Transcriber: Denise RQ Reviewer: Capa Girl
I find myself staring at this 18 minute countdown timer
and wishing I could imagine a world without clocks.
But I can't!
Can you?
No schedules, no timed group assemblies --
So much of what we do day to day relies on them
and yet, this idea of a clock -- It's a very simple device,
it's a very simple idea and yet we've fallen into lockstep with it in our society
to the point where we don't even think about it anymore.
So, I'm gonna talk to you about media psychology
and I can remember the moment when I first got interested in media.
I had gone through junior high and high school,
like most people, grade by grade, taking my piano lessons
not really feeling like I had made that many actual choices.
And the first choice I really got to make was an exchange programme
that I took from the University.
And I had this idea that I wanted to be independent
-- I didn't really know what that meant.
I had vague notions about a motorcycle and a far-away place!
So, when the opportunity came up I applied to go to New Zealand
and when I got to New Zealand, I bought myself a motorcycle,
and I was driving along a country road and I came to this lookoff
and I got off my bike and I took off my helmet,
leaned back on the bike and I thought to myself,
"My goodness, I just made all this up!"
I had this vague idea where did this come from.
The only choices I had made previously were what channels to watch.
And yet, as soon as I made this choice
to create this version of independence that I had imagined,
here it is coming true!
And it got me asking, "What is the nature of our reality?"
Do we make things up as we go?
And I realized that some of those ideas have certainly come from the media.
You recognize that archetype of the motorcycle and the far-away place.
So, that was my brief brush with coolness and then I went back to grad school.
And I started studying this stuff which is what academics do.
And I got interested in stories. It turns out
there's an evolutionary purpose for stories.
So if you imagine yourself in the middle of Paleolithic, 100 to 200 000 years ago,
you are in a cave, you've got a roommate, Gronck
he comes back and he's got a boar tusk though his arm
and you say, "Dude, what happened?"
He says, "I was there hunting, a boar charged me,
I charged the boar and now I've got a tusk through my arm."
By virtue of empathy, by virtue of his story,
we are able to experience that and we are able to learn from
that without actually -- thankfully -- going through that experience.
It has to do with story telling, it also has to do with empathy and mirror neurons --
There's a TED talk about that --
But of course, we also see stories in the media context: books, film, television
and it's interesting how we learn from those as well.
And there's a pattern to these as well.
We know that there is always that climax 20 minutes before the end of the movie.
We know that after Tom Cruise has his nervous breakdown,
you can go to the bathroom because he's gonna mope for a bit
before the attractive lady gets him back in again!
And of course, even a TEDTalk needs a narrative structure, so here we are!
Are we just making it all up, we absorb some of our ideas through stories and media?
And this mightn't strike you as important but I want to do a quick survey in the room.
How much do you think the purchasing decisions
of the average person in this room are affected by advertising?
From one to ten, so hold a number in your head --
One being not at all, ten being a whole lot.
Next question!
How much do you think your purchasing decisions are affected by advertising?
Same thing, one to ten, one is none at all, ten is a whole lot.
These two numbers, side by side, in your head, and now, I want to ask you:
For how many people is the first number smaller than the second number?
Show off hands -- We have two! Ok!
For how many people are the two numbers equal?
Show off hands! We have about -- 15 to 20.
For how many people is the first number bigger than the second number?
So you think that you are less affected
by advertising than the average person in this room!
This turns out to be a robust psychological phenomena,
everyone thinks that they are invulnerable to media.
You think you are all above the average in this room
and it's mathematically impossible
but we think that everyone else is an automaton being affected.
So, for the remainder of this talk want you to open yourself up
to the possibility that, just maybe,
everyone is a bit more affected by media than they what they realize.
And this wouldn't have been so bad back in the '20s, for instance.
Media tended to be informational. I'll use advertizing here to demonstrate.
If someone wanted you to buy a car, they'd assume you're rational
and therefore give you information about the car's merits and specifications.
So, what changed?
Well, to give you the quickest overview of Freud you'll ever get --
Freud's big ideas, slips of the tongue, free associations, dreams
pointed towards an unconscious, irrational mind that we don't acknowledge.
And Freud having experienced
The First World War and the build up to the Second,
made some conclusions about our deeper, repressed natures
being animalistic, violent and sexual.
His nephew, Edward Bernays, brought some of his ideas back across the Atlantic
and started using them in advertising and public relations.
And so, whereas previously we used to just describe
what we were selling, now we started to see
these hits of sexuality and these hints of status in ads.
And of course we all know how far we've come along with that
in today's advertising and I'd love to tell you that is not true,
that humans don't have these sexual and aggressive urges
and that advertising based on them doesn't work.
