heard about such good films as Inequality for All and A Place at the Table.

While there is an understandable to desire to shield myself and certainly my child from the unpleasant sides of life and society, excluding them as a common practice does everyone a disservice. I can’t keep everything negative in life away from my daughter, so if I try to shelter her as long as I can, it may come as a shock later and she may be unprepared for dealing with it. By carefully letting her experience — hopefully from a safe distance and with my guidance — some of the more unpleasant issues (and people), she may be eased into being better able to handle the situation, be better able to understand the nuances involved, and gain confidence in her own abilities to respond appropriately.

If my daughter only sees large, expensive homes on television and is kept from knowing that there are homeless people even within our community, who am I really helping? Instead of ignoring their existence, I can help her become informed about who these people are, some of the aspects contributing to the issue of homelessness, and how these individuals might be helped. Our volunteering at the local homeless shelter would help educate her and help her feel empowered that she can make a difference.

In a small way, my daughter has taken a first step towards learning how to deal with unpleasant situations. Today was her first day at daycare. She’s been mostly in my care of me, and she hasn’t been cared for by a non-family member in such a way before. Naturally, she was a bit anxious today, but she seemed to do very well. I hope that daycare will give her some wonderful experiences, like learning to socialize with her peers, access to all kinds of great toys, etc. She should have a lot of very good experiences as a result of daycare that she wouldn’t have had if she only stayed in my care. In order to get to those good experiences, though, she has to deal with this initially stressful situation of being introduced to it. I took her several days last week for a few hours each time to try to help her become familiar with the setting, but it was still stressful the first day on her own. Who knows, maybe it was more stressful for me or just in my head that she would be stressed. I can pretend she still dotes on me, though. Once she starts talking I’m sure she’ll be quick enough to put me in my place.

The real world and the virtual one cannot be entirely separated, and while I don’t have a great solution for how to prevent news stories, for instance, containing what we “should” or “need” to know from being shoved aside in favor of the flashy and positive, I acknowledge the value of such stories. Acknowledging the worth of such “unpleasant” or “dry” stories is the first step towards becoming more aware of them. Instead of denying the existence of some of the more negative issues in life, I want my daughter to be aware of problems and hopefully fix them. I want to have a net positive (more good than bad) impact on the world, and if she can do the same, I will consider that a wonderful success!

Sources and Further Reading:

• A Place at the Table. 2013.
• Forest, D. E., Kimmel, S. C., & Garrison, K. L. (2013). “Launching youth activism with award-winning international literature.” Journal of Language and Literacy Education [Online], 9 (1), 136–160. Available at http://jolle.coe.uga.edu/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Launching-Youth-Activism.pdf.
• This article has a good list of books that incorporate youth activism themes, including a book from a series I absolutely love, Big Wolf and Little Wolf. See a previous post about one of the books in that series.
• Inequality for All. 2013.
• Mcdaniel, Cynthia. “Critical Literacy: A Questioning Stance And The Possibility For Change.” Reading Teacher 57.5 (2004): 472–481. Academic Search Complete. Web. 19 Aug. 2014.
• Pariser, Eli. The Filter Bubble: How the New Personalized Web Is Changing What We Read and How We Think. New York: ThePenguin Press, 2011.