Aaron Tracy

I mean, I don't know how old your kids are, but I do think there's a sense in which if you're going to consume this work, you can also talk to your kids about what's going on.

Maybe not when they're four, but maybe when they're 10.

Kids can handle all kinds of complex discussions.

Part of the issue around this is this debate over levels of complexity.

How much should people know?

How much should they have to have to know?

Is it somehow a disruption of some kind of innocence to share information with people?

Which is the institutional question.

I think that for me, the reason this question is so pressing is the way in which there is no escape from that biography.

The biography is what's happening to us all the time.

We can't not know.

I'm 58.

When I was young, it was very difficult to find out biographical information about artists.

certainly about pop artists or current pop culture figures.

It was really incumbent on the audience member.

And now biography happens to us as audience members for all of these different cultural reasons.

But the reason it's really happening is because social media is built upon biography, your biography, my biography.

That's what it's made out of is people's stories.

So we learn this biographical information whether we want to or not.

Like to me, it seems like a real nicety to ask, do I need to go find this biographical information to share with my students?