But you have to keep in mind that advertising is a 500 billion dollar a year industry
and to put that number in relative terms
2 billion dollars will buy you a spaceship!
I've been saving up! (Laughter)
And so, each year they spend enough on advertising
to put 250 spaceships out into space.
So they're trying to manipulate us instead of taking over the galaxies, essentially.
So, I started getting worried.
As you start studying media psychology, you see all these negative effects.
You see, you know, television increases materialism,
increases feelings of isolation, increases loneliness,
increases depression, increases pessimism about marriage.
I won't even get into the stuff on aggression and sexuality.
And I got a little scared and I had to go back to my happy place.
So, I took a trip to Africa, and on this trip,
we were bicycling from the top to the bottom,
from Cairo to Cape Town. We're gonna roll a video for you here --
And on that trip, every morning, we would get up and start packing our bikes up
and load our gear and get on our bikes and go on.
The first couple of mornings was so exciting but as the trip went on,
we were doing the same thing, over and over again,
we were so habituated to it that we had to come up with ways to --
break the monotony! (Laughter)
So, what I realized on this trip was first of all, we are social species
and we are so attuned to the people around us
and we are flowing with what they are doing.
And second of all, we acclimatized really quickly to our situations
and this got me worried! Because somebody my age spends
more time, on average, interacting with media, that is, TV, the Internet, mobile devices, books
than they're doing anything else in that day, including sleeping.
I created a documentary from this trip and I was studying how media
can have positive effects.
It turns out that you can use media to make people feel
like they have more control over their own lives and this tends to be a good thing.
You see it all the time with motivational speakers, you see it on Oprah,
they try to make you fell like you are in control.
'Cause if you feel like you are in control,
you take action, you start doing things to make your life better.
Which is a lot better than if you feel like your life
is a series of random circumstances because then, there's no point in taking action.
And I got really excited about this idea,
about how media can maybe have positive effects,
so I started looking into the positive psychology literature --
There is a great TEDTalk on that, by Martin Seligman.
And it turns out that they've done research
on life satisfaction and what they found is that there are 3 ways
of pursing life satisfaction that seem to work.
The first is to go after pleasure.
And in positive psychology they define pleasure as being that sort of hedonistic type,
where you get what you want right now but it may lead to,
cravings or wanting afterward, and so, desserts, drugs, masturbation,
loveless sex, all of these fall in to the hedonistic pleasure category.
Beyond that, there is meaning.
And they define meaning as being a part of something
that is bigger than yourself.
Being a part of the community, being a part of something spiritual,
being a part of your family, something that will outlive you.
Your career can have a lot of meaning if you feel like it's contributing to humanity.
And a third way of chasing happiness that they talk about is engagement,
being fully in the zone, being fully in the moment
in whatever it is you are doing.
And that can be playing chess, that can be performing surgery,
that can be a really interesting conversation with a friend,
that can be looking at cells under a microscope.
The idea is just that your conscious cognitive power
is sort of fully wrapped up on what it is you're doing.
And so what they recommend is pursuing primarily meaning and engagement
and a little bit of pleasure on the side if what you're going for is life satisfaction,
based on the research.
And I'm always careful with engagement though.
The idea behind is that when your skills are high and the challenges are high,
you find yourself fully engaged.
So, TV watching, even though it may feel like time is flying by
and like you're not conscious of yourself, most of the time it's distraction,
those quick cuts, those flashing images
are keeping our brain distracted from other things,
and of course we channel surf if it's not going quick enough for us!
Video games, you can see how there's a bit more feedback,
there's a bit more potential for that flowing engagement
and of course, with computers, now, you can do just about anything!
And I always warn people, "Be careful with engagement!"
because media psychologists are at the other end of these things
trying to get you addicted.
You know those online games Farmville, Mafia Wars --
They're collecting data on all the kids and people who are playing them
and they are finding out when people quit, when people spend money,
when people invite their friends and they are programming it
as if we were rats in a maze.
So, I say, focus on meaning.
Now, it's interesting when you look at new media, the new devices
because you can pull them into contexts with some of the things
that we've been talking about.
If you think what Facebook is or what Twitter is, it's a combination of stories,
which we love to create, it's a combination of meaning
where we are participating in a community something bigger than ourselves,
and also that feedback when you put it on an iPhone
it almost looks like a video game.
But it seems like they can work in this way but sometimes they don't.
Of course we've seen new media being involved
in overthrowing corrupt governments very recently
but at the same time I got broadcasts about people's pets' digestive habits
more often than I would like via these media.
