Social Media, Social Change, and Slippery Slopes

A still from D. W. Griffith’s A Corner in Wheat, 1909, which I took from a public domain version on the Internet Archive.org. Here the rich wives of industrialists cavort while their husbands plot financial schemes which hit the poor where it hurts them the most, in the bread basket.

A while ago, I heard a BBC 4 interview with screenwriter Nora Ephron, who was publicizing her movie Julie and Julia (which I really enjoyed), a movie based on a blog, of all things, which still managed to be meaty, in more ways than one.

Anyway, Ephron, the daughter of movie screenwriters herself, said something quite remarkable, I think… She claimed that the movie medium wasn’t useful to promote social change, that it was ‘a visual medium’ and that all it persuaded people to do was (I think she said) purchase one brand of sunglasses over another.

It’s not that I am disagreeing with her, although, I’m sure many filmmakers would. In fact, I tend to agree with her. She supported her statement by asking (not an exact quote) How many anti-war films have there been made, and yet wars still happen.

This is certainly a topic for debate, hot debate. Does literature promote social change? Most people believe so, and they could point to Charles Dickens and any number of iconic authors. Yet, the point could be argued against as well. I mean, Brave New World, 1984, Kafka’s novels and Fahrenheit 451 are some seminal works predicting an ominous future for mankind (books we all read in school) and yet we continue to slide down the slippery slope they warned us about. (Actually, most books warn us about one fact: that history repeats itself. No writers see into the future, they just extrapolate.)

I watched the movie Network last night and was amazed at how prescient that movie was (is?). It’s about the corporatization (and de-fanging) of Network News and the rise of (cheap but compelling) Reality T.V. Forty years later, we are here, folks. Paddy Chayefsky, take a bow!

I tend to believe that it is technology that changes us the most; that the medium is the message, that what I am writing on this blog is less significant than the blog itself.

The fact that I was able to ‘capture’ an image from a D.W. Griffith film and post it at the top of the page is more significant than the fact that A Corner in Wheat is highly relevant with respect to the Nicholson Family experience, because it was the Wheat Boom era in Canada and because wheat was still very expensive, even for a middle class family, at $5.00 a barrel. And this supports my thesis: that the middle class is just the working class with more stuff and pretensions toward being upper class.

My story, Flo in the City (being written on this blog) about a girl coming of age in the pivotal 1908-1913 era, is based on the real life letters of www.tighsolas.ca. Here is the opening essay of that website, posted on the homepage. Tomorrow, hopefully, I will write the first installment of the second chapter.

Between 1908 and 1913, Henry Ford perfected the manufacturing of his Model T, revolutionizing the way ‘things’ were made and sold and ushering in the age of mass production.Between 1908-1913, D. W. Griffith produced hundreds of his Biograph silent film shorts, effectively giving birth to the American Film Industry.Between 1908-1913, Coco Chanel launched her fashion house in Paris, just as the fight for women’s suffrage reached its apex. She eventually redefined women’s clothing, liberating female limbs and lungs with soft fabrics and shorter hemlines, but too late to soften the image of the militant suffragettes.And between 1908-1913, bark salesman turned railroader Norman Nicholson of Richmond, Quebec, his feisty wife Margaret, their spirited daughters, Edith, Marion and Flora and lost soul of a son, Herb, were a proud family in crisis, teetering on the brink of financial ruin.The family left behind a vivid written record of their day-to-day trials, thoughts and feelings, in letter-form. Fittingly, talk of fashion, entertainment and long dusty trips in automobiles pervades these letters.For those of you who thought feminism was invented in the 1960′s, these letters will be a real eye-opener. For those of you who love Canadian history and marvel at the way technology changes us, these letters, penned at such a pivotal time in history, will be something of a revelation.

The Push-Pull of Biology and Ambition

Left: The young men of Eastern Townships, Quebec, circa 1908.

I am writing a book, Flo in the City, based on the real life letters of Flora Nicholson of Richmond, Quebec, posted at www.tighsolas.ca.

The novel will cover the years 1908, when Flora was a naive, over-protected schoolgirl of 15, who froze at examination time, living in a posh neighborhood of a quiet town, to 1913, when she was a teacher, with diploma, working in a city slum with some of the most deprived children in the entire Western World – all about to live through a Great War.

These five years were particularly pivotal when put in historical perspective.

Henry Ford perfected the manufacturing of his Model-T between 1908 and 1913 and D. W. Griffith created his many many silent film shorts in those years.

The automobile and the motion picture show, among other era innovations, changed the way people lived, big time.

(Coincidentally, Anne of Green Gables was published in 1908, by a Boston Publisher.

The iconic novel has since spawned an entire industry and become a key focus of tourism in Canada.

Last September I took my first trip to PEI, or Prince Edward island. I bought an Anne Shirley doll at the Welcome Centre of that picturesque province, and it now sits on my mantle between the two art nouveau vases I inherited from my mother’s family.

These are portrait vases of pretty girls in the Rembrandt style, gold on black with a greenish tinge, so the lovely little souvenir doll, dressed in green with a cap of glistening golden-red hair, fits in quite nicely.)

As it happens, we are experiencing something similar, right now, although, this time, the changes are happening so fast it is quite possible that we are morphing into a completely different animal.

Not that some things about us will stay the same. That’s why it is so important to consult history when making assessments of ‘the present’,

Take dating, or ‘courtship’ – as scholars might call it. (Not a classic ‘history’ topic, but why not?) From what I can see, not much has changed about the way young people ‘feel’ about ‘the art of love’ since 1910.

Marion sounds like a typical young woman in her 1907 diary as she experiences the perplexing push-pull of biology and ambition.

Flora, too, is similarly ambivalent about her desires for the future. At least, this is what I am trying to convey in my opening chapter Just a Change of Colour, which I started to compose in the previous blog, Do I Dare Eat A Peach?

Flora can’t get the phrase “Just a Change of Colour” out of her mind. Why? Because it relates to marriage and love, the biological imperative. And even ambitious ‘new women’ of the 1910 era like Marion and Flora, have sex on the brain.

Flora has more pressing issues to attend to. Indeed, her future career may be hanging in the balance – for she is failing at school, but, alas, Mother Nature cannot be denied.

Why do novels like Pride and Prejudice and Anne of Green Gables endure in the hearts of women while other once popular works fade to black in the collective unconscious? Because they deal with this very dilemma.

One remark I’d like to make about the Nicholsons and dating. From movies and such we are all aware that young women of that era from good families couldn’t consort with men except under the watchful eye of a chaperone.

Well, this doesn’t appear to be the rule with the Nicholsons, even though they came from a very respectable middle class family.

From pictures I have in the Tighsolas 1900 photo album, the girls were afforded quite a lot of freedom when dating. Richmond was such a close knit community, it is unlikely young people could get away with much, even if unchaperoned.

Still, it seems to me, if a young man had ‘serious’ designs on a young woman, he showed it by walking her to church. I guess, in this way, her entire family, the entire community, could see what was happening.

The photo above is one of many ‘goofy’ ones featuring young men.
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