media selection and cultural optimism

August 19, 2006 on 8:27 am | In Miscellaneous |

Nicola Doering, a German psychologist most famous for her overview work on the internet and psychology, has published a lot about media selection. In other words on the question “Why do people in certain situations use the internet/cellphone/etc?”

I rate her to belong to the group of cultural optimists. In the context of media the optimists are those who focus on how people use media to enrich their lives. In the eyes of the optimists, the user is an active actor rather than just a passive consumer and can be very inventive to use media for his/her comfort. For the optimists the positive aspects of media outweigh the negative ones.

As our digital world rapidly changes nowadays due to the internet, it’s interesting to observe the new forms of expression in the light of cultural optimism, the following youtube thread being just the latest example: