By Dr. Bob Deutsch, cultural anthropologist, cognitive neuroscientist and president and founder of Brain Sells (Boston, MA) a strategic communications consulting company.
To understand a society, it is useful to start with "attention." For those of us who have worked in the primeval forest studying non-human primates and Neolithic societies, the quickest and most precise method of identifying the "Alpha Animal" is to watch who looks at who the most.
The Alpha must be watched so that others can regulate their behavior around him (or her).
This “attention structure” is a fundamental organizing principle of society. In modern society we can say TV is Alpha but more and more it's also the PC and our mobile devices.
Nowadays we’re not only searching for information on the internet, but also establishing identity and territory on Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and the like.
What's so compelling about social media and things like Reality TV?
To answer this question we must look back to our nation's beginnings. America was (and is) a large and habitable landscape (especially as we expanded West). In such a perceived unlimited environment we have to puff ourselves UP, or else we feel puny.
Secondly, and most importantly, in America status has no legal standing. We are cut free from traditional social constraints to develop as individuals. Furthermore, we are all created equal by political doctrine.
Hence, Americans seek other ways to differentiate themselves. Performance is our means. Display is our aesthetic. Even George Washington did so, modeling his behavior after the Roman jurist Cato.
Jump ahead 200+ years. Today we live in a global-digital landscape. And we are still individuals, alone. Yet, we live with a new entity --- the 'mediated other'.
So we use social media to feel less alone and to display to the world who we are, what we are doing and what is on our minds. The primary goal is to say – Look at me. Pay attention to me. I am important.
The popularity of Reality TV (other than its ubiquity due to economics) is a variation on the above theme. It's not look at me. It's “I'm looking at you to prove to myself I'm better than you.”
I see all your warts and foibles. Watching soap operas was no different. Research shows soap operas were popular because the audience, knowing all the subplots that any one character in the opera was not privy to, could feel they were better and smarter than those they watched.
Our motivation today is not exactly that social media as a social medium validates my own experience. It's more that with social media as a mirror, each person can validate their own experience, by and for themselves. I, as the ‘mediated other’ to myself, can be whatever I like.
From this perspective, the modern impulse towards belonging to groups on the worldwide web is a reaction to the age-old need for status and territory.
There is a difference, though, between the ancient and contemporary landscape. Now we can make up our identities without the vetting inherent in face-to-face behavior.
In the digital space, each person can regulate their own behavior around their self-created image of themselves.
Despite the speed of the internet, we’ll need another millennia to see if the primacy of this totally-free and unregulated self is a good or bad idea.
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