An interesting part of yesterday's discussion concerned the primacy of language, and more specifically written language, in social media. While this primacy holds for now, it has a great deal to do with current technology constraints and may not hold in future.

For most of human history we shared and explored our experiences through different types of performance - storytelling, spoken poetry, dance, music, drama, etc. But the only way to record experience was in our collective memory and we could only perform to a small local audience.

In time the development of written language and the printing press allowed writers to develop the novel and communicate experiences both to a mass contemporary audience but also to audiences far in the future. And many came to see the novel as a superior form to the more popular performing arts.

In this context the rapid rise of radio, cinema and television can be seen as a restoration of an earlier balance in favour of performance as the best way to share and explore experience.

Today's social media have allowed us to move on from read-only newspapers, reference books and political pamphlets to a more read-write culture. But the vast majority of that reading and writing is in written text. What if the read-write culture could extend to performance too?

Many young people in east asia communicate mostly through mobile phone photos - "look at me/us", "look at what I/we saw/did". YouTube has 'video conversations' with people posting responses to corporate message, which are then commented on in turn.

For now it is much easier to type and edit text (as in the dicussion topic) than it is to do the same in other media. Mainly due to the primacy of written language in our culture and education.

But I am confident that we will eventually see photos, speech, music, micro-dramas, etc. surplant written text in social media.

 out of  found this valuable. Do you find this valuable?    

Evening, folks!
I wondered whether any fellow MIW members are planning to attend the Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Now Conference/ Symposium in London on 8th-9th October (web link below):
http://www.psychoanalytic-council.org/main/

If anyone would like to meet for a drink on the Friday evening before or after the symposium, please feel free to give me a shout!

Cheers

R

 out of  found this valuable. Do you find this valuable?    

Exceeded my expectations in many ways. Very funny and intellectually stimulating. Very well done to Bret and the other organisers and contributors (brilliant compere too!).

 out of  found this valuable. Do you find this valuable?    

I am interested in museums (including art galleries) and the role they play in our inner lives. Strictly speaking I suppose museums aren’t ‘media’ but they are popular and vastly under-theorised in this area. I am interested in both museums as institutions and the concrete objects they contain. Currently I am playing with ideas about psychic objects and concrete objects and the museum viewer’s encounter with both inside the spaces of a museum. Object relations theory is therefore important as are Winnicott’s ideas about transitional spaces and transitional objects. I am linking this with current museum professional practice (I am more a practitioner than an academic). So my aim is to use psychoanalytic ideas to think about the ‘museum in the mind’ and so widen professional debates about what museums are for. Is anyone else interested in this?

 out of  found this valuable. Do you find this valuable?    

hi all,
Just wanted to say hello and invite those who might be interested in exploring the concept of public service in the changing media landscape. We have people from the BBC and the Oxford Internet Institute as confirmed speakers. Please see the event details at http://www.connectionfactory.org.uk/events/public-service-media-in-the
Everyone welcome
Best wishes
Anna Piela

 out of  found this valuable. Do you find this valuable?    

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2010/feb/06/maternal-envy-jealous-of-daughter

 out of  found this valuable. Do you find this valuable?    

Show Last Reply

http://www.bbc.co.uk/headroom/grubclub/index.shtml

 out of  found this valuable. Do you find this valuable?    

This is a really useful overview of work that has been done in film studies drawing on Winnicott in particular. The blog also links to our community, so it would be great to see any comments/contributions from members of MiW too!

 out of  found this valuable. Do you find this valuable?    

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://static.ak.connect.facebook.com/js/api_lib/v0.4/FeatureLoader.js.php/en_GB"></script><script type="text/javascript">FB.init("7585561865ac386efd72e19d1cd080f4");</script><fb:fan profile_id="161853355451" stream="1" connections="10" width="300"></fb:fan><div style="font-size:8px; padding-left:10px"><a href="http://www.facebook.com/pages/Media-and-the-Inner-World/161853355451">Media and the Inner World on Facebook</a> </div>

 out of  found this valuable. Do you find this valuable?    

Show Last Reply

I'm not sure how this works or where to leave a message but I just wanted to thank the organisers and speakers for last Saturday's event. I am looking forward to the next one. I was too shy to say anything at the time but I wondered if anyone else thought about these points - that the clip of Gene Kelly in Singing in the Rain was satirised by Kubrick in A Clockwork Orange, an interesting irony considering the very polarised emotions evoked. Also, my viewing of A Clockwork Orange was forever changed when I learned that the most shocking part of the film was based on an experience of Burgess and his wife during a blackout in 1943: drunken American soldiers gone AWOL invaded their home, attacked Burgess and gang-raped his wife. Since learning this I have not been able to watch the film again and I wonder how others have coped emotionally with this information. I would be very interested to hear other people's views whether you attended on Saturday or not. Thanks again for a fantastic two hours. Very best wishes, Deborah

1  out of 1 found this valuable. Do you find this valuable? Do you?    

Show Last Reply