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On Adam Curtis’s Century of the Self.

This is the first episode of Adam Curtis’s the Century of the Self, a BBC documentary on the rise of Freudian psychology, public relations, and conceptions of the individual over the last century. To what extent do psychology and public relations shape the self under network culture? This is crucial to understand. In part, I think the answer can be found in the disorders that afflict a culture. Neuresthenia and hysteria dominated psychology in the late 19th century, giving way to afflictions like psychosis and neurosis, and more recently to bipolar disorder and asparger’s. This is a thumbnail sketch and I certainly need to elaborate it, but these afflictions could be seen as a map of the unresolved tensions within society. Moreover, popular remedies feedback on society, altering it. Thus, this Wall Street Journal article suggesting that Prozac impacted our way of thinking about the economy, exacerbating the bubble.

Curtis’s documentary also reminds us how the documentary has become a major cultural form in network culture, something I cover in my article on the immediated now.