Letters to the Editor
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Shared Experience
"But still, how often will we turn our televisions on at the same moment (let alone crack the spines of millions of copies of the same book at midnight) for any reason except to watch tragedies of 9/11 proportions unfold? We long for this kind of shared experience, the being a part of something."
Reading this article was one long “Aha!” moment for me. I’ve always felt a little abashed by my appetite for disaster news, a` la` Katrina and 911. And Star Wars and Harry Potter have always drawn me in. I never put that attraction together with that notion of “shared experience”—that I could strike up or follow conversations with friends and strangers and follow stories in the media as part of a group experiencing something in “real time.” Following that same line of thought, I start to understand the attraction of celebrity news and TV sports—it’s a bond; it’s a current narrative that large groups of people can share in an increasingly splintered world. Thank you, Rebecca Traister!