So, when you are using them, you're always sort of making that choice.
Now, on top of choosing your media wisely,
I got really excited about the second part of this,
the idea that we are now telling our own stories more than ever.
We are participating in creating our own media.
And it turns out there is a whole field of research that looks into this.
How we narrate our own story -- falls under narrative psychology
and what they found is that when people tell their own self-story
in a way that it is coherent, that makes sense,
they tend to be better off psychologically and more generative.
When people have a redemptive life story, a life story wherein they see their purpose
as sort of righting some wrong that they've experienced earlier in life
they also tend to be more generative,
more contributing to society, better off psychologically.
There's all kinds of interesting overlaps
between the way we create our stories and entertainment.
People's life stories tend to fall into archetypes,
as one of the Greek gods, the Maker, the Warrior, the Arbiter, the Naturalist.
People's life stories tend to fall into the dramatic, literary humors:
romance, comedy, tragedy, irony.
And it gets really interesting when you think about what entertainment is,
'cause in a way, I think, entertainment has sort of replaced philosophy for us
they take people with particular points of view
and run them up against each other and see what happens.
They take someone with a particular point of view,
and a particular situation and they play it out.
So, this whole idea about creating our own story got really exciting to me,
the idea that we are in fact making it up as we go!
That we are in fact, creating ourselves.
Particularly because it's a very different approach to things than the old way.
And you see that in media as well,
where it used to be the way we were fed media
and now we seem to be creating it ourselves.
So, getting really excited about all this, I got into my doctoral research
and I decided that I wanted to understand how we create ourselves in a really positive way.
And I have an interest in creating media and writing.
So I decided to interview acclaimed fiction writers,
people who sit all day making up stories.
I thought that if anybody would have a self story,
a way of seeing their own life that really made a lot of sense
and it was really empowering; it would be people
who are successful at essentially pulling words out of their heads
and throwing them down on paper and selling them to millions of people
and changing millions of people's lives through them.
And so, I got into interviewing these writers looking for that self story,
that way that we could narrate our own life
that would enable us to, essentially, be like them,
be creative, be productive, be able to create stories and create media
that would inspire people that would change people's lives.
And it turns out there are all kinds of really interesting findings,
but the sort of the main summary, the TEDTalk version here is
that they recognize that we all live within this bubble
that's created by the narratives that we tell ourselves
and the way that media influences those.
And, by virtue of the fact that they spend most of their time
sitting imagining what other people's bubbles are, what other people's narratives are
and writing according to those narratives,
they are able to step outside of their own bubble a little bit,
they are able to get out and see how it is
that we create meaning in our lives, how it is that we narrate our lives,
how it is that the stories around us influence our own personal narratives.
So, this was really exciting for me.
Keep in mind I had started this whole thing wondering, you know,
"Are we just making it all up? Where did the ideas come from?
And I've gotten back to this point where it turns out
that the ideas can come from us.
If you're cognisant in what media you're choosing and how you tell your story
we can indeed make it all up!
And then I got to my last interview with a Canadian writer named Nino Ricci.
This is my best drawing of him, by the way.
I didn't get the hands quite right.
But we were talking about the evolutionary purpose of stories
and he explained something to me that I hadn't thought of.
He said, "We use our stories to create the meaning that exists in our life
therefore stories are an evolutionary mechanism."
That is, if I am standing next to my roommate Gronck,
I've got a story that gives meaning to my life and Gronck doesn't,
I'm more likely to work harder and to try to survive
by virtue of having created that story that creates the meaning in my life.
Now, the problem is that if it's our stories that are creating all the meaning in our life
then, once we get rid of the stories, once we accept that the stories are man-made
logically, we have to accept that there is in fact no inherent meaning to our lives!
The end.
(Laughter)
And so, this really hit me pretty hard because I'd spent all my time
trying to understand meaning, trying to understand how we were created,
and I came to this inescapable conclusion that it didn't exist.
Until, you drive your bike up to a lookoff and you look at it.
Or until you watch 5 Buddhist monks work for 5 days to make a tapestry
out of colored pieces of sand and then sweep it all away when it's over.
Or, until you snuggle up with someone you love
or until you watch a two-year-old try to eat an ashtray.
(Laughter)
And then, you realize that it's not that there isn't meaning,
is that it really doesn't fit into our stories.
The ones that we make up.
So, I'm not saying that there is no meaning,
I'm saying that what we need to do is try to understand media and how it affects us
try to narrow it and choose our media appropriately
and to create a life that we want and to remember
that the really big and beautiful stuff
isn't always gonna fit into our own stories.
Thank you.
(Applause)