Chanced upon this yesterday:

“We need emotional content,” Lee tells his student, Lao. “Not anger.”

Lee is challenging Lao to focus upon his emotional self, to find and understand it, before expressing it through the particular form of body language that is Kung Fu. In this way Lao can hope to control his emotions, as opposed to them controlling him.

We can have some fun if we play with this as it relates to the creation of ‘social content’, by which I mean the myriad multimedia cascading through the social channels now comprising the central nervous system of the popular web.

By focusing more on the emotional aspect of the content we create and share, and about how this is visualised and articulated, we can meet our audience in a way that feels more at home on platforms associated primarily with social interaction.

From a movie marketing point-of-view, cinema-going offers nothing if not an emotional experience: isn’t it the promise of such that draws us there time and again? Indeed, couldn’t Lee be talking about ENTER THE DRAGON itself, from which the clip is taken? Not some banal martial arts beat-em-up, but an unsentimental revenge tale delivering anxiety and exhilaration in equally generous measure.

Social content has the capacity to connect us with our feelings – amusement, excitement, sadness and fear – and to provide a medium through which to share them. There are plenty of creative comms agencies out there doing no shortage of thinking on behalf of their clients, but we mustn’t forget to also feel. As Lee says: “It’s like a finger pointing at the moon. Do not concentrate on the finger or you will miss all of the heavenly glory!”

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P.S. Thanks to @mattgolding for serendipitously signposting the clip below this very morning. Be advised however, though it is both ‘content’ and in it’s own strange way ’emotional’, it has nothing to do with heavenly glory.

» Blog » Emotional content
On October 31, 2013
By Dan Light

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