How Are Community Aesthetics and Screen Technologies Affecting The Personalities Of Those You Love?

Mainstreaming and fortifying the construct of “community aesthetics” should be of great help to parents, teachers, counselors and others looking to reform or improve culture and to help fortify the optimal development of personalities of those they love. It is a way to constructively evaluate the learning and social environments of children, adolescents and adults of all ages, including those who have retired to a nursing home.

When artists, including authors, musicians and filmmakers display or attend their work over decades they are in a sense “creating culture”. If they become celebrated enough, their hometown, friends and teachers as well as other places where they have lived become interesting to a wide range of followers. When interviewed, the inquirers often want to know what their intentions and related thoughts were at any given interval.

After a celebrated artist passes away, some communities seek to preserve his or her property and form foundations to keep their memory alive. Somewhere along the way people explain what they liked or found interesting about the figure and in some cases what they disliked or found uninteresting. As our highly diversified culture continually expands and partitions various categories of aesthetics (entertainment), living persons with families may have to decide whether the artists being evaluated as well as many other influences on their children are to be approached or avoided. This includes food and various restaurants.

On a primal “hedonic” level, each person prefers some food over other food and most people have foods they strongly like and dislike. Moving up the scale, people like some media more than others and prefer some types of prayer services over others. We find “good” aesthetics something to be grateful for and “bad” aesthetics something to be uneasy or even alarmed about.

If you took your family to a special symphonic orchestra one week you are probably not going to be happy if your teenage son and daughter decides to attend a decadent heavy metal ‘concert’ in a big field outside the city limits the next week. What is their motivation? It might start off being “cool” and “with it” for peers but after they attend together for hours and hours in a peer to peer experience, they now have memories reinforced by the “music”… and then when they relive the “adventure” at various times in the future, the imprint on their taste and judgment might be long lasting.

One thing that aesthetics may study in psychology in the future is why certain people have a very wide and developing taste in music and others, even in their 60s or 70s have been focused on “rock and roll” that with certain groups like Led Zeppelin, Rolling Stones or “Grateful Dead”. When it comes right down to it, they are not particularly interested in most Christian music and many other genres available. They seem “stuck” in their likes and their likes are very narrow and in the minds of many “distasteful” and “juvenile”. Yet these very same people could very well be high functioning businesspeople, scientists, teachers, professors or school principals.

There is some mystery here, but the reality of these people’s taste influencing future generations is quite significant if not formidable. In one high school environment I saw a high school band learn how to play a particular song almost soley because the principal was a big fan of the painted rock band that created it! In a number of other instances I have seen how leader’s aesthetics was something quite influential if not contagious among many students. In the most lamentable scenarios, I have seen at least one high school theatre teacher produce a school play with immoral and amoral undertones and overtones so thick you could cut them with a knife

In such environments it can be quite uncomfortable to challenge entrenched ‘affinities’ and cultural acceptance or even routine celebration of a certain set of variables we might think of as built in aesthetics affecting the culture and communication patterns of hundreds if not thousands of people. Can it really be in so many instances people are merely interested in the instrumentals and are not worried about listening to certain lyrics over and over again? What are the social and psychological implications of a culture that routinely functions with this ethos?

It is becoming increasingly apparent that schools in America have demonstrated the potential and even the disposition to be morally harmful to students, perhaps doing more harm than good in many cases. If a teacher is ‘cool’ and ‘laid back’ but persistently demonstrates an orientation with aesthetics and values that are antithetical to what their parent’s prescribe, at least some children are not going to be self possessed and secure enough to orient in more optimal ways with pressure from peer groups and teachers combined. If such an individual is confronted by a group of parents, he or she will probably frame them as ‘extremists’ and people with persecutory impulses with too much time on their hands.

While we need to keep an open mind to allow students to view artistic expression in a wide variety of cultures and contexts: music and other expression from around the world and in many different venues, and we surely must keep an eye on the quality of emerging community aesthetics. Once we contemplate just how powerful these influences can be can be it is time to consider ways to intervene on the most problematic. Understanding the nature of community aesthetics is an essential step in this direction – a useful way to have discussions with family members, students, friends and others. Perhaps we can be too conservative or cautious, but perhaps there is little risk of that.

What are the effects of well selected classical music as well as contemporary and classical folk music? I think the aesthetic effects need to be compared with more problematic forms of entertainment on an interdisciplinary level – from science to English literature to psychology to pastoral psychology.

Virtually all students are heavily involved in technology and screens which fortify “community aesthetics”. Those who are more introverted may seek community in online video game groups that take on a much broader scope than many from older generations might imagine. Already Southwestern Oklahoma State University has for the last year or two (or more) supported an eSports program and Arena. When one weighs the trickle down effect on high school and middle school students as well as young adults living in their parents basement with no strong career plans, we know that examining the emergent cultures from video games is something observing families, groups and communities cannot avoid.