Compassion Augmentation via Interactive Digital Media

Awareness

2011-09-15T14:55:00.000-07:00

If we had an infinite amount of knowledge, everything that we did, every word we said, and every communication we had with another person would be perfect, correct, and progressing humanity toward peaceful ends. But this is not the case, and it never will be. Even with the advent and exponential growth of the internet we are only human. However, being human is still wonderful and filled with potential. The key is awareness.
If you have ever accidentally hurt someone's feelings, then you have thought or maybe even had to explain later, "Oh, I wasn't thinking." This common phrase is more than a colloquialism. It is true. You weren't thinking. Perhaps at that moment feelings took over, or the ego, or maybe it was just a matter of momentum. Words literally flew from your mouth before you could edit them.
So if we are to think, feel, and live at the same time, how can we do this? Many methods exist with the same goal. At their very base lies the same techniques as well. Meditation or deep relaxation is the starting point. To further develop or level of empathy and compassion, step two is to find the compassion you have for those closest to you, your mother or another loved one, for example. And, of course, you must find love for yourself.
From this center you can then extend that sensation to other friends, then strangers, and finally to "enemies." With a strongly developed ability for compassion, you can never not think. You are always aware that other people are literally interconnected with you and your happiness. You find it imperative to treat them as if your happiness depended on it, because it does.

Test for the “Human”

2011-04-29T11:27:00.000-07:00

Christine Rosakranse
Response for 369 - Nass
Test for the “Human”

    Any test for humanness is a difficult one because the definition of human is different depending on which aspect of the individual you are studying. Of course, there is the biological component of a human being, and that is well-defined. We have certain DNA and the expression of those genes leads to common physical traits. Mutations do occur and there are outliers of the system, but they lie well within a range of possibilities.
    However, the ontological essence of humanity remains out of the scope of the Turing test. He relies on transmitted communications in order to remove the face-to-face interaction, but that would be exactly where humanness lies. To be honest, I would argue that humanness is a spectrum. On the one end, you have a rock, inanimate and unfeeling. At the fully human end, you have an entity that hopes, worries, loves, and that is capable of engaging with other members of humanity.
    I always think of Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation when this question arises. He progresses through the seasons trying to become more “human”, playing chess, painting, and even have conjugal relations with another crew member. But throughout all of that practice, he submits that he is not human. In the movie, he gets the emotion chip, one of my favorite deus ex machina devices ever. They do not explain how it works. They just pop it in and boom - manic, all-feeling Data is born. I would say that at this point he became human, and would pass any Turing or Nass test.
    This is not to say that anything with emotions is human. I know my dog worries a lot about treats, and the scarcity of treats, and all beef related items in the world. But it’s how one worries that makes a thing human or not. On my spectrum, though, a dog would be more human than a rock, less human than me, but not because she can’t use grammar.
    Perhaps my test would be: To what extent does the entity have the ability to create an explanatory narrative? We constantly distinguish “what matters”, using a combination of logic and very nearly arbitrary rules. I think a computer wouldn’t be able to say which is more important, a rainbow or a cricket. And a human would, coming up with some narrative, that may or not make sense to a computer, but that would make sense to another human being.

What is science?

2011-04-28T10:28:00.000-07:00

Kuhn and Lakatos

    Kuhn’s account of paradigm shifts describes anomalies and inconsistencies as their root. This argument suggests a single model for change. Whether or not Kuhn believes this to truly be the only model would definitely color my ability to believe in his logic. His definitions, I find also, are too restrictive.
    He further explains that, as demonstrated by astronomy, the holes in a theory serve as a latching point for a new theory, without which it is unlikely for a new theory to hold. Retooling is an expensive process (intellectually and otherwise). Not just any theory would be considered for study. Something must be the catalyst for change.
Another way to state this is that “crises are a necessary precondition for the emergence of novel theories” (pg. 77).    This is a very logical way to think about these changes.     However, when he writes “To reject one paradigm without simultaneously substituting another is to reject science itself” (pg. 79), I cannot agree with him and neither can Lakatos. Suggesting that you work within one paradigm until you create a new one once again calls to the no-interregnum argument against Kuhn’s formation. And while he does admit to a possible period of confusion, he does not call this science.
    Lakatos, on the other hand, counters this by first introducing a concept from Popper that “all theories are not only equally unprovable but also equally improbable” (pg. 95). Dogmatic falsificationism assumes a “psychological borderline” between theory and factual prepositions. Once again, psychology comes into the realm of discourse because science can never be a “pure” exercise free from human foibles and intentions.   “There is no natural (i.e. psychological) demarcation between observational and theoretical prepositions” (pg. 113). He instead changes a paradigm from solid to “background knowledge.”
    One interesting side note comes from a footnote which states that some might see “methodological falsificationism as an existentialist philosophy of science” (pg, 113, footnote 2). Adding sophistication to methodological falsificationism involves distinguishing between interpretive theory and explanatory theory (pg. 129). Lakatos then replaces the notion of a single theory as being scientific with the necessity for a succession of theories to be scientific. I think that this is a better representation. Taking Kuhn’s view of science-no science-science to explain periods of confusion does not account for the intricacies of science and for the entire process.
    Lakatos uses the word “metaphysics” which represents an interesting focus for discussion, which in this case describes methodological rules as being “....motivated by the metaphysical principle that any explanation is only approximate because of the infinite complexity of the factors involved in determining any single event.”

So two questions we could ask are: To what extent does seeing methodological falsificationism as an existentialist philosophy of science affect the researcher? Does seeing science in a succession of theories make more sense than claiming individual theories as scientific?

Defining Emotion by Looking for Commonality

2011-01-10T10:45:00.000-08:00

The selected readings represent the challenges, but also possible directions for determining a universal validity in emotion research. Each of these papers presents emotion as a difficult concept to nail down. Emotion, in and of itself, is complicated by the highly regulatory and compensatory nature of the human brain. Not only do we have automatic responses (reflexes and impulses) to strange stimuli, but we also have cognitive responses to how we should feel about those feelings. Nielsen and Kaszniak demonstrate that each stage of emotional response is judged and in turn those judgments are reflected upon and perhaps judged again, according to an individual’s past development or emotional awareness (as mention in #1 of the notes section).

This can be an alternate to the current definition of natural kinds. We can look at the primitives of emotion without the over-layering of cognitive response. In some ways, valence and arousal act in this manner to describe emotions along axes of intensity.

In the Robinson and Clore paper, we can see that the extent to which a feeing, memory, or belief affects our self-report of emotion and alters an initial automatic response must be taken into account when comparing pre and post reports of an emotional experience. Due to the fact that we cannot literally “relive” an experience, self-report must deal with “accessibility principles.” Robinson and Clore present four types of knowledge that are accessed when individuals self-report. Stereotypes imposed by culture as well as those developed by a person over the course of their lifetime represent a strong molding force in the report of emotion. This represents a semantic driving force, as opposed to episodic influences. The episodic influences have to deal with the tendency of the vividness of a memory to fade over time (evanescence) so experiential knowledge is not always accessible, leading to reliance on semantic beliefs (situation-based or identity-based).

Later on in the paper in the Literature Review, a paper related to my interests was introduced. I find the results related to “online” versus noncurrent measurement of emotion as experienced by different genders to be non-intuitive.

In Moore, Romney, Hsia, and Rusch, we see that some terms that were researched more closely correlated across languages, such as happiness and sadness. However, envy and shame represented different dynamics. This could be because of the dependence of envy and shame on past acculturation, pointing to the “incommensurability among the languages”, but only, I would argue due to differences in the cultures that arises for non-natural kinds of emotions.

So my main question from these readings is then:
If we were to train someone to not let past conditioning color their current experience, to fully feel in the moment, would they ever feel envy or shame? Anger?

--Christine Rosakranse

Buying Propaganda and Fragmented Social Spaces

2010-11-19T13:04:00.001-08:00

Buying Propaganda
    Watching the video on Bernays and Freud that Ethan sent out was highly revelatory. So much so, that I went home and told my roommate about Bernays. To have one figure start the mass consumerism that our country now engages in is quite astounding. I had always taken for granted that people wanted things they did not need, but connecting that to our psychology in such a way as to invoke the ego and the id takes this manipulation to another manic level.
    Both this aspect of human interaction and The Media Equation deal with a level of mindlessness. That is to say that the average individual is not being mindful on a day to day basis (not being aware of actions and consequences on a profound level). The human being has evolved certain heuristics over time that are not necessarily compatible with our current society. As technology becomes more ubiquitous and pervasive, we, conversely, have to be more mindful. Taking our roles for granted is no longer acceptable in such a fast-paced and wired community.
    One example that enters into this comes from an article that came out recently in the Stanford newspaper which said that those who engage with social media extensively are less compassionate in real life. This fragmenting can only be combatted with mindful behavior.
--Christine Rosakranse

Implications of Self-Representation in Video Games and Virtual Environments

2010-11-05T10:29:00.000-07:00

    In some ways, it’s scary how much human beings are changed by the technology in their environment because we tend to interact with those technologies in a very automatic and trusting manner. We do not consciously reflect on the fact that the affective capability of any technology represents serious implications for the design and use of that technology. Given the amount of media of various forms that the average individual intakes, even weak effects can make strong contributions over extended periods of time. From television to video games, exposure is leading to a change in the mental architecture of the individual media consumer. Discovering the positive and negative consequences of these effects is important for determining what content is “fit” for consumption, in that it entertains without being detrimental to the well-being of the individual.
    Of course, conceptions of words such as fit and well-being vary, but we understand that certain values are considered universally beneficial. However, in studying video games, due to the interactivity and self-representative properties of avatars, we have a new paradigm for study that involves a medium that provides an unprecedented level of individual engagement. Strong levels of arousal can be attained in a gaming environment because those avatars in the game actually become a representation of the individual to whichever extent that person is engaged with that virtual environment. Sociological analysis provides methods for measurement.
    The positive aspects of a video game come in many forms. “When my team wins, we all win.” This sense of community and teamwork is often unrivaled in most work places. Being able to reproduce that in a real-world environment would provide the benefits associated with unselfish motivations. The research must study the affective capability of video games and then perpetuate that sentiment.
    The negative implications are also abundant. For example, being able to reduce aversion to negative valence can be both positive and negative. In training individuals to become better soldiers, the individual learns to shoot a rifle while in a stressful situation. This is good for the soldier, and not good for the person at the other end of the rifle. However, these methods of decreasing aversion can also treat PTSD, which is purely beneficial.   More research on affective capability of video games and virtual environments is called for, but what we already know from other fields can definitely help to inform the direction of this research to reduce the automaticity of the user and inform prosocial design.

Online Worlds and Compassion

2010-10-22T11:34:00.000-07:00

Cultivation Theory, Agenda-setting Theory, and the Spiral of Silence(1) represent some of the most salient theories for our current interests in media communication studies, with each of these theories representing a facet of influence that can direct research. Cultivation Theory as applied to video games and virtual online communities is interesting because it confounds the normal social roles and behaviors of the individual with unrealistic or hyperreal occurrences. As Williams mentions, online worlds differ offline perceptions(2). It may well change the way our society evolves. In the vein of my interest, compassion potentiation, there is not much apparent “good news” that can be drawn out from competitive and violent games. While the multi-player games that involve teams going on missions foster cooperation amongst their group, any outsiders are still seen as enemies. It would be interesting to relate the concept of compassion fatigue to online worlds where there is no reward for compassion and no other need for any reciprocity of kindness.
Much in the same way that Gerbner and Gross theorized that television caused an “enculturation” in the individual by changing their perceptions of reality to match those presented through television programming, the video games that individuals play may change the perception of the players. This has implications for both negative and positive changes to human behavior. Our virtual selves do not suffer the same consequences that our real-life bodies do, but the information that is presented to us in a virtual environment does make an impression on the way we think and interact with others in the real world. Therefore, if negative actions are awarded in the virtual world, this can have an effect on the way we think, even if only to a small extent. Conversely, if positive (prosocial) actions are rewarded in the virtual world, that may be able to reinforce those cognitive modes of kindness, empathy, and compassion in the real world.

