Concatenations - Blog

16/04: Video media Psych.

eople sometimes ask what I mean by "cam psychology." One key point is that most viewers have little or no capacity to imagine outside the boundaries of the box around the video image to understand that there is a real life outside this 'box.' There is also a tendency for viewers to 'project' and see or understand what they want to see and understand about the image in the box. The fedback I get re what people are seeing is totally inconsistent and completely conflicting. There is very little connection between what they perceive and who I (for instance) actually am and how I live.

From the point of view of understanding how people 'read' various kinds of media--this is a little frightening. To me it means people don't think when they are watching the news, a movie, or Britney Spears. Their understanding of what they are seeing is extremely limited. The relationship of visual media to reality seems questionalble. It may be that visual media is not in fact very representational of reality even when no one is attempting to manipulate it. When there is manipulation involved it could be (best case scenerio) that visual media creates nothing but utter nonsense.

I have been EXTREMELY surprised to learn that people don't make a clear distinction between what they see on television, in magazines and especially in live stream (where there is even less 'information') and what they experience first hand (in real life). Maybe because I have been thinking about media for a long time I have always thought that the point of it was to present a point of view, a different focus on an issue, or to coerce people into buying product. I have always thought of it as being some kind of fabrication, with intent, either benevolent or benign. How much does a few seconds of news footage tell about a war? How much does the photo of the birthday party tell about the birthday and how much is in the eye of the beholder?

McLuhan's idea that the medium shapes the message implies that even if we want to we cannot get the 'truth' onto paper or film or into a stream.

Meanwhile, we mimic and desire things, people and ways of life that we only know of via visual media. We try to be things that don't really exist, at least not in the way that we perceive them.

There IS plenty of room for deception using these types of media and we blame organisations and people for using it to deceive us, but fail to realise the obvious that these mediums just don't allow the truth to be conveyed with much accuracy. It is a sure bet for example, that someone who spoke a few words to me in a grocery store line up could more accurately describe me (the kind of person I am and the way I look) than someone who has watched me on this stream for hours, weeks or months...


You might want to think about this when you are watching the stream. You might want to think about it when you are watching the news, or a film. There is immutable fact and actually experience and there are impressions. They are two different things. The world is in a precarious state at the moment and I think it is because we have failed to make this distinction. We are now failing to make it globally:))

At another level we are failing to make the distinction between surface/appearance and substance. Because the world has become to visually focused we have begun to think if people or situations LOOK a certain way, they are very likely to be that way. About two seconds of concentrated thought will help you understand that this is almost never true:)) But that's another discussion.