3. Notes from tutorial

Just putting my chaotic notes from tutorial in sentences.

So basically what I’m working with now, are stories that we give to yourselves. The question is then: what forms of narratives do we tell about ourselves? How do we give form to ourselves?

The advice on tutorial was to treat it as a media-based enquiry. What media are engaged in those narratives? Words, diaries… There’s the phenomena of people defining their lifestyle through their behaviours, hobbies, clothing, tattoos…

What’s the difference between described self and symbolised self?

I see symbolised self as the image, the facade shaped in social media, in public. Not a mask, but perhaps a face. But what I am interested in would be the described self, which reaches many levels of psyche, and the deeper, the more interesting it gets.

What do we tell ourselves? What those narratives going on in the back of our heads tell us? Some call it ‘inner critic’, ‘inner parent’, I’ve also heard a name ‘inner Woody Allen’. Some of those statements might come from our closest environment, our parents, family, school… We internalise our experience and use it for creating some frames, some structure that would hold the perceived self together, that would explain ourselves to ourselves.

It is putting oneself into form, into frames of statements, beliefs, convictions.

I think it has a lot in common with narration used in literature, poetry, film… And purely because of my interest in cinema, in research I focused on voice-overs in movies.