Griffin, E.M. A First Look at Communication Theory. (7th ed., 2009) (Chs. 27, 28, 29)
Williams, Dmitri. Virtual Cultivation: Online Worlds and Offline Perceptions. Journal of Communication ISSN 0021-9916.

Project Compassion

2010-10-18T13:08:00.000-07:00

This past Friday the Dalai Lama came to Stanford for a colloquium called "Compassion, Science and Technology." CCARE and Project Compassion presented research projects in a format much like sharing there findings with the Dalai Lama in his living room, but in front of 1500 or so people. In my upcoming foray into research, the following findings and determinations will inform the design: (a) in education modeling provides a methodology for teaching compassion and (b) we can experience a cognitive reappraisal of emotion that circumvents the "feeling" aspect of empathy to generate a direct pathway to compassionate behavior.

I believe that in order to bring compassion and altruism into our daily conversation, we must integrate these prosocial ways of relating into the all-pervasive media we utilize every day. In this way, our habitual behaviors become a way to strengthen our mental acumen towards a more positive dynamic. Eventually, this overrides the standard goal-oriented (attachment-based) mentality in favor of a shared view of humanity. Several possibilities exists for digital media based compassion potentiation. Paralleling techniques for school curriculum, we can use the concept of modeling (in combination with using models that individuals wish to emulate) to change behavior. People watching instances of selfless acts, generous moments, etc. enacted by models of similar status may follow those behaviors. Similarly, priming for compassionate action is also an available role for digital media.

Integrating with Humanity

2010-10-14T13:57:00.000-07:00

    One morning this week I went to go get coffee and while I was waiting for my large cappuccino I performed a small act of research concerning nonverbal communication. At one of the tables near the sandwich refrigerator, a young man was talking to his computer quite animatedly using his hands to gesture at the screen (or the camera right above the screen). He was speaking in Italian, so there were not many verbal cues that I could depend on, but I could decipher that he was emotionally aroused, debating with the person on the other end of the internet. In deference to the medium, he was gesticulating within the visual bounds of the camera, really trying to get his message across without letting his hands fly too far away from the line of sight. His intention, most likely, was to provide information to the other person and to accentuate his position, though I have seen a person driving, with a bluetooth headset, gesturing to the person on the other side of the phone. In that case, the automaticity of talking with one’s hands overrides the practicality of the conversation methodology.
    This, in one way, reflects the concept of expressiveness as defined by DePaulo and Friedman (1), a concept that is culturally dependent and runs in families. DePaulo has also found that “expressive people are often regarded as more attractive than unexpressive people”, which feeds back to the man at the table, talking to the computer with his hands. Is he more attractive than if he were just talking? I will probably have to go back some time this week to test that particular hypothesis.
    The other interesting idea from the readings of this week concerns Bandura’s work on Social Learning Theory and the paper on “Imitation of Film-mediated Aggressive Models.” (2) I am not current on the aggressive modeling role of media, but I am interested in the degree of “compassion fatigue” that these communication methods engender. Does someone who sees crime regularly in the media become jaded toward that topic in general? Which intervening variables alter the system?

(1) DePaulo, B.M. & Friedman, H.S. (1998). Nonverbal Communication. In D. Gilbert, S. Fiske, & G. Lindzey (eds.) Handbook of Social Psychology, 4th edition. Boston: McGraw Hill, Vol. II, pp. 3-40.

(2) Bandura, A., Ross, D. & Ross, S.A. Imitation of film-mediated aggressive models. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 1963, 66, 3-11.

The Implications of Implicit Cues for Cognition

2010-10-07T14:08:00.000-07:00

    Social Judgment Theory as it applies to real-world applications is one of those theories that makes sense to the average person, and has intuitive value. It says that when we experience an instance of communication, we judge the source of that communication, placing it on a spectrum of trust. Coupling that with the priming factors in our daily life brings to light a wider range of implications. If we are constantly exposed to stimuli of a certain valence, we bring those biases subconsciously into our everyday activities. Noticing this correlation can inform how we go about interacting with others without bringing awareness into our actions.
    Bargh, et al. studied behavior with initial priming as well, researching if activating thoughts of the elderly has participants walk more slowly after towards the door. Race attitudes have also been studied. Being able to test subconscious beliefs using experimental trials has provided some non-intuitive trends.
    This also feeds into and draws from the Elaboration Likelihood Model, in that we are uncovering central versus peripheral effect, though in the case of priming, the peripheral communication is implicit rather than explicit.   The amount of cognitive load someone is willing to undertake reflects their attachment to that issue and/or a generalized “need to know.” Following the central route of comprehension and influence creates strong changes in the participants, whether for the positive or negative of the argument. However, implicit information and cues circumvent the central route and have widespread implications.

References:

Griffin, Em. A First Look at Communication Theory, Seventh Edition. The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc, 2009, Chapters. 14, 15.

Petty, R.E. & Cacioppo, J.T. Motivational approaches (Chapter 5). In Attitudes and Persuasion: Classic and Contemporary Approaches. Dubuque, IW: Wm. C. Brown, 1981 (pp. 59-94 & 125-161).

Bargh, J. A., Chen, M., & Burrows, L. (1996). Automaticity of social behavior: Direct effects of trait construct and stereotype priming on action. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 71, 230-244.

(Beneficial Priming?)

Symbolic Convergence Theory and the Osgood & Schramm Circular Model

2010-10-01T00:36:00.000-07:00

    One of the most useful convergences that Griffin describes in chapter three of his Theory of Communication is the overlap of objective and interpretive metrics for gauging the validity of a theory (1). While this Venn diagram reminds me of the connections between these two apparently disparate approaches, another diagram also comes to mind, Osgood and Schramm’s circular diagram with communication forming a looping process that travels between two individuals (2). One key element that was introduced in that work was that each piece of information travels through an interpreter. Language, of course, provides a wonderful opportunity to practice methods of helping divergent thought processes find a common path, often through interpretation.       With a little semantic openness, objective theory’s qualification of “explanation of data” becomes interpretive theory’s “understanding of people.” Similarly, the scientific need for “relative simplicity” becomes a more nebulous sounding desire for “aesthetic appeal”, but they do of course refer to the same thing. Convoluted, overly pedantic work is not appealing to a reader and reveals a certain pompousness and/or dearth of expressive ability.
    Using Ernest Bormann’s symbolic convergence theory as an example also helps the reader to partially define where their theoretical allegiances lie and gives the creative mind a chance to defend or negate some of the constructs, depending on the perceived importance of validity gaps.

N. B. On a side note, symbolic convergence theory reminded me of inside jokes and the way they help a group bond. I am sure they form a subset of Bormann’s “fantasy chains.”

(1) Griffin, E. M. (2009). A first look at communication theory (7thd ed.). NY: McGraw-Hill.
(2) McQuail, D., & Windahl, S. Basic models, pp. 13-37. In Communication Models for the Study of Mass Communication, New York: Longman, 1993.

Response to "A First Look at Communication Theory"

2010-09-24T10:12:00.000-07:00

Chs. 2, 4 Ed. 7

Objective vs. Interpretive,

Quantitative vs. Qualitative

What is the Truth in Communication?

Everything a human experiences is mediated through certain filters, be it biological, cultural, physical, or ethical. Sitting on the Caltrain traveling south, a rather uneven piece of safety glass separates me from San Bruno. From prior experiences I have developed a strong belief that the trees are not rippling like water as I pass them. Similarly, I believe that they are not covered in tiny white scratches that happen to fly across them at the same rate that the train travels. These are conditions imposed on the scenario by the mediating filter of the glass. Objectively, I can test this hypothesis by measuring the accuracy of my perceptions. However, it seems that the greatest space for emergent thought within the realm of analysis comes about through the interpretation. Not to undermine the seriousness or rigor of an objective approach, but the possibilities provided by an analogic approach do provide a certain richness of vocabulary and description not otherwise available.

In Chapter 2 of Em Griffin's A First Look at Communication Theory(1), he states that “Interpretive scholars seek truth as well, but many interpreters regard truth as socially constructed through communication.” The field of communication in this regard can be defined as largely subjective. On the other end, purely objective traditions circumvent the transcendent properties of human interaction and communication.

The theories that serve to inform the field of communication fall along a spectrum from purely objective to interpretive. Griffin lists the major theories in communication as grouped by level including interpersonal, group and public, mass, and cultural communication. In Ch.4, he maps the seven traditions onto the objective versus interpretive spectrum as well.

According to Robert Craig, with all these apparently disparate approaches the field seems to be overly differentiated, but coherency is possible if we think of the field from the standpoint of a “practical discipline.” Each tradition has its merits, of course, or they would have long ago been revised or dismissed. As for a definite approach, the question becomes one of focus and intention. It is not only a matter of which grand question you are trying to solve, but also why you are trying to solve that particular question. Both of these facets of research design would inform which approach and tradition would be most applicable. Or we could just call it the field of socio-cybernetic-politico-anthro-mass-public-personal-inter-communication and call it a day.

(1)Griffin, E. M. (2009). A first look at communication theory (7thd ed.). NY: McGraw-Hill.

The Role of "the Mindful Brain" in the Development of Empathic Concern (Part One)

2010-06-30T14:12:00.000-07:00

In researching methods for the development of empathic concern, we find that the syncretic nature of visceral, affective, somatic, and cognitive interactions creates a complex system of emergent emotional phenomena. Accounting for these intricacies within a research design becomes problematic without first determining the proper vocabulary to accurately represent the nature of this system. Drawing from the realm of mathematics provides one source for descriptors. Daniel Siegel, in his book The Mindful Brain, using complexity theory specifically, explains the logic of our human systems by writing that “an integrated state enables the most flexible, adaptive, and stable states to be created within a dynamical, complex system.”

Only when this mode of thinking is combined with the constantly growing lexicon provided by evolutionary biology and advancements in brain research can we begin to express the interconnected nature of neurological development.

The development of empathic concern itself involves several facets of interaction that build upon each other, an evolution both psychical and physical. In addition to initial instances of secure attachment, later stages of life include the development of a self-regulating equilibrium.

Siegel later describes a triad of mental well-being as including “coherence of mind, empathy of relationships, and neural integration.”

To be continued....

The Defragmentation of the Empathic Space

2010-06-16T11:31:00.000-07:00

One unfortunate consequence of the increasing sophistication and ubiquity of technology has been the reduction of empathy and compassion in everyday life. Due to the distracting effect of mobile computing, the average individual disconnects from his or her immediate environment and the people within it in favor of communication with a small network of nonadjacent friends, either through phone, text, chat or e-mail. They are not necessarily engaged with the space around them and do not actively pay attention to, empathize with, or feel compassion for others in the immediate vicinity.

In order to reverse the trend of empathic fragmentation that leads to lower levels of everyday compassion, the neural mechanisms behind compassion development must be revealed and methods for augmenting compassion must be designed and researched. This would then allow us to introduce a new level of social awareness into our technological dynamic by way of an ambient intelligence that leverages intimate media to effect both the level of concern and intimacy felt by an individual towards others.

