English SAC: Reactions to landscapes

The teacher allowed me to write up my SAC in blog format, so why not post it up. So here is my SAC draft enjoy.

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Today’s topic to be explored in this blog is why people react differently to their landscapes. Everyday we continually encounter different landscapes; though these landscapes we are exposed to are the same, people perceive it differently. The cause of this derives from the psychological theory of perceptual set. Other factors that may influence reactions to landscape would include past experiences in life, how people look at life and our friendship groups. Many examples of this can be found in the film Jindabyne which will be further explored.

The theory of perceptual set stresses the idea of perception as an active process involving selection, deduction and interpretation. It is a bias or readiness to perceive certain aspects of available sensory data and to ignore others. What this means is that things we already know influence how we perceive a place or object to be. For example if we are walking through a rain forest and soon after we observe a random tree, we would view this not just as a tree but rather as part of a vast rain forest exploiting other factors of nature and wildlife. But if we just looked at the tree we would just see it as a tree. In the film Jindabyne this can relate to the native Australian people (aboriginals) who draw a sense of spirituality from their landscape. Where as the White Australians only see it as land that is used for recreation and their own purposes.

Our different perceptions on life change how we react to our landscape and environment. To extend this point further. In general, when we are happy we are able to see things with more optimism and have a more positive outlook. But when we aren’t in such a happy mood we find that that nothing seems to matter. Relating this back to how people view landscapes differently, that generally when people are happy it lifts the environment around them up and in the same way when people aren’t in a good mood it is obvious that they wouldn’t care about their environment around them. For example, whereas Caylin Calandria regards Lake Jindabyne with a sense of awe, Tom is fearful of it, refusing to swim therein.

Friendship groups affect how we react to landscapes. The notion of being in a friendship group gives us a sense of identity and self worth. And the people within the friendship generally reflect the overall leader of the group. This affects how we perceive landscape because in most cases the opinion of the group is made by the leader. In saying that we do not want to disagree with the fear of being pushed out or being different to the group. In which this would hinder our true opinion on any topic for that matter. So rather than speaking your own mind it is rather the group mentality that dominates over all. This is evident in Jindabyne when the men saw the dead body of the aboriginal girl, the group mentality suggested that they leave it, but surely one of the men thought they should do something about it, but because of the group mentality it didn’t matter what he thought.

All these are clear examples of what can influence our perception on landscape. Though we can say that it would be the same landscape, a range of factors can change our perception on how we react to landscape. There are many other examples that we can exploit, but in the end, to really gain a greater understanding and appreciation for landscape we need to take ourselves out of our worlds and just see everything for how it is.

Peter.