research1

According to evolutionary psychologists, the media plays a crucial role in Darwinian evolution. The first forms of media were most likely prehistoric cave paintings. The purpose of these early paintings was most probable to educate the next generation about the culture's customs and practices. Learning about survival methods and skills was an important part of socialisation and ensured the group's survival. In a fundamental way, the first media was critical to self preservation. It has been suggested that the progress and evolution of technology in human history proceeded along. If adaptive capacity is improved by tools that are shared from one generation to the next via media representations, it can be speculated that brain capacity is shaped and accelerated via this "inherited" shared knowledge.

Mass media has not played a long enough role in human evolution to shape inherited characteristics in the species. According to research, the hunter/gatherer Pleistocene era brain is still the brain that governs human social life. However, as media becomes more prevalent, it is critical to consider how humans are adapting to this change. In an evolutionary sense, our species has not had time to adapt to today's accelerated media consumption, and we process mediated stimuli as if they were real. As modern technology advances, the incorporation of media and real-world stimuli into one-of-a-kind experiences becomes unavoidable. We become less aware of the media's daily and minute-to-minute influence as we become more accustomed to it. We invest so much time in mediated worlds that we no longer separate the mediated parts of our lives from the rest of our lives.

*Mass media, evolutionary aspect

(Evolutionary Psychology and Mass Media - Gayle S. Stever, Ph.D.)

• Has natural selection played a role in how humans adapt to mass media as it has grown more ingrained in human life?

• If survival and reproduction are evolutionary imperatives, which one has influenced the media more in the last century?

• Can the media improve human survival?

• Does mass media alter our sexual behaviour and chances to reproduce?

• Are there ways that mass media affect our opportunities to engage in sexual behavior and thushave more chances to reproduce?

• Or are there ways that mass media inhibits our sexual behavior and keeps us from having chances to reproduce?

‘’Shoemaker (1996) described the function of surveillance in early nomadic communities. All members of the society had to survey the environment for danger, and some individuals might have had this as their specialised function in the group. Perceiving potential threats to the group greatly increased the survival of all members of the group. Grabe (2011) wrote about the surveillance function of news, and how our monitoring of news media is a way to remain apprised of potentially survival-related information. Citing Shoemaker, she makes the argument that humans are hard-wired to pay attention to negative news because of the way journalists are able to warn the public about potential dangers. She suggests that the gender differences similar to those reported in Kamhawl and Grabe (2006) are a function of historically early gender roles wherein women protected children by avoiding danger while men protected children by monitoring danger and being prepared to defend against it.’’

‘’Research addressing themes in popular music linked to evolutionary themes produced similar findings with country western songs frequently containing phrases relating to sexuality and reproduction with an average of 10 such references per song (Hobbs and Gallup Jr., 2011). Salmon (2018) observed that these themes are found in music in general, although they are found more often in the most popular songs (e.g. those making top ten lists). Hip-hop and rap songs tend to focus on male interest in short-term mating, with much bragging about the number of partners they've had. In this same genre, female artists sing about wanting men with status and resources. The country-western songs had more themes around parenting as well as the start-up or break-up of relationships.’’

‘’Thus, a central part of development for children is play (Erikson, 1974) whereby children often rehearse tasks that they will be called upon to perform as adults. Media entertainment is an extension of the concept of "play" and a higher-level form of cognitive rehearsal for tasks and situations that might come into play throughout life in various relationships, so that we can practice interpersonal, emotional, or social situations without incurring any unnecessary risk to real relationships. ‘’

''Theorists have suggested that mass media is experienced as "play" by its recipients. Stephenson (1988) recounts that the daily mix of media consumed by viewers "is repetitious, like a child's game played over and over with variations on a familiar theme" (p. 49). It is not a big leap to see the consumption of fiction in mass media as a springboard for fantasy, which is related to play. A viewer watches a favourite television show and when the show is over, fantasises about being in social situations with a favourite protagonist, scripting conversations and practising how to behave in those social situations. This social behaviour is practice for future real encounters in the same way that the child cooking in a pretend kitchen is learning behaviours that will apply to real preparation of meals. The fantasy interaction with a favourite media persona is a type of parasocial relationship.''

''Thus, play involves fantasy and when one consumes media, one is transported into a parasocial fantasy world where we interact with the inhabitants as if they were real. We assess possible fantasy mates in these worlds in the same way we might assess real potential mates in a face-to-face environment.''

