Scholarly Sources:
Stever, Gayle S. “Evolutionary Theory and Reactions to Mass Media: Understanding Parasocial Attachment.” Psychology of Popular Media Culture, vol. 6, no. 2, Apr. 2017, pp. 95–102. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1037/ppm0000116.
This article explains why people become attached to celebrities from an evolutionary theory perspective.
This essay is important because it explains a bit about why people become attached to celebrities. It is important to understand why exactly people become attached to celebrities in order to understand why we feel sad when they die. The piece brings attention to a 1996 study that determined that from a scientific perspective people’s perceptions do not differ from feelings brought on by real life and the media. Repeated exposure in the media is what is most likely the cause of most people’s attachment to celebrities.
Gustafson, Donald. “Grief.” Noûs, vol. 23, no. 4, 1989, pp. 457–479. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/2215878. Accessed 10 Mar. 2020.
This journal article explains the social and psychological aspects of grief.
Grief and how we grieve is one of the bigger picture themes I want to address. Grieving is a very complicated process that varies greatly from person to person, which makes it very hard to understand. I have trouble even defining how exactly I grieve. The article was very complicated to understand, but it explains certain aspects of grief and how it is structured on an emotional and psychosocial basis. Grief is not something that can be generalized, which is another important theme that must be considered while writing my article.
Non-Scholarly Sources:
DiMaria, Lauren. “Cyberbullying and Depression in Children.” Verywell Mind, Verywell Mind, 25 Feb. 2020, www.verywellmind.com/cyberbullying-and-depression-1066791.
This article highlights the link between cyberbullying and children.
This article is very important because it shines light on the fact that what people say online can really hurt us. People believe that they can say whatever they want from the other side of a computer screen and disregard the fact that this has a real effect on real people. The main thing that inspired me to choose this topic is the fact that people were online trashing those that were expressing their love and support for Kobe in the wake of his death. This article proves that it isn’t okay and that people getting cyberbullies suffer real emotional consequences.
Brody, Jane E. “Understanding Grief.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 15 Jan. 2018, www.nytimes.com/2018/01/15/well/live/understanding-grief.html.
This article highlights the main ideas of two books that attempt to explain and understand grief.
This article offered a much easier to understand perspective on coping with grief than the previously mentioned scholarly article. The main thing is the anecdotes of how people tend to grieve. I feel like it is important to be aware of as many different grieving techniques as possible to attempt to begin to understand grief, which is an impossible feat because there is so much variability. Once again, the importance of grieving in your own way is highlighted, and that people shouldn’t have a negative effect on your process or try to speed it up.
Cultural Artifact
Here, Kobe’s daughter Natalia poses inn front of a mural of her Father and Sister in an Instagram post made by her mother.
This picture really tugs at the heartstrings, because it shows that she their family is staying strong and doing well. Especially when mourning a celebrity it’s easy to think selfishly and to somehow forget that your pain isn’t the worst. Kobe’s family kept their grief process very private, and this post is a reminder that they’re doing well and that as fans, we should be too.
Experiential Research
When Kobe Bryant died I was truly devastated.
I think the most important experience relating to this topic is how I felt when Kobe died. I couldn’t understand why I felt so terrible because I’ve never met Kobe. Even though I only watched him play basketball and give interviews, I really felt like I knew him and I felt like I was grieving as if I mourned him. I soon found out that my close friends were feeling the same way. My lack of understanding for why our feelings of sadness were all-consuming and so intense is what lead me to take on this topic.
In class, when I mentioned my possible topic to my teacher, he brought up how he also felt very sad. He said he even cried, and doesn’t even watch basketball.
When I had that conversation, I realized that I had found a subject that was really interesting. I knew that the basketball community was devastated at the loss of Kobe, but for someone that isn’t a hardcore basketball fan to cry means that these celebrities have a much bigger reach than I expected, and their passing can mean much more to people than I could have imagined. If his death was enough to genuinely affect an English teacher in Montreal that doesn’t watch basketball, imagine how someone that grew up in LA watching and idolizing Kobe while he played for the Lakers must have felt.
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