Using Intimate Media to Parallel Traditional Compassion Development Methods with Implications for Ambient Intelligence

2010-06-10T20:51:00.000-07:00

Introduction
(some note on importance culturally/socially and technologically/scientifically. more to come.)

The generation of a compassionate mood rests in two dimensions: concern and intimacy. Concern can also be called caring or more specifically empathic concern. Intimacy can also be understood as the level of connectedness one person feels with another or with the process itself of compassion development. Therefore, it must be taken into account that intimacy in this case refers to both the nature of the media presented for constructive reflection and the space or environment in which it is presented. Both have implications for research design.

Neurologically, it is interesting to note that the very mechanism which allows us to function in everyday life by allowing us to realize that others can hold views contradictory to our own, called the Theory of Mind, keeps human beings from fully being able to see another as self. This separation, key to social development and lacking in autistic individuals, provides a boundary that cannot be overcome. Complete autonomous functioning would then be the other extreme of the connectedness spectrum.

Report on "Love hurts: An fMRI Study"

2010-06-07T10:54:00.000-07:00

Report on "Love hurts: An fMRI Study"*

How much we relate to someone else or engage with them correlates to the amount of intimacy we feel when interacting with or thinking of that person. We are more intimate with loved ones than with strangers and this translates into how much empathy we feels towards them and how much compassion we can generate for that person. Cheng, et al. in their article “Love hurts: An fMRI study” describe the mechanism of intimacy “as including the other in the self...” They specifically studied empathy of pain, looking at the neural network involved in the “pain matrix”.

They discovered that not only does imagining a love one in pain cause greater activity in the pain matrix, but it also causes less activation in those regions associated with distinguishing self from another, such as the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) which is involved with an individual’s Theory of Mind, “allowing overlap between self and the other”.

From the direction of compassion development, one obstacle to empathic growth towards strangers rests in difficulty of evoking a stranger's perspective. Specifically, as those portions of our neural network are dampened in activity when we think of strangers, how can we overcome that in a productive way in order to foster compassion development?

* Love hurts: An fMRI study
Yawei Cheng a,b,⁎,1, Chenyi Chen a,1, Ching-Po Lin a, Kun-Hsien Chou c, Jean Decety d
a Institute of Neuroscience, National Yang-Ming University, Taipei, Taiwan
b Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, National Yang-Ming University Hospital, Yilan, Taiwan
c Institute of Biomedical engineering, National Yang-Ming University, Taipei, Taiwan
d Departments of Psychology & Psychiatry, and Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience, the University of Chicago, IL, USA
a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t
Article history:
Received 15 September 2009
Revised 10 February 2010
Accepted 16 February 2010
Available online 24 February 2010
Keywords:
Empathy

One method for compassion development that parallels traditional techniques

2010-05-28T11:05:00.000-07:00

Response and Addendum to Intimate Media and Ambient Intelligence

One method for compassion development that parallels traditional techniques:

After a participant is exposed to an initial stimulus of a picture of a “loved one” or their closest associate (mother, best friend, etc.), they are then asked to perpetuate the feeling of compassion (at the same intensity/valence) while viewing pictures of friends, strangers, and “enemies”.

In order for this system to have the greatest efficacy, the pictures must be drawn from the participant’s life. The creation of an interface that leverages readily available intimate digital media, such as pictures stored online, combined with categorization methods, such as tagging and grouping, is the first step.

Research Set-up:

Setting: Initial studies are to be performed in a lab setting, with the ultimate goal being integration into the home environment through a computer interface or digital photo frames.

Steps:

Participants are asked to go through their photostream, tagging each photo containing a person with the level of compassion they feel towards that person. In order to avoid complex interference, only those pictures with one person should be used. Level One would represent those closest to the participant (center point in the diagram, see diagram). Level Two represents friends. Level Three are strangers (which are pulled from random pictures, not from the participant’s photostream). Level Four are “enemies”, those people to whom the participant shows an aversion.
The tags will allow the application to show the participant Level One pictures first. It is important to have the participant reflect on the feelings that are aroused by the picture, specifically that of compassion.
After a preset period of time, the Level Two pictures will be shown and the participants will be asked to perpetuate that initial level of compassion to these pictures, as well as they can. In order to most closely parallel traditional techniques, the first sessions should only include Level One and Two pictures.
Once the intensity of compassion for Level Two draws near that of Level One, then Level Three pictures should be introduced and so on to Level Four.

Measurements:

Self-reporting measures will be used to track the participants’ progress, as pictures change in level of compassion felt. A more rigid study can be performed using fMRI readings to quantify the change in neural activity of those regions of the brain associated with compassion.

Findings On Finding Flow

2010-05-18T20:17:00.001-07:00

Finding Flow: The Psychology of Engagement with Everyday Life

When high skill and ability meet challenge it creates space for mental growth. Csikszentmihalyi writes that this is exactly where “flow” experiences happen. Autotelic is another way of describing these experiences, which means self-satisfying, something you engage in for its own sake. Key to this is focus and motivation, namely doing tasks that are consuming and progress your ability. This places us in “flow” and pushes along a progressive learning path where we increase complexity and order.

Csikszentmihalyi also states, “Persons whose lives are autotelic help to reduce entropy in the consciousness of those who come in contact with them.” Interactions with others become more simple, less congested, when you’re in a flow-state. It becomes a matter of developing a playful seriousness about your goals and life. He states, "Thus each of us is responsible for one particular point in space and time in which our body and mind forms a link within the total network of existence."

One of the big ideas that I particularly enjoyed from the book that the author shares comes from Buddhist philosophy - “Act always as if the future of the Universe depended on what you did, while laughing at yourself for thinking that whatever you do makes any difference.”

Pink’s Drive on Motivation and Its Implications for Interactive Media

2010-05-11T10:13:00.001-07:00

Pink’s Drive on Motivation and Its Implications for Interactive Media

Until quite recently, I always assumed that people would naturally wish to engage with an interactive art piece. Plonk them in front of some exhibit and they are bound to let their childlike curiosity take over and lead them through a wonderful experience. Right? Not always. Even when faced with something as provoking as a massive fire-breathing sculpture, quite a few people pass over the chance to press the button and make the world a little more brightly lit, if only for a short period of time.

The question becomes one of engagement and motivation. Daniel H. Pink’s Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us approaches these topics from a business perspective, but his revelations also touch on other aspects of human interaction. He differentiates between two categories of behavior: Type X, dependent on extrinsic motivation, and Type I, dependent on intrinsic motivation. Extrinsic motivation is the if you do this, then you get this type. Intrinsic, on the other hand, relies on “the inherent satisfaction of the activity itself.” Remember when you were a kid and you finished a puzzle, just because. And how that felt was...? Cool, aka inherently satisfying.

You can’t make someone engage with an artwork through an external reward system. The desire for engagement must be drawn out from intrinsic qualities and the key to the development of an optimal experience through intrinsic quality is flow. Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi worked towards developing a conceptual framework for this facet of experience. Pink says, “Most important, in flow, the relationship between what a person has to do and what he could do was perfect...That balance produced a degree of focus and satisfaction that easily surpassed other, more quotidian, experiences. In flow, people lived to deeply in the moment, and felt so utterly in control, that their sense of time, place, and even self melted away.”

The implications for flow in interactive media are complex when taking meaning, context, and interaction design into consideration, but some tenets drawn from Pink’s work can provide a basis for further conversation. He describes three elements for optimizing one’s work life: Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose. Translating this into the realm of interactive digital media requires a certain flexibility of thought.

Autonomy relates the amount of control the participant has within the system. Having a definite order to the interactions delimits the potential of a piece to an experience akin to turning pages in a digital book. However, the very nature of an interactive digital experience as a piece of engineering as well as art places real limitations on the design.

Mastery means being able to improve. In the case of interaction, this could mean “getting the hang of it.” But, on the level of cognitive reconstruction, this could also mean developing an understanding as to the intention of the artist/engineer with emergent goals becoming possible after multiple instances of interaction. This approach also becomes more palatable when we include Pink’s annotation to mastery, that it is an asymptote.

Which leads us to purpose. This could include living an optimal life, connecting with other members of humanity, intuiting, or all of the above. This is difficult to define because the purpose of art and the purpose of someone interacting with art is up to debate and interpretation.

Perhaps the role of art is to share a purpose.

Compassion Augmentation Manifesto Intro

2010-05-05T19:50:00.000-07:00

Manifesto Intro:

While compassion may or may not be our “natural” attitude towards others according to differing traditions, it can be noted that societal constructs, on the whole, do not necessarily support compassionate behavior, favoring instead a market/perceived worth-based social structure. Compassion, however, can be promoted and developed within an individual’s mental architecture through various means.

In regards to certain academic traditions, these particular means can go by other names such as “facts”, in the context of Lewin’s field theory. Those “facts” which are capable of changing a person’s mental state towards a more stable meta-mood of compassion have not yet been fully explored.

Within the realm of developing technologies and interactive digital media specifically, those factors regarding interaction, user experience design, content, context, intimacy, and empathy are of special interest.

The complex nature of multi-faceted interaction towards compassion augmentation provides an exciting milieu for further exploration and study.

It is the responsibility of artists/engineers/scientists to develop and reinvest knowledge continually within an iterative process towards the augmentation of the human intellect as well as towards the augmentation of compassion, as the two act to balance human evolution towards a sustainable future.

On Russell's "Appropriate Expressions of Intimacy: Lessons of Digital Jewelry and Large Displays"

2010-04-27T12:59:00.000-07:00

As computing becomes more ubiquitous, questions regarding propriety and intimacy come to the fore. Exactly how does one distinguish between private and public information displayed in a public space? As social networking continues to grow to include more personal sharing, what defines publicly available information anyway? In Daniel Russell’s paper “Appropriate Expressions of Intimacy: Lessons of Digital Jewelry and Large Displays” he draws conclusions related to these issues from two ends of the ubiquitous computing spectrum.
At the USER Lab at the IBM Almaden Research Center, his team created “e-rings” with LEDs that display information based on one’s “personal state.” This could include a wide range of inputs from receiving an e-mail from a certain person to stock prices. A digital jewelry box serves as the device interface for changing display behavior. E-rings display information in a public way, but the definition of the display (what a certain color means to the user) remains private. This is one way of creating a boundary between public and private information as opposed to a pager, which provides public information only when the user acknowledges it (beeping, flashing, etc.) and hides the exact message in the display.
Before entering into the discussion of large displays, Russell shares one interesting insight regarding the social signals provided by pagers (which could easily include smart phones). Russell writes that looking at a pager “connotes a sense of importance about an information feed into the wearer’s life that exceeds the need to pay complete and active attention to live, face-to-face interaction.” Of course, this can also be related to someone’s perceived ability to multitask effectively.
To test the manner in which users interact with a large display, Russell and his team created IM Here. While instant messaging is normally considered private, this method of display clearly draws these conversations into a public space. In the case of IM Here, in order to create a sense of intimacy, the chat sessions are allocated a small portion of the overall display space.
Russell determined that positioning, scale, physical design, and societal norms defined the “public vs. intimate characteristic.” Implications from this can inform design for ambient information systems as well.

Questions for the reader:
To what extent are public spaces capable of intimacy?
For which experiences is intimacy required and to what extent?

Review of Techgnosis

2010-03-16T10:30:00.000-07:00

With densely packed sentences leading down complex paths with authority, making fascinating connections in such a way as to mimic the brains' method of cognitive development, Techgnosis makes for quite an intellectual ride. The concept of what constitutes an information technology definitely creates an interesting space for conjecture. Such everyday components of life, our alphabet and writing, are rarely truly analyzed for their deepest meaning, but they have changed society in fundamental ways. Techgnosis reviews, amongst other remarkable connections, how the alphabet led to the possibility of monotheism, how it changed our memory from an internal datastore to an external one, and how those facts contributed to future information technologies.

