Join us for a unique Global Social Witnessing call on Wednesday, January 7 where we’ll make space to witness the global media system — sensing into the growing risks facing journalists, and the complex interplay between the 24/7 news cycle and our individual and collective nervous systems.
While attuning to the many ways in which parts of the legacy media may remain enmeshed with the trauma architecture of the past, we’ll also invite the evolutionary updates that could help nurture more emotionally intelligent forms of storytelling in the future. Details and free registration here.
Resonant World #170
With the benefit of hindsight, I now know that I spent much of my time as a war journalist in a state of at least mild — and at times acute — dissociation.
This made complete sense: By cutting me off from the overwhelming nature of the events erupting around me, and the danger I was occasionally in, my mind-body system was protecting my ability to do my job.
The mechanism worked smoothly for the most part — except when periodically it all became too much. I’d crash into a depression that could take months to resolve.
I want more of my colleagues in journalism to understand dissociation because I believe this knowledge can protect people from burnout, trauma and stress.
But I’m equally interested in exploring the systemic impact of dissociation among the people working in global media — the planetary nervous system that plays a far more fundamental role in regulating our collective body than simply serving us our news.
I suspect there’s an epidemic of dissociation at work in news organisations — given the state of the world, how could it be any other way?
It isn’t something that’s talked about very much in the industry, but it seems obvious to me that this mass dissociation shapes the way stories are selected, framed and told.
I’m curious about the wider implications of these downstream effects for the way we engage with global crises. And I’m also exploring and what alternative forms of storytelling, and the media platforms capable of delivering them, might look like (See for example the What Is Collective Healing? podcast, which I co-host on behalf of the Pocket Project).
Because I’m pretty sure that if we ever make it to the other side of the metacrisis, then the media systems informing our future will look nothing like the legacy titles of the past.
These have been core questions driving Resonant World since the outset, so I’m delighted to be collaborating with the Pocket Project to stage an online event tomorrow (Wednesday, January 7) called Witnessing the Global Media: Towards the Emotionally Intelligent Storytelling of the Future from 1900-2030 UK time (GMT).
We’ll be joined by the amazing facilitators Manda Johnson and Robert Buxbaum, both pioneers of Global Social Witnessing, and also my great friend and collaborator James Scurry, who occupies the unusual position of being both a psychotherapist and senior producer at Sky News, giving him a unique insight into the impact of trauma on the industry. (You can see us in dialogue on this topics last year below).
James is one of the conveners of the annual #MediaStrong conference on journalism and trauma, and to my mind is doing as much as anybody to work towards establishing a more psychologically healthy and emotionally mature media landscape.
Do join us for what will be a powerfully insightful and community-building event!
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