Media Response 2: Single 6 Year Old Ladies

My oldest daughter (and please forgive me that I am again using my girls as part of my posting) had her big “friends” party this weekend. This meant that there was nine four, five, and six year olds wearing tutus, bracelets and necklaces, fingernail polish and face paint (it was a “Fancy Nancy” party). My daughter chose the music for the event. Among these song choices was “Single Ladies,” currently a favorite in my household.

The girls were sitting around drawing pictures, stamping images of Disney princesses and fairies, and putting stickers onto paper. They were eating salt water taffy and drinking lemonade out of tea cups. The room was bustling with commotion, talk, and giggles. Then a funny thing happened. Beyonce Knowles’ “Single Ladies” comes up on the little boom box in the corner of the room. All of a sudden, a girl yells out, “I love this movie” (meaning “Alvin and the Chipmunks 2: The Squeakquel”) and there is a sudden booming of high pitched voices belting at the tops of their lungs, “Now put your hands up!” in one chorus.

If this was not interesting in itself (since several very young girls singing a song about jealousy and moving on from an old/bad relationship is quite interesting) what happened next was even more interesting to me. There was a social structure to the singing based almost solely upon who knew the lyrics best. Their interaction with the media of song triggered a social hierarchy that came out of their confidence, and that confidence was from their degree of engagement with the media. There were two girls that knew the lyrics perfectly; with some of the dancing as far as they knew it (it seemed that it was contorted by their recollections of the Chipettes’ dance from the movie). Later, it was Miley Cyrus’ “Party in the U.S.A.” from her latest album that earned the same response.

Party in the U.S.A. (I apologize but Miley has asked that the embedding feature be removed from YouTube)

This brought to mind the idea that we have discussed in class about our students’ engagement with media and the levels of experience that cause a kind of social hierarchy among them. I had never seen it quite in the above microcosm before, but I can see how, in school, it is not unlike in “Horton Hears a Who” when the daughter proclaims that everyone in her class has a cell phone therefore she needs one too. If you don’t have a cell phone, an iPhone, an iPod, a Blackberry, or whatever other gizmo is most popular, you are automatically less viable in the social sphere. Also, there is the degree to which you Facebook, or post YouTube videos, or blog that can also play a part in your level of social viability. I think that this is great material for discussion in a classroom setting, talking about media engagement as a new kind of discrimination of societal levels or in understanding the structures we build for ourselves based on our media consumption. More particularly, it would be interesting to discuss what things have the most social currency and which make you socially poor (like the geeks who learn the Klingon language may have huge investment in media but the wrong media).