David Bowie: The Man Who Fell to Earth


There’s a prophetic scene in the 1976 David Bowie movie, The Man Who Fell to Earth; he’s in what looks like a control room with dozens and dozens of screens, each showing something different.  There he is – with his weird, lens-shaped
irises, clearly watching all of them at the same time.  lens

For years I’ve used that scene to describe kids growing up as our own digital natives.  Yesterday I was playing music on my iPad for my 16 month old grandson, and showing him how to do “play” with the arrow and “stop” with the double bars.   When I decided it was time to switch gears and got out a book to read with him he took it from me and began pushing on a big red picture of the sun and sliding his finger, looking genuinely bewildered that nothing moved.  We’ve all heard an apocryphal version of this story but I now no longer need SNOPES to know it’s real.  Digital native indeed.

So the visionary that was David Bowie transcended his amazing music – We Can be Heroes, it seems – and took prophetic risks in many ways in diverse venues.  He was beautiful and gifted and unique; despite his music, for me, it was his presence in this film that demonstrated the astonishing breadth of vision.

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Cynthia Samuels

Cynthia Samuels is a long-time blogger, writer, producer and Managing Editor. She has an extensive background online, on television and in print, with particular experience developing content for women, parents and families. For the past nine years, that experience has been largely with bloggers, twitter and other social media, most recently at Care2's Causes Channels, which serve 20 million members (13 million when she joined) and cover 16 subject areas. In her three years at Care2 monthly page views grew tenfold, from 450,000 to 4 million. She has been part a member of BlogHer since 2006 years and has spoken at several BlogHer conferences. Among her many other speaking appearances is Politics Online, Fem 2.0 Conference and several other Internet gatherings. She’s also run blogger outreach for clients ranging from EchoDitto to To the Contrary. Earlier, she spent nearly four years with iVillage, the leading Internet site for women; her assignments included the design and supervision of the hugely popular Education Central, a sub-site of Parent Soup that was a soup-to-nuts parent toolkit on K-12 education, designed to support parents as advocates and supporters of their school-age kids. She also served as the iVillage partner for America Links Up, a major corporate Internet safety initiative for parents, ran Click! – the computer channel - and had a long stint as iVillage's Washington editor. In addition, she has developed parent content for Jim Henson Interactive and served as Children’s Book Editor for both Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble.com. Before moving online, she had a long and distinguished career as a broadcast journalist, as senior national editor of National Public Radio, political and planning producer of NBC's Today Show (whose audience is 75% women) where she worked for nine years (and was also the primary producer on issues relating to child care, education, learning disabilities and child development), and as the first executive producer of Channel One, a daily news broadcast seen in 12,000 U.S. high schools. She has published a children’s book: It’s A Free Country, a Young Person’s Guide to Politics and Elections (Atheneum, 1988) and numerous children’s book reviews in the New York Times Book Review and Washington Post Book World. A creator of online content since 1994, Samuels is a partner at The Cobblestone Team, LLC, is married to a doctor and recent law school graduate and has two grown sons who make video games, two amazing daughters-in-law and three adorable grandsons.

2 thoughts on “David Bowie: The Man Who Fell to Earth”

  1. As a digital immigrant, I still feel such a sense of wonder when things move. Will the digital natives ever experience that sort of wonder with each new invention? Or will it all just fulfill an expectation? I guess only they’ll be able to answer that in the future.

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