Augmenting Human Compassion: A Conceptual Framework

2009-12-02T13:45:00.001-08:00

Check out this SlideShare Presentation:

Augmenting Human Compassion: A Conceptual Framework

View more documents from Christine Rosakranse.

On OurTube: “Open video” could beget the next great wave in web innovation - if it gets off the ground

2009-11-16T11:01:00.000-08:00

On OurTube: “Open video” could beget the next great wave in web innovation - if it gets off the ground1

Earlier this semester, I read an article on remixing videos by Jonathan McIntosh. In the same issue of the Technology Review, David Talbot discusses the trials and tribulations of getting “open video” into the mainstream. It begins with the story of Michael Dale and Abram Stern, who decided to make video remixes using C-SPAN coverage of Senate floor speeches. They ran across difficulties due to copyright laws, but could not find a viable alternative source for the speeches, partly due to formatting issues. Open standards would accelerate the searching process, but it’s time for widespread implementation has not yet arrived.
Dale now works for the Wikimedia Foundation, which has just this goal in mind. They want to develop “open video” before there is a demand for it because they believe that, in general, the necessity of this sort of innovation is not obvious to the public. As Chris Blizzard of Mozilla states, “Open standards create low friction. Low friction creates innovation. Innovation makes people want to pick it up and use it. But it’s not something where we can guess what ‘it’ is. We just create the environment that lets ‘it’ emerge.”
HTML5 is part of this new approach. There are no plug-ins required because an open-source player is included in the browser. Creative Commons is also helping by creating precedent in the domain of copyright law, helping to establish open licensing.

Reference:
Talbot, David (2009) OurTUBE: “Open video” could beget the next great wave in web innovation - if it gets off the ground.Technology Review Vol. 112/No. 5

Compassion Map

2009-10-05T12:35:00.000-07:00

The elements of compassion.

New Post at Graduate Blog on Developing Compassion

2009-09-29T11:13:00.000-07:00

Click me--> Developing Compassion

Emergence and “Swarm Intelligence”

2009-09-26T18:17:00.001-07:00

Emergence occurs when numerous simple interactions take place and develop a secondary complexity or a discernible pattern. A more rigorous definition exists mathematically and in physics, but this layman’s explanation works well to explain some of the intricacies related to everything from economics to trends in virtual-environment rules of etiquette. In “Swarm Intelligence” by James Kennedy and Russell C. Eberhart, emergence is introduced in chapter one as a key term for understanding evolution in culture and society.
The first chapter of “Wikinomics” discusses a grand world of collaboration and its subsequent consequences. These consequences are the emergent phenomena of a social construct. There are predictable occurrences, but the unpredictable effects and variations also make an interesting study. The authors of “Swarm Intelligence” state, “Our argument is that cultural evolution should be defined, not as operations on ideas, but as operations on minds. The evolution of ideas involves changes in the states of minds that hold ideas, not changes in the ideas themselves; it is a search - by minds - through the universe of ideas, to find the fitter ones.”
Thinking of cultural evolution in this way allows for additional commentary on what may or may not occur due to the new “wikinomics” coming into prevalence. One side effect that is already being witnessed is the change in business practices. As Tapscott and Williams write, “Publishers of music, literature, movies, software, and television are like proverbial canaries in a coal mine - the first casualties of a revolution that is sweeping across all industries.” The benefits of collaboration also represent another exciting avenue for discovery. “Swarm Intelligence” provides an excellent method for interacting, mentally, with this complex world.
Recommended reading:
Kennedy, James and Russell C. Eberhart, with Yuhui Shi. Swarm Intelligence. San Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann Publishers. 2001.

Douglas Engelbart: Augmenting Human Intellect and Bootstrapping

2009-09-24T08:34:00.000-07:00

The Roaring Twenties witnessed fast economic growth until the Wall Street Crash of 1929. Before finally bottoming out in 1932, the Dow Jones Industrial Average would lose 89% of its value.1 Growing up during this time period meant a more simplified view of one’s needs. This led to a definitive moment that occurred in Douglas Engelbart’s life when he was just 25 years old. During the December of 1950, after taking stock of his current life, with his job at the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics, and figuring out that he had achieved the goals he had set forth as a kid growing up during the Great Depression to “get an education, get a steady job, get married”, he discovered that he “no longer had any goals.”2 On a drive through Northern California, being an electrical engineer at Ames Research, he actually calculated that he had roughly 5.5 million more minutes to work during his life. He had to figure out what to do with this precious time.
With no particular designs on getting rich or changing careers, he though about saving the world. And while pondering about how to fulfill this need after several months he came up with the following insight:

FLASH-1: The difficulty of mankind’s problems was increasing at a greater rate than our ability to cope. (We are in trouble.)
FLASH-2: Boosting mankind’s ability to deal with complex, urgent problems would be an attractive candidate as an arena in which a young person might try to “make the most difference.” (Yes, but there’s that question of what does the young electrical engineer do about it? Retread for a role as educator, research psychologist, legislator...? Is there any handle there that an electrical engineer could...?
FLASH-3: Aha - graphic vision surges forth of me sitting at a large CRT console, working in ways that are rapidly evolving in front of my eyes (beginning from memories of the radar-screen consoles I used to service.)3

After working through some details regarding the implementation of such a device where a “general-purpose, computer-powered information environment”4 would assist with network-based collaborations between colleagues, he dubbed this new route in his career “augmenting the human intellect.” However, it wouldn’t be so easy to get others to share in his vision or to provide funding for this lofty endeavor.
Within the context of 1950’s technological ability, this vision still seemed unattainable to others in his department or in the business world. Afterall, the leading edge in technology was the IBM 704, capable of executing up to 40,000 instructions per second. So instead of developing the idea of augmenting human intellect for his PhD, he wrote his dissertation on bi-stable gaseous plasma digital devices. After graduating, he tried to find a more “congenial” environment for his augmentation work, but found out that he had to subsume his intentions even at the Stanford Research Institute where he began working in October 1957.
When he was finally able to work on augmentation in 1959 after receiving funding from the Air Force’s Office of Scientific Research, it was difficult to get intellectual backing for his project because he had to place his augmentation research squarely in the realm of other’s disciplines in order for them to be responsive to his message. In general, his augmentation environment was written off “as just another information-retrieval system.” So, in order to be taken more seriously, he decided to create a manifesto, taking him almost two years to write.
“Augmenting the Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework” was finished in 1962. Engelbart believed technology could augment human intellect by developing “an integrated hierarchy of cooperative mancomputer process capabilities.” This would “step-up” the mental abilities of a person level by level to be able to handle more complex thought processes. He also explains that, “We refer to a way of life in an integrated domain where hunches, cut-and-try, intangibles, and the human ‘feel for a situation’ usefully coexist with powerful concepts, streamlined technologies and notation, sophisticated methods, and high-powered electronic aids.”5
In his paper, Engelbart writes that two people during the previous two decades had “speculated upon the possibilities of close manmachine cooperation.” Those influences were Vannevar Bush and J.C.R. Licklider. Bush coined the term Memex to describe a system where items were categorized by associative indexing and then searched for using a specialized workstation. Licklider (1960) defined a concept called “man-computer symbiosis”, a system whereby humans and computers work in conjunction to “think as no human brain has ever thought and process data in a way not approached by the information-handling machines we know today.”6 Engelbart also placed his aspirations within the context of work being done by Vazsonyi, Morse, Teager, Culler and Huff. One amongst his list would prove to be a powerful supporter and ally.
While Engelbart attempted to figure out how human beings have so far evolved to deal with complex situations, he tried to receive funding from various sources. His proposal for creating an “interdisciplinary Knowledge Augmentation Laboratory that could pursue the technology of human augmentation as quickly as possible”7 finally came across the desk of J.C.R. Licklider at ARPA.
By 1963, Engelbart had funding. Later he would explain, “Lick was the first person to believe in me. And he was the first person to stick his neck out and give me a chance. In fact, if he hadn’t done that, if he hadn’t stuck his neck out and given me money, I don’t think anybody ever would have done so. That was why I trusted him. Lick was like my big brother.”8
While working towards augmenting human intellect, he would invent the mouse, work on “hypertext systems as part of the NLS” (oNLine System), and work towards his “vision for a personal workstation that can legitimately be thought of as one of the sources of ideas for the personal computer.”9
The NLS was first publicly demonstrated at the 1968 Fall Joint Computer Conference during a 90-minute multimedia presentation where Engelbart debuted the mouse, hypermedia, and on-screen video teleconferencing. In 1989 he founded the Bootstrap Institute, with its main focus being to create high-performance organizations that include “pro-active participation from stakeholders” in all realms of influence including government, industry, and society.
Engelbart, with his evolving pursuits, realizes that with the quick development of technology coming to surpass the development of human intellect, certain adjustments must be made. As the sophistication of technology increases, society has to continually revise it’s methods of information appropriation to accommodate these changes. Engelbart (1998) has conceded this need for modification in the following quote:

Real social danger today is that the technology is erupting and moving so much faster than it ever ever ever has in all of our historical experience ... [It’s] time to start adapting society to this revolution in the technology. There’s a lot of potential dangers ahead if we don’t adapt it successfully.10

Stated more succinctly as the Law of Disruption, Downes and Mui in Unleashing the Killer App (2000) write that “[s]ocial, political and economic systems change incrementally, but technology changes exponentially.”11
The bootstrapping approach is being developed upon currently by the Doug Engelbart Institute. Additionally, in 2005 Engelbart received funding for the HyperScope project from the National Science Foundation. Once again, we find that time often leads to newer technology that is more easily capable of achieving previously stated goals. In this case, Hyperscope uses Ajax and DHTML to recreate the abilities of the NLS and the renamed software Augment that can link within and across documents in order to “engage a wider community in a dialogue of collaborative software and services.”12
Augmenting human intellect as a theory and aspiration has itself been further augmented to suggest that all facets of society must come together and work towards a common goal. As coined by Engelbart, organizations can improve the process they use for improvement, thereby iteratively compounding the effect. As a goal for HCI, iterative progress towards making information more usable, intuitive, and effective would be the perfect compliment to Engelbart’s dream. It seems that intellect’s final compatriots would be responsibility and compassion, and if this has not yet been addressed, perhaps it will be in the next iteration.
--Christine Rosakranse, for Comm-6480

Resources:
1 "Wall Street Crash of 1929." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. 20 Sep 2009, 16:26 UTC. 20 Sep 2009 .

2 Waldrop, M. Mitchell. The Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal. New York: The Penguin Group. 2001. pg. 211.

3 Waldrop, M. Mitchell, The Dream Machine. pgs, 211-212

4 Waldrop, M. Mitchell, The Dream Machine. pgs, 212

5 Engelbart, Douglas C. Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework. Summary Report AFOSR-3223 under Contract AF 49(638)-1024, SRI Project 3578 for Air Force Office of Scientific Research, Stanford Research Institute, Menlo Park, Ca., October 1962.

6 Jacko, Julie A., and Andrew Sears, eds. The Human-Computer Interaction Handbook: Fundamentals, Evolving Technologies and Emerging Applications. New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers. (2003) pg. 3.

7 Waldrop, M. Mitchell. The Dream Machine. pg. 216.

8 Waldrop, M. Mitchell, The Dream Machine. pgs, 217.

9 Jacko, Julie A., and Andrew Sears, eds. The Human-Computer Interaction Handbook: Fundamentals, Evolving Technologies and Emerging Applications. New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers. (2003) pg. 5

10 Brown, John Seely and Duguid, Paul. The Social Life of Information. pg. 84 (Engelbart, interviewed on National Public Radio’s Morning Edition, 11 December 1998)

11 Downes, Larry, and Chunka Mui. 2000 Unleashing the Killer App: Digital Strategies for Market Domination. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.