''It has been argued that the human brain has acted on the basis of one model of human interaction, and that was the model established by the Pleistocene hunter/gatherer society, a society that was conducted face-to-face. In the Pleistocene era, if a woman saw a man who was a good potential mate, she had only to behave in ways that would be attractive to him, and she had every expectation of being able to bear his offspring. Television and eventually the Internet made the images and information available about potential candidates for mates that the woman had not met in person, indeed might likely never meet in person. ''

''In 30 years of fan research, I have met many dozens of fans who are holding out for the ideal represented by their favourite celebrity and who would not consider someone lesser than that ideal. In many cases, it meant that the fan did not date at all. From a natural selection perspective, people who idealize and stay single/celibate as a result do not have their genes passed on to progeny. This is particularly true for women who are less likely to engage in frivolous reproductive activity if they are holding out for a perfect mate. Men can both hold out and also have casual sex because of their lesser investment in potential offspring.''

Byung-Chul Han claims that the most common mental illnesses in our society are caused by performance maximization under free constraint. Exaggerated work and performance results in self-exploitation. Self-exploitation is accompanied by a sense of paradoxical freedom, and is more effective than exploitation by others. The exploiter and the victim are the same person and cannot be separated. This dependence on oneselfs eventually turns into violence and selfharm.

The overload of information and impulses and the increasing workload, necessitate special time management and attention techniques. They negatively affect the structure of our attention and our perception of time and environment. As a result, multitasking has become an everyday necessity, which he regards as a civilizational setback, an attention technique that is necessary for survival in the wilderness. A wild animal is forced to divide its attention among many different activities and is unable to immerse itself in its immediate environment. Thus, it is unable to contemplate deeply, neither during feeding nor during mating.

The cultural achievements of humanity, such as philosophy, arts and sciences are the result of in-depth, contemplative thinking. In modern times, thinking is reduced to a mere calculation. All forms of creation and endeavour descend to the level of work. Giving up one's individuality in order to "function" better and making work above all else leads to see production as the ultimate aim of social existence for the self exploiting human the ‘’animal laborans’’ The animal laborans never feels that it has reached its ultimate goal. That doesn't mean it does not want closure. Rather, it means that it is unable to reach it as performance compulsion forces it to achieve additional results. This way gratification never comes to rest and its feelings of lack and guilt persist. Compared to the ideal self, the real self appears as a failure buried under self-blame. In this case, self-realisation and self-destruction coincide and often leads to mental breakdowns, such as burnout, depression and anxiety.

There is no longer a single aspect of life that is immune to commodification. Hyper-capitalism turns human relationships into market value as well. New media and forms of communication exacerbate the deterioration of interpersonal relationships. The late-modern performing subject is incapable of building strong bonds. In the case of depression, all ties are severed, including the one with oneself.

Only in a new form of life and time narrative does the author see a way out. One that emphasises "break times", which do not only serve our working times and make us be able to work again, but allows us to contemplate freely. He points out the time experience of art that is not surrendered merely to consumption and communication, but in its essence allows and teaches us to linger as manifestations of intense, gratuitous and overflowing life.

(The Burnout Society - Byung-Chul Han)

summaries, highlights, notes from books articles etc concerning topics i discussed in my previous works

(The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class - Guy Standing)

*performance pressure, labor, free time

Economist Guy Standing explains how millions of people are in the precariat, and in defining this emerging class, points to the dangerous political and social consequences as well as the exciting progressive revival that this class could produce.

One defining characteristic of the precariat is distinctive relations of production: so-called “flexible” labor contracts; temporary jobs; labor as casuals, part-timers, or intermittently for labor brokers or employment agencies. But conditions of unstable labor are part of the definition, not the full picture.

Those in the precariat have no secure occupational identity; no occupational narrative they can give to their lives. And they find they have to do a lot of work-for-labor relative to labor, such as work preparation that does not count as work and that is not remunerated; they have to retrain constantly, network, apply for new jobs, and fill out forms of one sort or another. They are exploited outside the workplace as well as in it, and outside paid hours as well as in them.

This is also the first working class in history that, as a norm, is expected to have a level of education that is greater than the labor they are expected to perform or expect to obtain. This is the source of intense status frustration. Few in the precariat use their full educational qualifications in the jobs they have.

