This article really got me thinking.
I'm Gen X but I had a far different life experience from most millennials.
People still had a "name", a "face" for my generation. When something occurred that had the potential to impact the reputation we had, it could be addressed face to face, with people standing in front of you unless you were famous or a politician.
I wanted no part of fame either because I understood very young that media attacks were a very different animal to what your average joe dealt with concerning assaults on someone's reputation.
I preferred the face to face approach to conflict resolution - being able to speak to people, in person, who actually knew me as a person. So like the plague I avoided any potential for fame.
Now, with the film everything you see mentality of youth, the little things we may do can be taken out of context, become misrepresented and every single person then deals with attacks on reputation that are the same type of attacks that in my youth only politicians or the famous had to field.
Growing up in an environment like this is both challenging as well as unforgiving. No one alive has avoided making at least one mistake in life, and the publicity of everything we do and subsequent media attacks on character are very unforgiving.
This type of fame is what causes child actor syndrome of emotionally unstable adults; literally a direct result of the limelight at too young an age.
But now it's literally a fame being faced by every single person growing up or trying to live in this environment - and people like this teacher can't just check out of the culture, because indeed it's now literally become a cultural phenomenon instead of something reserved for adults mentally prepared to deal with it and financially viable enough to address it in as direct a manner as possible (using PR firms and the like to help smooth over a publicly damaged reputation).
I feel the teachers pain, I also being a person who is more than happy in life to avoid fame... But this type of thing is now a fact of life, and everyone is having to learn how to deal with the reputation/fame issue no matter who you are or where you work.
It's probably just a good idea to consider that you are being filmed 24/7, and some of that footage is going to become very very public. There's no profession that's a safe haven, what with everyone carrying around their own recording device every where they go.
I don't think it's profitable to be a teacher right now. Only the strong of heart can stand it. Especially nowadays no one really learns. When I was writing about "the yellow wallpaper", I found an option to
discover this and I was happy. Now it's just unreal to get young people interested. Everyone wants to be streamers and bloggers. No one wants to spend a quarter of their life studying and end up not being anything.