12 "Douglas Engelbart." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. 22 Sep 2009, 00:43 UTC. 22 Sep 2009

Remix: On “Open Video in Practice” Technology Review, Vol. 112/No. 5, Sept/Oct 2009 Issue

2009-09-21T14:05:00.000-07:00

Remixing, though prevalent in our society in myriad ways, remains an area of contention between rights and fair use. Shortly before reading Lessig’s Remix, I had just finished reading an article in the Technology Review (Sept/Oct 2009 Issue) entitled “Open Video in Practice” and subtitled “How a remix was made - and how it could have been easier” (pg. 76). This short article was nestled in a larger article on “open video” called “OurTube”. This shorter article caught my attention because it had pictures of fictional character from two vampire related fictions, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Twilight.
Technology Review rarely has pictures of standard celebrities and this article had the main characters Edward Cullen and Buffy Summers in the right hand corner. Jonathan McIntosh, a New York based video artist, created a remix of scenes with these two characters where Edward Cullen becomes a more stalker-like figure with weird facial twitches than a star-crossed lover. Using Buffy as a strong female character, Jonathan points out the innate creepiness of Edward’s relationships.
In order for Jonathan McIntosh to create this remix he had to find the right dialogue and did so by sifting through Google text searches of “fan-transcribed dialogue”. The article states that this laborious task could be simplified with open video standards. This would involve a searchable database of written dialogue coupled with video clips. Over time an archive could be developed with clips of everything from congressional hearings to horror movies.
Making these video clips available in this format would not only mean a shorter route for finding suitable segments for any given remixing project, but it also suggests a more streamlined editing process. Currently, this type of video amalgamation represents a borderland to legal precedent. No media company has yet tried to have the Buffy/Twilight remix removed. It is available at www.rebelliouspixels.com. In terms of opening the world of media to creative reprocessing, this mash-up acts as one milestone towards open video standards.

Augmenting Human Compassion

2009-09-15T15:01:00.000-07:00

“Augmenting human intellect” represents one of the continual goals of any well-designed technology. In the course of our readings, three major influences have sprung up time and again as to how we, as a society, may go about using technology to evolve our cognitive capabilities. For Douglas Engelbart (1962), technology may do so by leveraging already existing perceptual mappings or by bringing the mental abilities of a person up to a level of more complex thought through various methods including “streamlined terminology” and “powerful concepts.” Licklider (1960) also defines a similar concept called “man-computer symbiosis”, a system whereby humans and computers work in conjunction to “think as no human brain has ever thought and process data in a way not approached by the information-handling machines we know today.” William Ross Ashby (1956) also wrote of “amplifying intelligence” in his work on cybernetics. However, intelligence needs to be countered and balanced by basic moral and ethical considerations. I would argue that the foundation of these considerations lies squarely with an entity’s capability to feel compassion. Additionally, with a certain level of compassion (and intelligence), ethics, as in a listing of rules or system of conduct, becomes secondary. So, instead of concentrating on the aspect of human cognitive evolution defined as intellect, I would like to find methods for augmenting human compassion using digital media.
Compassion as a component of a healthy mental state and as a necessity for a large societal organization is a sometimes marginalized concept. That may be because it is seen as a responsibility of parents and families to develop compassion in their children. Certain concepts are only slowly adopted into the mainstream’s consideration. As it is, the research into human-computer interaction focuses mainly on functionality and usability. Even more human-centered designs are concerned with business considerations such as turnaround and click-through analytics.
For example, while reading Myers’ A Brief History of Human Computer Interaction Technology, I found that the introduction clearly states that his history only covers the “computer side of HCI” and that “a companion article on the history of the ‘human side,’ discussing the contributions from psychology, design, human factors and ergonomics would also be appropriate.” This “human side” approach would form the basis of my research project for determining how one might augment human compassion.
Discovering what makes one more compassionate would be the first topic for research. Within the context of digital media and within the constraints of one semester, it seems daunting to hone compassion down to a measurable aspect, but I hope that by making an open call for ideas that some epiphany will come about.
From the historical perspective, we can see that in developing his conceptual framework for augmenting human intellect, Engelbart defines the objectives for his study and covers his basic perspective. He promotes leaving room for intuition or a human’s “feel for a situation”. For augmenting compassion, I would also say that one would have to leave room for epiphany as well.
My first avenue for exploration could include researching whether or not any current internet memes act to augment compassion. From cute LOLCATS with funny captions to YouTube videos like Christian the Lion, does sharing these with others help to augment our society’s overall level of compassion? And, conversely, is sharing morbid imagery damaging to compassion? One caveat comes with the level of interaction that might be necessary for long-term effects. If one sees something, is it enough to have a persisting effect? Or must one also be involved somehow to ensure a stable change in mentality?
Given these possibilities for investigation, another avenue for exploration that might prove to engender long-term increases in compassion levels would involve the integration of a participation component through interactive art or music. If a lack of compassion stems from a lack of empathy with others or with a disconnect from humanity or nature, then a key component to developing compassion in others would involve creating a palpable connection to others and, thereby, to humanity in general. With interactive art, the person becomes a component of the creation, a powerful metaphor that might prove helpful for compassion development. However, a connection beyond the computer might also be necessary for augmentation. An association from human to art piece to creator of art piece to humanity would be ideal.
Following Engelbart’s format, the objective of a study taking in the previous suppositions and conjectures would include the following goals: (1) to find the factors that determine a given individual’s level of compassion; and (2) to develop methods that would act to augment human compassion using digital media. Engelbart’s specifications for his framework still fit for this research direction.
Step one would be to find a test for compassion so that quantitative results can verify any changes over time, from before exposure to the stimulus to afterwards. Step two would involve testing non-participatory stimuli such as the YouTube videos for changes in levels of compassion. Step three could then cover participatory situations of varying complexity.
As this blog post/response essay is written in response to our second week’s readings on the subject of History in Perspective, any further reading suggestions along these lines of augmenting compassion, augmenting empathy, or developing emotional intelligence would be greatly appreciated. Any studies that have been performed on the effect of interactive art would also be of great interest to me. Usually I am not one for trying to pin down the exact meaning or relevance of a piece of art, but in the context of a compassionate evolution I would concede the necessity for some formal investigation into the matter.
I believe that the nexus of intelligence and compassion would negate the need for overly strict rules that may be based on a narrow or subjective morality. The ultimate goal for technological society must include room for this augmented compassion.
--Christine Rosakranse

Developing and promoting your blog: becoming known, respectably

2009-08-10T11:07:00.000-07:00

Developing and Promoting Your Blog: Becoming Known (Respectably)

View more presentations from Christine Rosakranse.

2009-08-06T11:16:00.000-07:00

Leveraging Social Networking Sites to Build Online Presence

View more presentations from Christine Rosakranse.

Part one of a four part series for Developing Your Business's Online Presence

The different theoretical approaches to the concept of presence. What is the best approach?

2009-05-11T15:19:00.000-07:00

“Presence is a multi-dimensional concept; i.e., there are different types of presence.”1

The concept of presence is definitely one that has not yet been concretely and throughly defined or operationalized though many attempts at covering the different aspects of presence have been made by professional academics across many fields. Lombard and Ditton2 list six conceptualizations that have been developed to define the ambiguous concept of presence. Taken as a whole, these conceptualizations represent facets of an overarching definition instead of a complete and absolute explanation unto themselves. Utilizing this approach to develop a faceted classification scheme would then cover a significant amount of the intricacies of presence better than any individual conceptualization. However, a more concise listing of the facets would have to be developed.
Currently, those facets of presence listed by Lombard and Ditton, among others, are nonorthogonal with common elements overlapping between the groups. The International Society for Presence Research (ISPR) takes this grouping further and lists five groups of approaches, but this list can also be more tightly and exactly configured. For example, presence as social richness, as mentioned in Lombard and Ditton’s paper “At the Heart of It All: The Concept of Presence”, is incomplete because its defining parameters focus on the medium itself and not on the actual interaction. Measurements of “capacity for immediate feedback, the number of senses involved, personalization and language variety” do not necessarily represent the intricacies of presence when dealing with a mediated interaction. The social aspect of presence, in terms of a faceted classification scheme, would include this concept of social richness as well as some of the following conceptualizations that focus on social elements of interaction as mentioned by the ISPR: “social presence”, "social actor within the medium", "parasocial interaction" , "co-presence", "transportation: shared space", and "medium as social actor".
Presence as realism creates a bifold definition that can be taken as either “social realism” or “perceptual realism”. In this way, it also takes the interaction at a more superficial level than would a deeper, more expounded upon theory. However, from this concept we can take its two distinct definitions and add these to the vocabulary of a classification for presence. As defined by the ISPR:

"’Social realism’ occurs when part or all of a person's perception fails to accurately acknowledge the role of technology that makes it appear that s/he is in a physical location and environment in which the social characteristics correspond to those of the physical world.”

Perceptual realism is linked with the similar terms “sensory presence," "naturalness," "ecological validity", and "tactile engagement".
Presence as transportation starts to include more of the relevant elements of a mediated interaction. However, as these three elements are defined in Lombard and Ditton’s paper, the three types of transportation that occur are apparently considered mutually exclusive when this is not necessarily the case. In 1997, when the paper was written, perhaps these distinctions were more obvious. Currently, the borders between “You are there”, “It is Here”, and “We are Together” are slowly dissolving. This is especially true of online games where more than one live player joins together using microphones to communicate for missions and strategic planning.
Some of the aspects of presence as transportation are grouped with "spatial presence," "physical presence," "a sense of physical space," "perceptual immersion," and "a sense of being there". These occur when all or part of a person’s perception is submerged into a mediated environment. In other words, when they are “there”.
Lombard and Ditton list two more conceptualizations beyond the previously stated presence as social richness, realism, transportation, and immersion. Presence as social actor within medium was previously grouped with other social aspects. It is a voluntary willingness to “overlook the mediated or even artificial nature of an entity within a medium and attempt to interact with it” that becomes evident in environments such as Second Life and other games where characters, whether human-based or computer avatar, are treated with the same amount of care and consideration. Lastly, presence as medium as social actor is well-represented by “A Space Odyssey’s” Hal. This is also part of the social aspects already mentioned.
The International Society for Presence Research also includes another group of conceptualizations that include "engagement," "involvement," and "psychological immersion". This does not directly translate to one of the previously mentioned facets. However, this simply reveals one of the flaws of the current system. Engagement and involvement signify how much people get “sucked into” the medium and, therefore, become more closely tied to the occurrences therein.
Using these differentiations of experience does break the conceptualizations into only five categories, but these still involve a good deal of overlap. To be more concise, a listing should be made where a single experience can be “chopped up” into unique facets. For an initial foray into this realm, I would include essence of interaction (physical, mental), timeline of interaction (synchronous, asynchronous, one-time, continual), medium of interaction or senses involved (typing - touch, visual, auditory), and the intention of interaction (learning, gaming, etc.). This is very inchoate listing and more research would have to be done, but I believe this to be the most efficient direction for future presence research.
References:
Denton, William. "How to Make a Faceted Classification and Put It On the Web" Nov. 2003. http://www.miskatonic.org/library/facet-web-howto.html
Ditton, T. and Lombard, Matthew. “At the Heart of It All: The Concept of Presence.” JCMC 3 (2) September 1997.
International Society for Presence Research. (2000). The Concept of Presence: Explication Statement. Retrieved from http://ispr.info/

Origins of Domain Specificity

2009-03-16T10:50:00.001-07:00

The Origins Of Domain Specificity

View more presentations from Christine Rosakranse.

