Why called it Imaginary Social Worlds

Perhaps I should start by explaining the title of this blog – Imaginary Social Worlds. It’s a term that I borrowed from John Caughey who coined the term in the early 1980s. The basic idea behind an imaginary social relationship is that we engage with media figures in ways that parallel actual social relationships. We also engage with media content as we build out the cultural context of our imaginary world. Critics do not like to think about the amount of time we spend “inside,” as we live in an action-oriented Western culture – no time for daydreaming. Caughey wrote his book at a time when the personal computer was just emerging; there was no Internet. It seems to me that we spend an inordinate amount of time interacting with media and with people that we don’t know or don’t know well (consider the “friends” you have on Facebook). Social networking through social media is all the rage today, and so Caughey’s idea is amplified in ways we could not have imagined. I write about imaginary social relationships in my book, Advertising in Everyday Life. And, as a scholar I continue to look not only at what the mainstream pundits refers to as social networking through social media, but I also consider the social “world” that is inside our head. It is a world populated by places, things and people that to some extent are out of the media – movies, TV (news and entertainment), the Internet, among others. I think it is worthwhile, as others look at the exterior world, they this blog spend some time and effort focusing on the interior world of the individual and how we utilize the content of media in order to make sense of our place in society.