Another characteristic of the precariat is distinctive relations of distribution. They must rely largely on money wages, without non-wage benefits, such as pensions, paid holidays, retrenchment benefits and medical coverage. The precariat has lost those forms of remuneration and has no prospect of regaining them. This loss of non-wage benefits is understated by conventional income statistics and indicates an even greater increase in income inequality than it typically reported.

The precariat also lacks rights-based state benefits, such as unemployment benefits, as well as private benefits gained from investments and contributory insurance plans. Because the wages of the precariat are increasingly volatile and on a downward trend, the overall result is that they live on the edge of unsustainable debt and in chronic economic uncertainty.

The precariat is additionally defined by distinctive relations to the state: they are losing rights taken for granted by full citizens. Instead, they are denizens who inhabit a locale without civil, cultural, political, social and economic rights, de facto and de jure. They are supplicants, reduced to pleading for benefits and access to public services, dependent on the discretionary decisions of local bureaucrats who are often inclined to moralistic judgments about whose behavior or attitude is deserving.

These three defining dimensions produce a consciousness of relative deprivation and a combination of anxiety, anomie (despair of escape from their precarious status), alienation (having to do what they do not wish to do while being unable to do what they would like to do and are capable of doing), and anger.

Those in the precariat lack self-esteem and social worth at work; they must seek that esteem elsewhere, successfully or not. The ability of the precariat to develop long-term self-esteem is undoubtedly diminished. There is a risk of feeling constantly engaged but being isolated in the midst of a lonely crowd.

“A central aspect of globalisation can be summed up in one intimidating word, ‘commodification’. This involves treating everything as a commodity, to be bought and sold, subject to market forces, with prices set by demand and supply, without effective ‘agency’ (a capacity to resist). Commodification has been extended to every aspect of life – the family, education system, firm, labour institutions, social protection policy, unemployment, disability, occupational communities and politics.”

“Fewer workers are in a position to make contributions or have them made on their behalf, and fewer qualify under contribution rules. But in any case official attitudes to unemployment have radically changed. In the neo-liberal framework, unemployment became a matter of individual responsibility, making it almost ‘voluntary’. People came to be regarded as more or less ‘employable’ and the answer was to make them more employable, upgrading their ‘skills’ or reforming their ‘habits’ and ‘attitudes’. This made it easy to go to the next stage of blaming and demonising the unemployed as lazy and scroungers.”

“The precariat is under time stress. It must devote a growing amount of time to work-for-labour, without it offering a reliable road to economic security or an occupational career worthy of the name. Labour intensification and growing demands on time put the precariat at constant risk of being spent or, as one woman put it, in a mental state of being foggy and fuzzy. The tertiary lifestyle involves multitasking without control over a narrative of time use, of seeing the future and building on the past. To be precariatised is to be wired into job-performing lifestyles without a sense of occupational development. We respond to signals, which redirect attention hither and thither. Multitasking lowers productivity in each and every activity. Fractured thinking becomes habitual. It makes it harder to do creative work or to indulge in leisure that requires concentration, deliberation and sustained effort. It crowds out leisure, leaving people relieved just to play, passively in the mental sense. Non-stop interactivity is the opium of the precariat, just as beer and gin drinking was for the first generation of the industrial proletariat. The workplace is every place, diffuse, unfamiliar, a zone of insecurity. And if[…]”

“This commodification of education is a societal sickness. There is a price to pay. If education is sold as an investment good, if there is an unlimited supply of certificates and if these do not yield the promised return, in terms of access to good jobs and high income with which to pay off debts incurred because they were nudged to buy more of the commodity, more entering the precariat will be angry and bitter. The market for lemons comes to mind. As does the old Soviet joke, in which the workers said, ‘They pretend to pay us, we pretend to work’. The education variant would be as follows: ‘They pretend to educate us, we pretend to learn’. Infantilising the mind is part of the process, not for the elite but for the majority. Courses are made easier, so that pass rates can be maximised. Academics must conform.”

Examines how colonialism's exploitation sites are expanding today. The discovery of new forms of raw material is what makes the current moment distinctively colonial. If historical colonialism expanded by appropriating for exploitation of geographical territory and the resources that territorial conquest could bring, data colonialism expands by appropriating for exploitation ever more layers of human life itself. A simple, daily act that every individual body does of monitoring whether it has drunk enough water has suddenly become something that happens in a competitive social space. The human body has been reworked into something that requires a distant infrastructure, from which, incidentally, profit can be made. Data abstracts life by converting it into information that can be stored and processed by computers and appropriates life by converting it into value for a third party.

