The Truth About Social Conditioning: The Century of Self

[alexb5784]

Someone wrote about this in a post back in 2006, but I re-posting the links. You can watch the entire series on YouTube.



I'm currently watching a documentary described on Wikipedia as:

The Century of the Self is a British television documentary film that focuses on the family of Sigmund Freud, particularly his daughter and nephew,* ‬who influenced the way corporations and governments throughout the* ‬20th century have thought about,* ‬and dealt with,* ‬people.

"This series is about how those in power have used Freud's theories to try and control the dangerous crowd in an age of mass democracy." —Adam Curtis"

Part 1. Happiness Machines
Part 2. The Engineering of Consent
Part 3. There is a Policeman Inside All Our Heads: He Must Be Destroyed
Part 4. Eight People Sipping Wine in Kettering

The whole series is broken into four pieces that run 1 hour each. I'm watching the second part right now. It's a great series produced by BBC.

The Century of the Self - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[Acolyte]

Watching the first part, too. It has brought some interesting concepts so far.

[ZephyrusX]

I watched this two or three years ago. Is this the documentary with the old cigarette commercials targetted at women? It was interesting, but often media studies present a simplistic model of how social conditioning works. They often seem to suggest that we 'passively' absorb what we receive through the media, which is not the case. We interact with that information and regulate it in meaningful ways. You can contribute social conditioning to resiliency factors just as much as to the media. For example, a teenage girl with educated parents with good communication skills and a healthy attitude on body types may not internalize all the junk pertaining to feminine 'beauty' despite the over abundance of this 'junk' in the media.

[KaleidoskopicVision]

I watched this a year ago, it's quite a good documentary which paints an illuminating picture of how modern culture has come to be. It's amazing how massive an impact advertising has had on the modern world, the documentary really makes that apparent.