To what degree to media archetypes create personality types?
Subsumed questions:
(1) To what degree do we (intentionally or unintentionally) model our personality after media archetypes?
(2) To what degree do other people interpret our personalities so as to conform their interpretations to media archetypes?
Related questions:
(1) Assuming we are more media saturated in the present than we were in the past, is it safe to say that that personality modeling based on media archetypes is more prevalent and/or more pronounced nowadays? Does this imply that the distinction between the media and reality – specifically, reality pertaining to personality types – disintegrates as time goes on?
(2) Are questions about media archetypes and their relation to personality types as they change through time something that can be answered, or do these questions fall prey to certain Heisenberg Microscope-type paradoxes? I ask this because, what comes to my mind, is the fact that trying to discover things about the past requires some medium (e.g. a history textbook) and such a medium -- being human artifice and therefore unnatural – becomes the very archetype-creating instrument that is our subject of study. It would be like scrutinizing a brand of microscope for flaws in the lens, through a microscope of that same brand.
Tangential questions:
(1) Assuming it is even possible to make sense of the notion of “personality,”
[“And there is as much difference between us and ourselves as between us and others” Montaigne, Of the Inconsistency of Our Actions]
what are its components and how can we measure it? Do we measure it in tradition of behaviorism? But then what is the difference between the Actor and the Genuine?
(2) Is it possible that emulation of media archetypes doesn’t recreate personality, but acts as a personality-superstructure on top of a nonmalleable foundation? If this is the case, what can we call this superstructure? We couldn’t call it acting, because it seems more genuine than acting.
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