Nielsen's "Usability" and Some Questions (Part 3/3)

2009-01-27T14:40:00.000-08:00

Nielsen says, “Peoples’ attitudes toward computers in general should probably be seen as a component of the social acceptability of computers rather than their usability.” One interesting outgrowth of this statement would be the fact that as time progresses and technology finds its way into true ubiquity, we will find fewer instances of true novices and social accessibility will increase regardless of a designer’s intent.
Where Jakob Nielsen discusses usability trade-offs several good comments surface, including the fact that one cannot design the perfect interface for all user types. Also, where other considerations, such as security measures, take precedence, ease of use sometimes suffers. This area naturally leads into section 2.5, where he discusses categories of users and user differences. This is an essential element to be covered in these beginning chapters. Figure three on page 44 shows the matrix of users’ experience which is also enlightening.
The way that Nielsen goes on to describe the systems as they pertain to the matrix is quite eye-opening especially if someone has never considered these interfaces from the perspective of the user. He also introduces the concept of quartiles in signifying which user is at the high end of a given spectrum or the lower end.
At the end of this chapter, Nielsen also mentions that it is not necessarily the best idea to permit the user to customize their own interface beyond a certain cosmetic point. This point is followed up in later chapters, but it does provide the context for additional questions.
Question:
How does one decide how much of an interface should be customizable (for example, in the case of Facebook versus Myspace)?

Nielsen's "Usability" and Some Questions (Part 2/3)

2009-01-27T14:38:00.001-08:00

Memorability, on the other hand, is one of those elements that might not seem immediately obvious when user-testing first occurs, but many of us have experienced the loss of system proficiency after not having used a product for any extended period of time. I continue to experience some amount of anxiety when moving between Adobe products when the quick-keys for certain shared functions is not the same or when the interface (eg. in Illustrator) is different between a Mac and a PC. Additionally, whereas errors are also easily recognized as a hindrance to production, subjective satisfaction would seem to be a derivative of the other attributes for usability.
Question:
Does subjective satisfaction deserve to be an individual element or is it a derivation of the other attributes of usability?

Nielsen's "Usability" and Some Questions (Part 1/3)

2009-01-27T14:28:00.000-08:00

What is usability?
One of the key concerns for Usability professionals is being able to answer the question “What is Usability?” According to Jakob Nielsen, usability can be defined by the following five attributes: learnability, efficiency, memorability, errors, and satisfaction. Each of these attributes would seem obvious once you read the list of them, but, of course, being able to come up with a complete and concise list is the difficult part. For each of these attributes, he then further explicates the details. In the case of learnability, I’m glad that Nielsen has differentiated between novice and expert users. However, he does not necessarily include level of comfort in mastering an interface. Holding usability to a higher standard would involve taking learnabilty to the level of mastery and a high degree of comfort. Currently “learning software” is the strongest bastion for these more stringent levels of learnability.
One question for this section would be:
How does one use leading edge teaching techniques to increase cognition and make learnability more core to usability?

Research Methods

2008-12-10T11:47:00.000-08:00

I’ve had the opportunity to learn and use a very powerful program this semester for statistical analysis called SPSS (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences). I also had the please of finding out about Google's Spreadsheet-based Forms.
During our usability testing, we can draw conclusions from the participants’ behavior and from direct questioning, but in order to catch some of the larger ramifications of our design choices it would behoove us to learning statistical analysis methods. And these two programs provide a strong mechanism for doing so.

Shortcut Information Architecture

2008-11-13T08:32:00.000-08:00

The first step in developing a website is to determine the site’s goals and objectives. Usually, this is where personas and uses cases come in, but for a super-quick method this arena is sometimes truncated as the designers take on informal roles as the personas (thereby defining the audience) and also define a few use cases off the bat just to get started. You can then jump into sitemaps and wireframes. This also fleshes out the project scope and description. A key element to this segment of information architecture is Competitive (Heuristic) Analysis. What are the other guys doing? What are they doing wrong? What are they doing right? This is also a form of technical analysis. Some will hand off their sitemaps and wireframes to a designer for the completion of the project. In the case where all this goes on in-house, the iterative development process can continue, designing a more robust and innovative product. The end?

Paper Prototyping

2008-10-29T07:16:00.000-07:00

Such a wonderful thing as paper prototyping has often been overlooked as unprofessional in appearance, a first step but nothing you should test, or unnecessary. These are all fallacies. The utility of paper prototypes stems from their low-resolution appearance and quick turn around time. You can test one user in the morning and correct any flaws by your afternoon session. The low-res appearance makes the tester more likely to point out functional flaws and not design, which is the goal of initial testing. So buy a good book on the subject (I suggest "Paper Prototyping" by Carolyn Snyder) and try it out on your product development today.

Use Cases

2008-09-25T08:30:00.000-07:00

It seems as if Use Cases are too obvious to mention, but with the great amount of mystery surrounding these deliverables, I feel the need to mention a few definitions. First of all, a Use Case can be text or graphical, as in a state diagram. The basic attributes involve identifying the user intention and the system responsibility. More complexity is added as you consider the relationships between objects, the preconditions, the post-conditions, and the business rules. Therefore, a Use Case can come in different flavors. I have a graphical one below, roughly based on a decision-reaction flavor. Depending on your point of view, they may also be confused with taskflows, scenarios, etc. The information represented in each of these does involve a certain amount of overlap, but depending on the project they may not all be necessarily included.

Information Horizons

2008-09-08T12:06:00.001-07:00

I would like to introduce the concept of Information Horizons. For the more scholarly, please feel free to read the work of Sonnenwald in regard to this concept.

The Information Horizons approach to studying information-seeking behavior takes into account the larger world of information instead of one particular source. With any subject matter in mind, from a scientific inquiry to which blender to buy, we can see that multiple sources are often searched through including not only the internet, but friends, family, magazines, newspapers, etc. Anything that can relay information can be seen as a source of information.

In an IH study participants are asked to map their information horizons creating a network where the nodes represent information sources. Sometimes the lines going from the information seeker to the source represent primary searches, sometimes the lines go between sources (as in after asking Aunt Betty about her blender, I then searched items on Amazon from that same company).

I am excited to be performing a study using IH in terms of the presidential campaign. Hopefully, the results will be eye-opening for all students of Information Communication, Behavior, Architecture, and the like.

Usability Testing

2008-07-30T08:20:00.000-07:00

One of the most fundamental usability methods is, of course, user testing, but the lack of time and resources sometimes makes this approach unfeasible in a corporate setting. Problems also arise and compound the difficulty of achieving relevant test results when we include user testing with an iterative design process. Therefore, one must differentiate between formative evaluation and summative evaluation.* Formative evaluation is performed in conjunction with steps of an iterative design process. Summative comes at the end and evaluates the overall quality of a design. This later evaluation type is most commonly used.
* From Jakob Nielsen's Usability Engineering

another version of the blueprint graphic.

Style Guide Documentation

2008-07-23T12:05:00.000-07:00

Finding myself smack dab in the middle of writing a style guide for the company (a relatively new direction for us) and requiring some assistance for this uncharted territory, I have found a wonderful resource in the GNOME guides for their developers, namely the Human Interface Guidelines and the Style Guide they utilize. It is well written, succinct and comprehensive. As far as usability, a fairly modern concern, goes, it is rich in reasoning for their methodologies.

So google it. And learn. If you want.

(IMAGE IS COPYRIGHT PROTECTED, T-SHIRTS AVAILABLE, E:MAIL-POETROSAKRANSE@GMAIL.COM)

Book Report: Usability Engineering by Jakob Nielsen

2008-06-09T08:03:00.001-07:00

One of the most useful takeaways from this book is the listing for “Discount Usability Engineering.” Nielsen bases this on four techniques – User and task observation, Scenarios, Simplified thinking aloud, and Heuristic evaluation. At the last IA Summit, while listening to a lecture on usability testing, the following information came to the fore. Apple did very little “standard” user testing for their iPhone, instead relying more heavily on user observation. They looked at how the user interacted with their system. And the product they came up with is notably user-friendly. This goes back to Nielsen’s “Discount Usability Engineering.” These methods have proven successful in Apple’s case and, more importantly, where the budget is lacking, i.e. in almost every other company.

Communication Design for Container Gardening

2008-06-03T09:14:00.000-07:00

This semester at RPI my team has taken on the task of creating a web site for container gardening inspiration and creation. One of the sources of personal inspiration for creating this site was the RHS Chelsea flower show and one presenter in particular. We've used a basic structure (a shallow hierarchy) for organizing the information, using the pictures and evocative titles to say most of the story. If I have free time after this semester, this is something that I would like to build and share with the world. Here's a little preview.

From Poetry to Information Architecture

2008-05-14T11:11:00.000-07:00

By the way of mathematics, lest we forget, I have traveled from poetry to Information Architecture. The story itself is long and meandering, but the end (as of now) is quite clear. But, as much I have faith in myself and my journey, it is nice to know that someone out there helped pave the way and wrote a nice little quote to cover it. For those of you who know me personally, this quote I believe will sum everything up quite nicely. Hence, I here the call:

I see the field of library and information science (L&IS) highly centrifugal and greatly in need of high-quality syntheses.
…I would give warm encouragement to writers who show a talent for creative integration and criticism of ideas …I would particularly like to see books that attempt to organize whole segments of L&IS through some single, powerful metaphor …
…I would like critical explications of noted individual authors…by some-one who reads them in full…… I am calling for persons who add the skills of a poet to whatever training we can give them as scholars or scientists —

scientist-poets, if you will...

(This is also posted and cited on my new homepage at http://www.rosakranse.com)

Using CSS in Faceted Classifications

2008-04-29T11:07:00.000-07:00

So here's an interesting thing one could do with CSS. Considering that CSS allows for inheritance of properties, one could create a list of items with varying properties and categorize those using different attributes including color, spacing, bold, etc. text elements. CSS and a faceted classification scheme go hand in hand.

Take Homes on Wireframes

2008-04-25T07:50:00.000-07:00

We've been discussing hi-fi versus low and medium-fidelity wireframes.

Fidelity refers to the "realness" of the presentation, whether or not one includes mock-up content or "Greeking" with lorem ipsum. And in class, my group was called out for using color in our presentation. It was a matter of debate with the client. They disliked the color scheme, but when we tried to assure them that this was not the purpose of the meeting, that we were only here for the information architecture of the site and not the design, it was still distracting. So we changed it, and all went well from that point on.

p.s. We also moved our site constants to create a global nav below the header, deleted the adobe icon, and moved the calendar well above the fold.

Notes for Five Trends in Tagging by Gene Smith at the IA Summit, ‘08

2008-04-12T11:40:00.000-07:00

These notes provide very wonderful words that should be googled, and sites that should be checked out.

1) Structure: wesabe.com uses sticky tags, uses tags as part of the resources, bubble-up type, semantic tags – ex. ia (information architecture), Zigtag.com mined Wikipedia
2) Leveraging communities: LibraryThing – user-driven vocabulary to combine or separate tags
3) Automanual Folksonomies: mixed approach at Etsy (like eBay for handmade items, unique items), LibraryThing tagmash – like set math with Union and Intersection, “semantics on top of minimal structure”
4) Pace Layers: speeds of innovation from nature level up, starts with Mr. Brand, moved into IA by Peter Morville, (faceted tags)
5) Sparking innovation: Flickr, Dan Catt, geotagging

The Vocabulary of Information Architecture Deliverables

2008-03-19T11:39:00.001-07:00

There is a fine line these days between application, web application, and web site. I find myself talking of actors to one group of co-workers and of personas to my classmates, though the overlap is considerable when taking into account the basic idea of a role. Now, for a more formal application, the actors must include every type of user. That is, they must be exhaustive. While more leeway is generally given to the idea of a persona. Though they too must be exhaustive and mutually exclusive to be the most efficient.

