Tag: trend

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Updating the Self

David Trend

Neuroscientists call the brain an “anticipation machine” because it spends so much time predicting the future.[i] It does this by piecing together past experiences to build scenarios of expected outcomes, in a process that reinforces itself as predictions come true. But of course things don’t always come true,  creating uncertainty and wreaking havoc on the anticipation machine. In mild cases this expresses itself in a sense of worry that things might go wrong. But pile up a lot of bad experiences and you end up expecting the worst, in what psychologists call “anticipatory dread.”[ii] While this can be a healthy process in buffering the shock of negative events, it also can spiral into a harmful sensation of crisis.

Recent research has a lot to say about the anticipation machine’s relationship to the update impulse. Visions of the future don’t spring from a vacuum, but link to objects, expected outcomes, or something we think we want.  This desiring process applies to just about everything, whether it’s a slice of pizza or the admiration of others. But here’s the fascinating part: Getting things is less powerful than wanting them. That new pair of jeans might bring a thrill. But soon comes the yearning for another purchase. Neuroimaging reveals that “wanting” and “liking” occur in different parts of the brain, with the former more strongly active than the latter. Contrary to common wisdom, motivation isn’t influenced by animalistic hungers and drives. What gets people going is the imagination, which is why advertising favors feelings over facts.  

Continue reading “Updating the Self”
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Update Available: The Algorithmic Self

Bing, Bard, and other bots. The world is rushing headlong into a ChatGPT future. Yet amid the giddy optimism over boundless new capabilities lie deeper questions about how artificial intelligence is reshaping human consciousness in unnoticed ways. Update Available: The Algorithmic Self (2023) take a critical look at this emerging phenomenon.

Update Available is available as a free download from Amazon, Apple, Barnes & Noble and other major retailers, published as an Open Access Creative Commons book.

Other books by David Trend include  Welcome to Cyberschool: Education at the Crossroads in the Information Age, Worlding: Media, Identity, and Imagination,  and The End of Reading: From Guttenberg to Grand Theft Auto.  

Trend’s popular “Changing Creativity” course is taken each year by over 1000 students throughout the University of California system.

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Anxious Creativity: When Imagination Fails

Just released: Creativity is getting new attention in today’s America –– along the way revealing fault lines in U.S. culture. Surveys show people overwhelming seeing creativity as both a desirable trait and a work enhancement, yet most say they just aren’t creative.

Like beauty and wealth, creativity seems universally desired but insufficiently possessed. Businesses likewise see innovation as essential to productivity and growth, but can’t bring themselves to risk new ideas. Even as one’s “inner artist” is hyped by a booming self-help industry, creative education dwindles in U.S. schools.

 Anxious Creativity: When Imagination Fails examines this conceptual mess, while focusing on how America’s current edginess dampens creativity in everyone. Written in an engaging and accessible style, Anxious Creativity draws on current ideas in the social sciences, economics, and the arts. Discussion centers on the knotty problem of reconciling the expressive potential in all people with the nation’s tendency to reward only a few. Fortunately, there is some good news, as scientists, economists, and creative professionals have begun advocating new ways of sharing and collaboration. Building on these prospects, the book argues that America’s innovation crisis demands a rethinking of individualism, competition, and the ways creativity is rewarded.

Available from all major booksellers. More info at: https://www.routledge.com/Anxious-Creativity-When-Imagination-Fails-1st-Edition/Trend/p/book/9780367275068

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Elsewhere in America

Elsewhere in America: The Crisis of Belonging in Contemporary Culture by David Trend (Routledge: 2016)

The book uses the term “elsewhere” in describing conditions that exile so many citizens to “some other place” through prejudice, competition, or discordant belief. Even as “diversity” has become the official norm in American society, the country continues to fragment along new lines that pit citizens against their government, each other, and even themselves.  Yet in another way, “elsewhere” evokes an undefined “not yet” ripe with potential. 

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The book argues that even in the face of daunting challenges, elsewhere can point to optimism, hope, and common purpose. Through 12 detailed chapters, Elsewhere in America applies critical theory in the humanities and social sciences in examining recurring crises of social inclusion (“belonging”) in the U.S.  After two centuries of struggle and incremental “progress” in securing human dignity, today the U.S. finds itself riven apart by new conflicts over reproductive rights, immigration, health care, religious extremism, sexual orientation, mental illness, and fears of terrorists. Why are U.S. ideals of civility and unity so easily hijacked and confused? Is there a way of explaining this recurring tendency of Americans to turn against each other? Elsewhere in America engages these questions in charting the ever-changing faces of difference (manifest in contested landscapes of sex and race to such areas as disability and mental health), their spectral and intersectional character (as seen in the new discourses on performativity, normativity, and queer theory), and the grounds on which categories are manifest in ideation and movement politics (seen in theories of metapolitics, cosmopolitanism, dismodernism).

For more information: https://www.routledge.com/Elsewhere-in-America-The-Crisis-of-Belonging-in-Contemporary-Culture/Trend/p/book/9781138654440

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Misunderstanding Media Violence

imgres-4As we enter the most recent round in the media violence debate, a story from the past is illustrative of the difficulties in drawing conclusions too quickly from what seem like common sense observations.

In a now-famous study conducted in the 1970s, a group of American researchers were convinced they’d come up with a perfect way to measure the effects of violent media.[i] They had decided to study teenage boys who lived in residential facilities and boarding schools where television viewing could be completely controlled. For a period of six weeks, half of the boys were permitted to watch only violent programs and the other half non-violent shows. Everyone expected the boys exposed to violence to become more aggressive and unruly, as similar studies of younger children had demonstrated. Continue reading “Misunderstanding Media Violence”