Being born in 1989 had its perks and its disadvantages when compared to growing up in the post-2000 era. As a child, I was very much influenced by entertainment and media. Glued to the Discovery channel, I always wanted to travel, and the show “The Crocodile Hunter” was my key to the world. It also influenced my decision in career choice; stay out of an office. A cubicle was torture in my 6-year-old mind. As I watched hour after hour of crocodile wrestling, snake handling and environmentalist lessons, I gained a respect for the world around me and how to treat all living things.
Today, I am a multimedia journalists who, instead of wrestling wild animals, photographs them. Working in sports can often resemble one of the many documentaries I would see on the Discovery channel. There was an alpha male, a clear winner and loser and always a good story to compliment the action.
I was hooked. My childhood dreams of taking on the great outdoors with rope and snake-bag in hand had been fulfilled, just in a safer fashion. Taking on the world, camera in hand, is my adventure, dream and realization. All of this from one television show in the 1990’s.
Growing up in the 1990’s had its advantages. I wanted to play outside instead of sitting in front of a computer playing video games. In todays entertainment-filled world, I feel that I would not have had the same childhood because of these technologies.
My values that I learned from television could still be learned if I was born 10 years later, but today, there are much more distractions for children to not chase their dreams, and instead, chase fake characters in a video game.
In Persepolis, we watched a young girl exposed to a multitude of cultures and watched how it changed her. From the restrictions of how you are to live your life in Iran during the Israeli Revolution to the free-living atmosphere of Vienna, Austria, you can see how this can change one’s personality and choices. The temptation of sex, drugs and rock and roll would not be as big of an influence in Iran as it was in Austria.
The same comparison can be made within time frames of growing up. Just as the generation before mine grew up in an entirely different world. Today, with Facebook and social media, there is a completely different atmosphere in which children are to discover themselves through the internet and all of the outside influences that we saw in Persepolis are no longer hundreds, or thousands, of miles away - only a few clicks.
Just as one’s surroundings can influence them, images are one of the most powerful catalysts toward our independent thoughts. In Susan Sontag’s In Regarding the Pain of Others, she describes the power of images and the art of war. Her book uses photographs from a variety of historic events, from lynch mobs in the South to the attacks on September 11, 2001, to back her claims.
“Transforming is what art does, but photography that bears witness to the calamitous and the reprehensible is much criticized if it seems ‘aesthetic;’ that is, too much like art” (76).
Art has a profound impact on one’s life and decisions. Now, The Crocodile Hunter may not be “art,” but it is still a form of media, like art has many forms of media, that influence one’s decisions.
Growing up in the age of television has had a great impact on my career choice and how I live my life. If I grew up in the age of the internet, I’m sure the outcome would be entirely different.