In the world of words, our definitions are oftentimes ambiguous, based as they are on context. However, this provides a fantastic space for sharing and learning. The trick comes in hearing what someone else is saying to the extent that you can argue for there position.

Bias in Computer Systems and Search Engines

2008-03-04T08:17:00.001-08:00

Recently, reading the work of Nissenbaum on Bias in Computer Systems and search engines has been quite eye-opening in terms of my everyday unconscious bias in my personal search methods and programming. For the most part, it seems like the algorithm design for most search engines is a mixture of hard work and some intellectual laziness. To truly determine the relevance of a given site to a search term requires more than just simple surface reading or simple-minded spiders crawling around the internet. However, short of an artificially intelligent search resource of impeccable morals, true relevance independent of moneyed backing is not something that will soon surface, unless of course, we somehow utilize the digg and del.icio.us approach of allowing the user to qualify the relevance of a site. This of course can also be prone to abuse as more than one user has managed to digg fallacious information, giving it the credentials of a truly useful resource.

Information Architecture and Library Science

2008-02-06T12:29:00.000-08:00

One of the topics of research in my IA class is Ranganathan, the father of Library Science in India. In order to place books in more intuitive locations, with less relying on previously determined constructs, he determined that each book has facets. These are the following:

Personality, Matter, Energy, Space, and Time.
Personality—what the object is primarily “about.” This is considered the “main facet.”
Matter—the material of the object
Energy—the processes or activities that take place in relation to the object
Space—where the object happens or exists
Time—when the object occurs

It then becomes an interesting game to come up with these for each book or even each document file on your hard drive. There is no extremely useful reason for doing this on a small scale, but I suppose if you have a free Sunday and an obsessive need to classify, then you might just give it a try. It’s a fun thing to consider when you are placing pictures into a filing system.

systematic individuality

2008-01-23T12:53:00.000-08:00

when the secret sort of asking-control
kindly insists -

let me make you understand
no line on earth lies straight
but curves
around her form -

I’ll take from you this need

this so-longed-for rectitude
harms
the already damaged meek

Why am I Still Reading "Special Topics....

2007-12-28T08:42:00.000-08:00

in Calamity Physics"?

I ask myself on occasion, why? And I know it's because of my particular problem with book reading, that once I start reading a book I have to finish it (the sole exception being Joyce's "Ulysses", which I've started reading five times and have never managed to finish). This leads me to read books that I know the mystery ending to by the third chapter or books with extremely cliched story lines. I lament, Why oh why? but always continue reading and so I now find myself in a unique situation that usually only comes to me when I am watching a particularly uninteresting CSI. Namely, I don't care what happens. Reading "Special Topics in Calamity Physics", which is filled with a great deal of anecdotal information, I find myself not caring about the characters, the plot, the endless book references, and smart-alecky very-nearly-inside academia jokes. Even in the references that don't fly over my head I find no relief. At the greatest extent of my interest, a sorry "oh" will escape from my lips. And yet I trudge on, and will until the end of this 514 page book. Currently at page 116, I see no end in sight, but if I read the "Decameron" and "War and Peace", well then, By Jove, I will finish this little tome!!

Katrina of Accord

2007-12-19T07:21:00.001-08:00

Merry Christmas to all and to all a good night....

Blogged with Flock

Sewing

2007-11-28T09:15:00.000-08:00

I have this one sweater with shredding sleeves, quite in the process of falling apart. In turns, I rip it a bit further, then tie the black ends back together. Depending on my mood, sometimes I just play with the strings like a gentle cat, neither destroying nor mending. I like the way the threads feel and I even highly enjoy the very idea of them. That they have taken the impact of endless countertops and desks, and have ruffled many a time against the computer keyboard. This is not an insight. This just is one of those other things.

Data Coupling, Ilities, and Software Design

2007-11-12T13:06:00.001-08:00

I am currently reading "Software Design" by David Budgen and getting all sorts of insights into the field of software architecture, design, implementation, and management. My notes are filled with words that buzz around in my brain - including the ilities (quality factors like reliability, efficiency, maintainability, and usability). Which of course leads to a poem. Here's for Meena-beana. Sorry about the Heidegger non-sense ;)

ilities

modules B and C
communicate,
being functionally related,
by parameters

with no control

element.

stick cohesive
and switch conditional
on site

the strength of bond
not quantifiable,
systematically

but by invisible metric,
relativistic,
within the scope
of periphery

existing only by no
direct reference

yet, they persist,
B and C,
iterating through
encoded maybes

likelihoods stacked up
by high
desirability

image recognition

2007-10-23T08:34:00.000-07:00

feeling plural

no longer one,
now these
myriad latent insanities
jellyfish
stings tiny

against weapons of
this- can’t- be

shots that never aim true

extruded, as we are, through
diaphanous excuse

enter muppet-stage
yes, heart
yes, indeed

I see, I see

Spider Woes

2007-10-18T08:07:00.002-07:00

this costumed wish to righteously give
what can only be had
by taking

places generosity within web
of irreconcilable
loss

where opposing strings
resonate normal

you, not so in multiplicity
sane only
by liquifying former bugs,
and drinking mummies

Next on the Reading List

2007-10-18T08:07:00.001-07:00

So, of late, gender considerations and definitions for me are being....well...redefined by, what I would consider, leaps and bounds. So I ask the Science Fiction writer in my class for a reading list that would help me to explore this world, while fictionally, more deeply. Beware of my spelling:

Lane of Heaven - Ursula Leguin
Hammered - Elizabeth Bear
Nightrunner (Trilogy) - Linn

In terms of my C# instruction. Not all human classes inherit from their base.

--christine

Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson (A Review)

2007-09-26T06:51:00.001-07:00

With only so many hours in the day, it’s impossible to read all the books that one wants to. But one should make the time for Snow Crash. As one view of the possible near future where governments have fallen to give way to franchised collections of territories, it acts as a warning as much as anything. The basis of the plot rests on language being able to perform a viral operation, like a disease being able to change the basic DNA of the system that it infects. And while the overall premise is commendable in its scope (so much historic detail is provided that the reader wants to believe in the theory), combining the visual snow that changes programmers and the babel-approach of fluid exchange that changes people in the non-virtual world does not really ever create a coherent flow of possibility. I felt that the over-the-top suppositions were not well enough supported despite the attempt at solidly founding them in some factual basis. However, I would still recommend this novel as a fantastic introduction to the world of cyberpunk.

Inappropriate

2007-09-19T11:20:00.000-07:00

We spend our entire lives trying to live up to the expectations of others so that we may garner a modicum of trust and confidence in ourselves and in our morality - who we are depends of what we project. Perhaps, we are only ghosts of our inner selves. This lesson is taught to us early on, often accompanied by the phrase "What would people think?" All aspects of our outward appearance are carefully chosen to reflect what we wish to be. Our egos become inextricably attached to what we own and what we say.
Heavens forbid anyone trying to live outside that construct. And so, I have inside my head a little old lady chastizing me every second of my life. She used to have a general old lady voice, but it has lately become very specific. "Oh, you're not going to wear that are you?", "Stop biting your nails", etc. She regularly tells me of my inadequacies, and if I let her, if on any given day she wins, I lose and everything becomes very flat and dim and no amount of sun will fade the clouds.
However, most days, I kill her in the morning and skull-fuck her well into the nighttime. ;)

Loki*

2007-09-13T18:16:00.000-07:00

interfacing a kindly
madness,

funneling devotions
into lettered nests,

this cracked to breaking
thin-boned hand

outputs purpose
via elegance

*(written while reading Chaos and Literature)

Heidegger is much like Cheesecake

2007-09-10T12:33:00.000-07:00

I, the ontical me, wanted to create a little glossary of terms in regards to Heidegger’s work. However, instead of being strictly alphabetical, I find a stream of consciousness approach more useful (for the ontological me at any rate).

Ontic: physical or factual existence (actual?); whatever pertains to being generally rather than some distinctively philosophical (or scientific) theory of it (ontology)
Epistemology: branch of philosophy that studies the nature of knowledge
See also: Chaos theory, determinism, causation, stochasticity
Definite Description ?
Ontological: of or relating to the essence or the nature of being; “What is the nature of the knowable things?”
See also: Universals, Substance (What is?)
Qua: the capacity of
*Something which exists is greater than that which is imagined.*
Process Philosophy

{reality indeed,
she said
is becoming}

Hermeneutics: the study of theories of the interpretation and understanding of texts

Exegetic: the elucidation of philosophical and legal texts
Postmodernism-Baudelaire
Prodromal?
Oneiromancers-hieroglyphic

To live by multiplication
Replacing ourselves
Until the historic We
No longer exists

.
.

Stochastically
We were never,
As now,
We are not

answer to the title: rich and creamy

How to win friends and influence people

2007-09-04T07:33:00.000-07:00

Dale Carnegie knew a few things about how to deal with people. He based his courses on a few solid assumptions about human behavior, namely the following: people want to feel important and this basic tenet will affect how they interact with others. This allows several more assumptions to be naturally concluded from that including the fact that no one wants to be told that they are wrong or to be criticized outright. So, the question becomes, “How does one mitigate or utilize these natural tendencies to any benefit?” In his book “How to Win Friends and Influence People”, this question is dealt with using anecdotal information based on his wide range of experience and the experiences of those who have taken his course and then applied it to their business and life affairs. It is best to read the book as a manual, rereading those passages that seem to not be sinking or those that have particular significance. But barring going out and buying it now, I will let you in on a few easy ways to start winning friends. Smile. Don’t directly criticize. Lavish praise and attention. However,of paramount importance is to do this honestly or not at all. If you must have an example to know why, then go out and read Dale Carnegie's work.

Taken to Task

2007-09-03T05:17:00.000-07:00

we’ve hung our skins on the coatrack,
taken our nickel’s worth of iodine
to get outside cubic

this cartilage where opinions insinuate
corkscrewing into the ribcage-
protected fist of meat

drumming out percussions’ thump
beating ors into ands like us
always echoing what

A Matter of Opinion

2007-09-01T06:45:00.000-07:00

In a very significant way, everything is a matter of opinion. We choose whether or not to believe in something, even if the facts support it or completely negate its possibility because we always have a choice. And so, it follows that the difference between good and bad is a matter of opinion. The difficulty arises in the amount and quality of information one has that can be used to ascertain the truth. Various examples are available to demonstrate the way something that is apparently bad can turn out to be beneficial to humanity. The easiest of these demonstrations comes from suffering (death, disease, etc.) leading to an epiphany that is then shared with the rest of humanity, thereby increasing the overall level of awareness in a society. But enough with abstractions.
One maxim that can easily be destroyed is the following: It’s not good to keep secrets. Of course it is. Following the Taoist tenet of see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil, propagating vicious rumors is detrimental to everyone. Propagating half-truths is also dangerous, but at the same time telling the truth to someone whose ignorance twists it into something evil is also destructive. Hence, the problem arises because unless we truly know someone and every nuance of their logical process, we cannot know how they will interpret information shared with them. So weigh your words carefully and be fully aware that choice and difference with ultimately shape shared information in a way that is nearly entirely unpredictable in the long run.

