Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
people to think, memorize, discuss, describe, etc. using languages. In other words
these inventions made people literal brain dependent. It is noteworthy to say that this
mainly happed in Western countries. And based on this the long history of Western
philosophy represented by Plato occurred. What happened in Asian counties is
somewhat different. Somehow people did not try to clearly separate rational actions
and emotional actions. The reason why this happened is an interesting research topic
and will be described in other occasions. But anyway for Asian people the concept of
separation between logos and pathos has not been so clear.
5.2 Influence of Movies and Telephones
Another two most impactful inventions in the recent history of media are telephones
and movies. Nowadays we tend to focus only to recent inventions such as video
games, mobile phones, e-mails, blogs, twitters, and so on. Unfortunately we almost
forgot the big impact these two media have had on the basic change of our behaviors.
Before the invention of telephone, the formal aspect and emotional aspect of our
behaviors was clearly separated. For emotional behaviors, mental distance and special
distance were closely related. When we are together with our familiar people such as
family members and friends we expose our private/emotional behaviors. We have a
strong instinct to be connected with our familiar people. But before the invention of
telephone when we were spatially separated from them, as we did not have methods
to communicate with them, we had to hide the emotional aspect of us and behaved
formally like in business scenes. But after telephone was invented, telephone made it
possible for us to be connected to our familiar people even though spatially separated
(Fig. 2). And gradually people tend to mix the formal and emotional aspect of our life.
This is the fundamental reason why nowadays even during meetings, dinners, etc.
people want to communicate with their familiars using mobile phones and smart
phones. In other words the telephones has initiated the confusion between rationale
and emotional aspects of our behaviors. The role of mobile phones and other recent
media is only to accelerate this trend.
The invention of movies has the similar effect. Before the invention of movies
people were trained as literal brain dependent and reading and writing were the major
intellectual and communication behaviors of people. But the invention of movies
introduced “images” as important communication medium. Images have a strong
power to influence directly to the emotional part of our brain, or right brain. Therefore
after long years of training to rationally use left brain, people began to depend on the
usage of right brain. This means that people gradually became emotionally dependent
instead of rationally dependent. The recent trend of the excessive use of computer
graphics and animations have their origin to the invention of movie. What computer
graphics and animation are doing is only to accelerate the trends.
5.3 Future of Entertainment and Media
As is described again after long years of separation between logos and pathos in
human behaviors, these two aspects are approaching together and it could be expected
that in the future it would merge again (Fig. 3).
