Discovery Archives | Notes to a Stalker

Observing and being observed. When having to cope with a stalker... life doesn't give you a lot of room for reflection in your life. Still there are those quiet moments from time to time where you can kind of step back and ask yourself well how did we get here? To get to further on this, I had to take an even bigger step back and wonder how the process of observing and being observed really gained the momentum it has on the scale we see today. Let's Step Back a Generation or two and look at the influences on modern thinking Even though the very early days of TV were before my time it's always interesting to look back at pictures from the very early days of TV and understand the impact this has had on our thinking processes on an individual and collective level. Prior to TV, what you saw was much more of a one-at-a-time process when it came to your experiences as an individual. Your mental processes were also much more tied to the immediate experiences you had directly. Basically, there was a time where we lived in our lives and were much more present. Life With TV... And TV Culture For the first time people on a mass scale couldn't visualize something through an actual image wish they could then reflect upon in their own mind on their own terms and at their own pace. Whether we knew it or not the bigger change we were going to go through was a mental one. The impact on our mind, our thinking processes and how we see ourselves. This was also the start of the TV culture we have now. Don't get me wrong I binge watch with the best of them yet have no problem keeping the media world from my world. Voyeurism and every twisted mental habit resulting from the mental and emotional processes often goes unchecked. In case that was not clear... with TV we could watch all kinds of story lines of others but seldom did we look at ourselves and how we responded at least internally. Where Does Stalker Culture Start and Does it End? Or Just Evolve into Something Else? When does TV creep into real life? Do you start creeping on a neighbor just cause they seem off? Or do you creep on a neighbor because they might have something you don't? Or do we just never bother to check our inner demons because well let's face it... we must be right. Right? We could not possibly be missing anything? At what point do we start looking at creating externally the world we live in internally, especially if we have unresolved issues we have not been able to move past? Well, for some never if they can at all help it. For others TV is great entertainment because we don't need to work out our issues on our environment or the people in our lives. TV Culture is Born and Shapes our Lives Fast forward 30, 40, 50 years and counting... a number of trends how come up from this TV culture that we started. Different types of images stories content basically all of a sudden had a life of its own.Hollywood and content and movie creators of all kinds all of a sudden became much more important and garnered a tremendous amount of attention from everyone. (Prior to this the movie and Silver Screen industry was closed and shrouded in mystery, seemingly untouchable).Content coming through on this box all of a sudden started raising all kinds of questions and bringing on unconscious motivations and desires thoughts norms and expectations to the surface to examine play with and through story lines workout different types of endings.People's thought processes of profoundly changed because of the process of being able to watch something and then reflect upon it in your own mind and to whatever degree you do or don't work with express it in your own life somehow. How Does Theater Fit in? Of course theater is alive and well, it always has been and always will be. There's always something alluring about the stage both being on it and watching it. For the purposes of understanding the dynamic of stalking the stage offers a wonderful set of analogies. Anyone who's ever had to deal with a stalker as soon as you become aware of yourself and being watched what are you asked for it or not you're on stage. Whether you actually have something that someone wants or not... they think you have something worth at least watching. In any event there's a few important things to remember about this whole dynamic of being watched or being on the stage. Only a small group gets to be on the stage at any given time the rest of us get to watch or if you're lucky you get to clean up the mess behind the stage that no one but the people who do the cleaning see.There's a whole lot of learning at the actors get to go through an experience by being watched and acting out story lines where they're their own or someone else's.People who are watching do not receive the benefit of being able to actually go through that process directly. They only get to watch the actors from the outside going through their process.And last but certainly not least if there's no lights on the stage no one gets scene or gets to see. Point number 2 brings up a very valid Dynamic that we are well through at this point in our development. By virtue of the fact of being able to visualize and then reflect and visualize and then reflect visualize and then try out to whatever extent you do in your own life, this dynamic of learning has kicked in a whole other process with people. Once you have that experience and you know it exists even if you don't have it anymore you know what can happen it's the nature of the limitations in our consciousness. This means that if you never even make it on the stage you have some level of weariness that even though you were role has been to be just an anonymous face in the audience you know that there are other types of experiences to be had. Can We Really Be Surprised: Reality TV is Just another Part of TV Culture? A giant irritation for nearly everyone at some point in time but no I don't think it was ever a real big surprise. Reality TV gave regular people a chance to experience what the Fancy Pants actors and actresses get to experience on a much smaller scale. Reality TV also took out some of the mystery and probably added more to the whole process of expression two large numbers of people through video and TV. Yeah... have whatever philosophy you want to have on reality TV but, my point is the learning process that individuals get by being able to take on different roles is why some of these other changes are happening. Because we can only clean assume into it or we have to accept what people tell us is their learning process that's all we see you don't experience with someone else experiences. We end up seeing the results of their experience because it's natural that whatever someone learns they can then take a next step in their expression of that learning process. So, as a result we started learning collectively in new an unexpected ways. We still are so, there is more to come...

Discovery

Watching and Being Watched: TV Culture and Stalking

Stalking, Manipulation and Blind Spots: What Do We Know, What Do We Imagine

Stalking: Me, Myself and the Other