Golden Globes: Internet Edition

Sunday’s Golden Globe Awards was just another celebrity-filled, action-packed evening to find out who wore what, and who should have just stayed home.

Oh yeah, and there was some stuff about movies and television, and some awards for those things. Something like that.

I wouldn’t know, having not seen the actual show but only catching the action after the fact on Twitter and EOnline.

Jennifer Lawrence’s dress kind of looked like a white comforter with black bands around it. It cost about $1 billion, but I could probably make one at home.

So the Twitter-verse did just that, posting their own weirdly accurate versions of her dress — less haute couture and made from actual comforters. It might be all in good fun, but what’s ironic is that Lawrence actually called out the mainstream media in a December interview with ABC for making “humiliating people funny.”

The media should take responsibility, she said, for how it affects especially younger viewers, who are “picking up how to talk and how to be cool.”

The media can have a detrimental effect on younger generations especially.

A recent IU research study suggests the reality shows “Teen Mom 2” and “16 and Pregnant” caused viewers to be more likely to believe teen mothers have an enviable quality of life.

Nothing could be further from the truth. In reality, most teen mothers are overworked, lacking support and exhausted. They don’t have the paychecks girls receive on the show, either.

By consuming media, we are also often told what to think.

Teenagers can be made to think that maybe it’s not such a bad idea after all to have a baby in high school. Our generation grew up with “American Idol” and every other reality show that gloats in other people’s misery. We were spectators to the bully on the playground, and what’s more, we were entertained.

Celebrity gossip has also become such a significant part of our culture, especially through social media.

Jennifer Lawrence had what some would call a fashion faux-pas, and it practically took over Twitter. I’m saying who cares if you thought she looked bad?

Maybe it’s our supposedly narcissistic generation. Nothing boosts your confidence like making fun of someone wearing a dress worth your college tuition.

But we aren’t living the movie “Mean Girls.” The mean girl is not always the one whose dad invented toaster streudel. Sometimes the mean girl is actually a 40-year-old man blogging on Golden Globes fashion in his pajamas.

It’s not a crime to notice certain comforter-like qualities of someone’s dress. But I believe that when ridiculing someone else dominates so much of our daily conversation — even a celebrity, someone remote from our day-to-day lives — it just fosters cruel thoughts and actions toward other people.

­— cjellert@indiana.edu
Follow columnist Caroline Ellert on Twitter @cjellert.