I can see (myself) for miles and miles and....

I don't normally write personal posts. But last night, during one of those proverbial late-night-staring-at-the-ceiling attempts to sweep the cobwebs from the corners of my mind in order to prepare it for rest, I had what felt like a small-to-middling realization. I remembered realizing, out on the playa one night at Burning Man, that I'd lived all my life unable to tell the difference between anger and resentment. Coming from others, I mean. That when a person was angry with my I immediately thought they resented me. What mattered of course was how this affect my response.
I realized last night, thinking about this project to define the "user" of social software as a user in conversation with him/herself as much as with "real" others, realized that there are some emotions that are easily mistaken online. Really big, important emotions. Though they're not really emotions; they're aspects of communication that involve emotion. But it's precisely because they're not expressed, they're read, that they are easily confused. Empathy and projection. A person might be empathetic or sympathetic, compassionate, in an email, or post, or comment. That would be our reading, our impression. But the person being compassionate might be projecting. Transactional Analysts described these kinds of phenomena as "crossed transactions."
For example: Bossman: Mary, get me a hundred copies of this report by lunch please. Mary: You don't own me you know! I do have other things to do! (They were a bit less PC back then; but you probably recognize the dynamic. Think of Chloe in 24). TA would have called this an adult-child transaction, wherein Mary responds as a child to a demanding parent.
So the thing that hit me was that there are certain kinds of communications, affective or emotionally rich ones, that are handled in face to face talk by use of body language, face, and of course the fact within seconds we can establish, by walking up or down the ladder of intensity and risk, each other's intentions. But in blogging, commenting, emailing, (less so in IM -- because it cycles through short turns and is actually connected to another person), we are required to read/interpret the intention behind what others say. And so we can read them generously, that is assigning to their words what seem to be their intentions. Or we can read them internally, that is through our own emotional complexes, including of course all the things we tend to hear because we're sensitive to them.
Some of the most important aspects of communication, those having to do with interest, with liking a person, with being acknowledged, ignored, agreed with or disagreed with, are essentially up for grabs. If we have emotional cobwebs and detritus, and I don't know a soul who doesn't, we recognize/encounter our own crap in other's words, and assign it to them (unless we're enlightened, in which case we can catch ourselves before answering!). Same with ideals, fantasies, wishes, etc: we might believe they mean it (when in fact *they're* engaged perhaps with their own idealizations). This would explain the tendency in dating sites for people to ascend the ramp to intimacy at great speed, only to then fall from the peak disastrously and walk away in great disappointment. The medium engages us with our own means of understanding another's intentions, but brackets their ability to correct where our heading.

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Here's talking at you, kid... It's all talk on social media

"Of all the gin joints in all the world, you have to come into this one..." Ever get that feeling that there's a whole lot more talk going on here than there is listening? That perhaps the medium itself is biased? That the writing medium only captures statements and utterances, posts. It only captures us when we talk. It doesnt capture us when we don't talk. And because the screen here can only show what its design is capable of seeing, nothing exists that is not added to it. And we know that. The web's speed has increased these days to such a velocity that it's become impossible to think without having to communicate about it (as i'm doing now, if just to make a point).

I'm reminded of the Fawlty Towers Germans episode in which Basil Fawlty (John Cleese), in the middle of hanging a moose head on the hotel lobby wall, has to climb down from a stool to answer the phone, at the other end of which is his hospitalized wife, calling to ask if he has hung the moose head. And his response, something along the lines of "I'm doing it! I was just... I mean, what is the point you stupid bint? I was just busy doing it and then i have to stop doing it to pick up the phone to tell you that i was in the middle of doing it?! I mean is there anything esle I can do for you? Move the hotel a couple feet to the left?'

There are of course many ways of talking. But this mode, which is for the most part "talking to oneself", produces a strange conversational effect when it involves attaching comments to others' posts, responding to comments in posts, posting on posts, and so on. I wonder whether we'll recognize each other, some day (and I hope far away). We'll recognize ourselves, of that I'm sure. But will anyone else? Well there'll be gin joints to stop into. And some day, some where, in some far off gin joint along the norther coast of Morocco, in a town known as Casablanca, somebody will say "here's talking at you kid" and perhaps there'll be nothing wrong with it...

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Eric Berne's Games People Play and social media

I've been busy working on several papers lately... blogging's been sparse at best... here's the first of three of the papers... reading notes on Eric Berne's notion of the transaction and the emotional "stroke"... must rest...

From the reading notes:
Eric Berne's Games People Play, popular during its time but no less fascinating and perhaps even relevant to a theory of mediated interaction, is a wonderful reading of the transactions of emotional "strokes" among people interacting with one another. For Berne, human interaction is always engaged in this fundamental exchange (his theory is exchangist, I think), one that seems to have an effect on the body and on personal well-being as well as having its obvious effect on emotional and psychological dispositions. Though we would have to conjecture as to how human interaction can even communicate with biological systems, I see no reason to so here: it's pretty obvious that we are capable of making each other feel good, as we're capable of truly stressing each other out also. That our moods affect our health is well, just as obvious.

What then of the interactions that occur when we're not face to face? What of Berne's stroke? Let's, for the challenge of it, take this fuzzy but genuine insight, this notion that we communicate in order to provision ourselves and others with a feeling of membership and well-being that has no content itself but is instead the subtext of all content of communication, and map its transposition into mediated social interaction.


Reading Notes: Eric Berne's Games People Play PDF, 17 pages. Eric Berne's work on transactional analysis has long fascinated me for its insights into a dimension of interaction that involves basic emotional acknowledgment and recognition: a dimension that would seem diminished by the online interactions and communication that occur without face to face transactions, but which might nonetheless motivate our interactions nonetheless. If it were the case that online interactions attempt to get at the emotional stuff of life that's not immediately present, perhaps through substitute signs, gestures, the use of etiquette or other displacements and substitions, then we could claim that the online world is thin, but offers promise. A lot can be done with ASCII.

All my reading notes are here.

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