media selection and cultural optimism

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:

Let’s get psycho

For a time now I have been feeling like I should add a Psychology category to my blog and to start talking about less irrelevant things. There is so much in the world of psychology out there, it would be a waste to just leave it to old dusty shelves. I plan this category to be a place where I publish my thoughts from my own and about other people’s research.

Discordian Teaching #00007

Parcival says:

Excitement is trying to grab something in your right pocket with your left hand.

Create Incremental Snapshot-style Backups With rSync And SSH

My friend Hyper has written a very helpful tutorial on backups that works with any *nix machine.

Discordian Teaching #00006

Parcival says:

There is tremendous value in not being seen