Data colonialism is a term used to describe the continuation of a global extraction process that began with colonialism and continued through industrial capitalism, culminating in today's new form: instead of natural resources and labour, human life is now being appropriated through its conversion into data. Human beings become not just actors in the production process but raw material that can be transformed into value for that production process.

(The Costs of Connection: How Data Is Colonizing Human Life - by Nick Couldry and Ulises Ali Mejias)

*art therapy, psychology

Art therapy is the successor of “psychological Modernism”, which during the late 19th and early 20th centuries included medical psychology as well as theories and practices related to more speculative practices of hypnosis, somnambulism, interpretation of dreams, automatic writing and spiritualism. Art therapy emerged in the second half of the 20th century as a new psychological genre and, the author argues, a new kind of art that offered the opportunity for psychological “salvation” in a “psychological society”.

The purpose of art therapy originated in the idea to create a new kind of connection between art and personality. Art therapy as a form of art arose with the intention to psychological liberate modern human from the restrictive adherence to materialism and physiology.

Since art therapy interacts with a subject that is absorbed in a psychological reality, we can assume that art therapy treats art as an opportunity for psychological salvation of the individual in 'psychological society'. Psychological ideas about art and the intensification of the psychological subject prepare the emergence of art therapy as a new psychological genre in art.

When art therapy appears in the art world, it does so through the psychological figure of the artist, whose approach tends to fall along one of the following four lines: 1) the artist as a 'psychological hostage'; 2) the artist as a 'psychological rebel'; 3) the artist as a 'psychological expert'; 4) the artist as a 'psychological inductor'.

The early years of art therapy (from the late 1930s to the late 1950s) were marked by an increase in artists' interest in psychoanalysis. Artists believed in the expressive power of art as well as its healing potential. Artists have valued art therapy as a transformative experience. The cult of the inner world and the unconscious dominated art therapy. Many artists were influenced by Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung's theories, which allowed them to use imagery and experiment with techniques that liberated them from conscious control over their work. During this time, the artists appeared in art therapy as "psychological hostages," and they were initially admitted to psychotherapy as only a patient and a victim.

The second period in the development of art therapy (from the early 1960s to the late 1970s) was connected with the establishment of art therapy as a psycho therapeutic practice and independent profession. Artists were interested in the ideas of anti-psychiatry and humanistic psychology. Art therapy considered art as a kind of authentic self-communication. The artists involved in deconstructing the idea of psycho pathological imagery and the inclusion of 'psychiatric art' to the modern art canon. During this period in art therapy, the figure of the artist appeared as a 'psychological Rebel'. During the second period in art therapy, the psychological figure of the artist was presented as a 'psychological rebel'. Most of the early art therapists were artists.

The third period in the development of art therapy (from the early 1980s to the late 1990s) is associated with the growing professionalization of art therapy and the increasing interest of artists to the techniques and institutions of psychotherapy. The democratization of art therapy as an educational project redirected artists to professional psycho-therapeutic training. The emphasis in the creative process has shifted from the notion of free sublimation to the notion of the discursive strategies. During this period in art therapy, a figure of the artist appeared as a 'psychological expert'. The expectations of the artist's role in art therapy have expanded to more complex and innovative psychological insights. Artists involved in the field between art therapy and art are tempted to act as testing systems, targeting audience reactions and experiences. Psychological curiosity about 'others' quite openly transforms into the staging of multiple alternative selves'. The 'psychological impersonation' becomes the perfect mirror medium between the interior and exterior worlds.

The fourth period in the development of art therapy (after 2000) has witnessed the increased interest of artists in the impact of neuroscience on the development of the therapeutic disciplines involved in the phenomenology of human perception and behaviour. The emergence of positive psychology and neuroaesthetics has changed the role of art therapy as an incubator of new ideas about mental health. The return of art therapy as contemporary art in the controversial rhetorical field of critical psychology started with the unusual alliance of art therapy with neuroscience and new genres of psychological art. The fourth historical period in the development of art therapy coincided with an increased interest in performative practices in the field of visual arts, which created opportunities for some forms of art therapy to be represented as equal participants in the contemporary art system. This moment is important because it marks the transition of the artist’s place in the field of art therapy from a passive object of psychological study - the 'psychological hostage', or what Kuspit called 'the artist as ideal patient' (Kuspit, 2019) - to the figure of artist in the field of art therapy as a 'psychological expert', consultant and researcher.