weekly update: ok starting for real
posted 10/16
I’ve been meaning to do weekly updates, both for documentation purposes and to take a moment each week to reflect and summarize what I’m thinking about. it hasn’t happened until now, but hopefully it continues.
reading: Social Intelligence (Goleman), Society of the Spectacle (Debord), The Language of New Media (Manovich), Snap to Grid (Lunenfeld)
working on: happiness helmet (hat? headband? wearable…) – detects smile size and inflicts pain inversely proportional
thinking about: social neuroscience
amae – a Japanese word that has no English equivalent but Goleman describes it as “empathy that is taken for granted, and acted upon, without calling attention to itself.” He says, “Amae seems to take for granted a mutual priming of aprallel feelings and thoughts in people who are attuned. The unvoiced attitude is something like: if I feel it, so should you – and so I needn’t tell you what I want, feel, or need. You should be closely enough attuned to me to sense it and so to act on it without a word needed.”
projection vs empathy (and creating a feedback loop)
rejection triggering the same spot in the ACC as physical pain, perhaps suggesting that the pain center evolved the sensitivity to social rejection as an alarm signal to warn of potential banishment – and to prompt us to repair the threatened relationship, and another more recent study relating the brain processing of a lot of social experiences to physical ones (Lieberman & Eisenberger)
microexpressions – and eckhart’s training software
dyssemia – a deficit in reading – and so acting on – the nonverbal signs that guide smooth interactions
Goleman: social intelligence = social awareness (primal empathy, attunement, empathic accuracy, social cognition) + social facility (synchrony, self-presentation, influence, concern)
I-you vs I-it relationships (the utility of each, the switch between, the murky blend space)
those cards on the big blue buses where, if your driver was particularly friendly, you can let him know
to do this week: finish the wearable, start another project, think about idea for kinetic piece