Fun with the I Ching

2007-08-21T19:32:00.000-07:00

Preoccupation with prophecy always leads to interesting revelations, but how much can a random toss of three coins, six times count in life? More than one would think, especially when combined with your own natural intuition. We ask leading questions when it comes to our own fate and tend to steer it down a path towards epiphany (apocryphal or true is up to debate).

So, I ask the coins (and sometimes the cards) about my near future. Turning 27 with a multitude of possibilities yet before me, I would like a clue as to whether this week, this month, this year is going to be productive in any way. And the answer comes: 8, 8, 6, 8, 7, 7

This string of numbers translates to:
Contemplation of the divine meaning underlying the workings of the universe gives to the man who is called upon to influence others the means of producing like effects.
Thus a hidden spiritual power emanates from them, influencing and dominating others without their being aware of how it happens.

Oh, so that's what that tingling sensation beneath the third rib was....but it continues...

Six in the third place means:
Contemplation of my life
Decides the choice
Between advance and retreat.
This is the place of transition. We no longer look outward to receive pictures that are more or less limited and confused, but direct our contemplation upon ourselves in order to find a guideline for our decisions. This self-contemplation means the overcoming of naive egotism in the person who sees everything solely form his own standpoint. He begins to reflect and in this way acquires objectivity. However, self-knowledge does not mean preoccupation with one's own thoughts; rather, it means concern about the effects one creates. It is only the effects our lives produce that give us the right to judge whether what we have done means progress or regression.
Gentleness that is adaptable, but at the same time penetrating, is the outer form that should proceed from inner calm.

I think I had a lunchtime discussion about this recently. Yes. Interesting.

"And The Band Played On"

2007-08-09T04:49:00.000-07:00

Train wrecks occur all at once with perhaps a few previous indicators to let the omniscient know of their inevitability. Faulty wiring, a drunk driver.
The time period before the AIDS epidemic was filled with countless train wrecks with too many previous indicators of destruction to enumerate, but the book "And the Band Played On" does make the attempt.
In fact, the sheer volume of unfortunate, ignorant, and clearly destructive circumstances leading to our era's Black Plague attributes to a feeling akin to swimming through broken glass to reach the edge of an ocean of suffering. Of course, we haven't reached the edge yet, but, with the newest developing technologies in prevention and identification, we believe in the edge.
This book is a literal must-read. In an era so defined by its major diseases, everyone must be aware of the history of AIDS to better fight against it and to develop the compassion towards those suffering its consequences.

The Effects of Web 2.0 Technology

2007-08-05T07:58:00.000-07:00

As we network more and more, sending e-mails and sharing blogs, the threads of connection become more numerous, but are they as strong as prior types of relational connections? Can you really know someone online from a mere profile? It is possible, but the writer must be hyper-aware of their audience and the interaction of the writer's words with their audience's belief systems. Furthermore, the extent to which one can include esoteric references depends on the collective knowledge of their core audience. In this, some cadres collectively adore commiserating over "inside" knowledge. The secret for marketing then becomes being able to relate this sort of knowledge (literature, mathematics, engineering, etc.) to a general audience, combining it with shared knowledge to make it more memorable.
Our collective unconscience and meta-informational systems are merging to a greater extent every year and it is the job of a Web Professional to keep ahead by all means of networking and information gathering available.

To this end: Technorati Profile

;)

Static:

2007-08-01T17:18:00.000-07:00

in "Complex Dynamics in Literature and Science"

Static, by confusion, redefines. With its dual paradoxical meanings, it is etymologically off to a good start. When applied to poetry, we have a non-metaphorical collusion of cosmic principles.

The study of poetics, for me, has never provided an exact answer for the very pertinent question of why one writes poetry. But during the course of my reading, I have found that the poetry I love and the poetry I write generate static.

Now, static means the following: non-moving or noise (in the mathematical sense, a chaos). And by poetical static I of course mean mentally chaotic eddies. Like the definition of chaos, great poetry explodes meaning into ambiguity where it at once coalesces into significance.
In addition, “the reading process instantiates the symbiotic relationship between complexity and noise, for it is the presence of noise that forces the system to reorganize itself at a higher level of complexity(1).”
The life-altering poetry causes previously formed mental connections to rearrange themselves according to a higher understanding.

(1) Ed. N. Katherine Hayles, "Complex Dynamics in Literature and Science", pg. 20.

Reading Between the Lines - "Ex-Gay Ministries"

2007-07-24T08:26:00.000-07:00

Readers make certain assumptions when reading an article. For newspapers and magazines, unless the article clearly states that it is an opinion piece or an editorial, they assume that the information is unbiased, fair, accurate, and inclusive. They assume that the experts cited are truly experts in their field. Of course, those at GLAAD know that this is not always so and in no case have I found this more evident than in the articles I have been reading about the ex-gay movement from the ex-gay ministries’ position.
The articles at the Christianpost.com website attempt to create the appearance of being fair and, even to a certain extent, scientific. Where claims based on faith are dubious, surely science will provide the answer.
In the article entitled “‘Ex-Gay’ Remarks Draw Fire” by Lillian Kwon, posted on the Christianpost.com website (June 20, 2007), the vocabulary reveals the biased, unfair, inaccurate, and non-inclusive stance of the writer. Even the placement of quotation marks reflects the biased view of the reporter. The title refers to comments made by Alan Chambers, the head of Exodus International (quoted in the article as being “the nation’s largest evangelical referral ministry on homosexual issues”). In the LA Times, he said that he had never met an ex-gay. While Kwon’s article does not clearly state “he’s wrong”, it does fill the rest of its paragraphs saying that this man is wrong for various reasons.
The seemingly honest vocabulary honestly scares me. Even calling this matter a “homosexual issue” where issue can easily mean problem, undermines the professionalism of the article. However, “issues” is just the first instance. She then goes on to quote Stephen Bennett extensively, labeling him as president of his “pro-family” (my quotes, not hers) group Stephen Bennett Ministries. Pro-family, as if homosexuality were somehow anti-family. Kwon then quotes Bennett saying that Exodus International is the “largest information and referral ministry in the world on homosexual issues” and that he was shocked that they could make such “irresponsible and false statements”. Reading it over again, I see that Lillian Kwon opened up her article by poorly paraphrasing from Bennett.
Other examples of biased language use include the following: saying that anyone is “engaging in homosexuality”, using quotes around “survived” when someone said that they had survived the ex-gay experience, using no quotes when mentioning “homosexual conversion”, treating “gay tolerance” as a disease by saying that it has reached record marks, and saying that “less than a majority of Americans say homosexual relations are morally wrong.” She writes, “less than a majority”, not writing the statistic the other way around as we normally would – namely, that a majority believe that homosexual relations are morally correct. This is one amongst the many “scientific” airs put on by this article.
Lillian Kwon also uses hearsay and quotes other articles out of context. The worst case of this is when she cites the June 25th article by Michael Kinsley in Time magazine (a pro gay rights article I might add, entitled “The Quiet Gay Revolution”), and uses the one paragraph in it that could be taken out of context and used in a negative manner, “Kids grow up today with gay friends, gay parents, gay parents of friends and gay friends of parents…Kids are also exposed constantly to an entertainment culture in which gays are not merely accepted but in some ways dominant.” Kinsley meant this in a positive light, later writing of the positive role of Ellen Degeneres in television. Kwon took the quote and changed it into something more akin to “Geez, their dominating culture now. We have to stop it.”
More pseudo-science is related to the unwary reader as words like “genetic predisposition” are thrown in. Matt Barber, of Concerned Women for America (who once compared allowing gay marriage to another Hurricane Katrina in his column “Gay Marriage – It’s Alive”), said that there was no evidence that people are born homosexual. He’s the expert?
The last eight paragraphs compare homosexuality to alcoholism and, with one quote per paragraph, manage to call it a sin or temptation five times, even going so far as to relate it to cocaine addiction and bulimia by quoting one poor soul who had suffered from each of those afflictions as well being homosexual.
I didn’t necessarily expect a well-balanced article about ex-gay ministries on the Christianpost.com site, but it is always surprising at what extremely biased misinformation is passed off as fair and accurate reporting.

My Head is Filled with Strange Attractors

2007-07-18T12:10:00.000-07:00

Now larger than many grasshoppers stacked on eachother's exoskeletons, I'm reading four books, two of which are delighting me to no end with their interconnectivity - Heidegger's "Being and Time" and a collection of essays (not Heidegger's) entitled "Chaos and Order: Complex Dynamics in Literature and Science." Of course, it wasn't random happenstance that led me to buy these books. My head is filled with strange attractors.
In other words, I (heart) chaos and I am quite fond of Being. Now for the turbulence that sparks creation - But Time and Order are mere consequences. In fact, they might not even exist at all.

Pick a sitting rock and Let's Discuss.

--Christine Rosakranse

Definition (Being and Time)

2007-07-17T06:43:00.001-07:00

It's not Heidegger's fault, I say. This question of Being started before reading his work, but now the reasoning takes on a new vocabulary. Which what why? At the end of a long and rainy day, I can only question, "What is your product, machine?" I have many answers, but what is the answer?
So if I need an answer, I read a book. I've only just started reading "Being and Time", so luckily I am still in the "forming the question of Being" phase.
And, evidently, somewhat circular reasoning (back and forth) is acceptable in these more rarefied echelons of thought.
One problem I find though is the physical evidence versus the soul, as far as prejudice is concerned, but let me hold on a second to that thought. First the question, I suppose, and then the answer. No good to be too divergent at the beginning, unless all is chaos. And then that would be perfect. After all, am I divergent? And collective, as well?

--Christine Rosakranse

My Father’s Flowers

2007-07-10T12:42:00.000-07:00

Time freezes in an image. In the case of my father’s flowers, their visual essence is captured by my camera. Sound is not an issue, but for the breeze as it caresses the leaves and this is so soft as to be ghostly. It is rarely remembered when compared to the passion of the image.
My father has a fondness for daylilies. I must admit that so do I. In Upstate New York, an abundance of orange flowers overwhelms the otherwise green landscape. This sunrise hue punctuates gardens throughout the Tristate area, at least during the summer months. However, my father’s garden holds yellow, pink and crimson varieties with dark centers and curly petals, as well as the more persistent orange blooms. Not the average daylily. And therein rests the fascination.
I ask my father whether he breeds new varieties, thinking that perhaps some breed he has created is catalogued somewhere. He says no, but that the bees do it themselves. While I do enjoy the hybridization process that growers all over the world undergo, I enjoy also knowing that nature will continue as it always has, and that life is still evolving under its own recourse.

to read why the bees are dying: http://www.hcn.org/servlets/hcn.Article?article_id=16891&gclid=CKuSmMHfnY0CFRlsTAodWhae3w
(The Silence of Bees)

The Teaching Experience

2007-07-09T08:55:00.000-07:00

Education is: everything. Anything known must be learned, though sometimes this basic tenet is forgotten. The power any one person may have to create change stems directly from their knowledge, which acts as a limitation for those without it and a freedom for those who do have a larger store of knowledge. The greatest need for education, therefore, lies where there is the greatest need for change. In New York City, the low-income neighborhoods represent this "high-need." The cycle that keeps the children of low-income families from becoming high achievers or going to college is one that must stop. The only way out of this loop is through education.
I began tutoring Mathematics (Algebra, Geometry, and Calculus) at North Miami Beach High School to fellow students (a mix of middle and low-income groups) and continued my education at MIT to earn a B.Sc. in Mathematics with a minor in Spanish. Teaching undergraduate classes at MIT in Number Theory, instructing test preparation skills and High School level math for the GRE, SAT, and LSAT for the Princeton Review (including low-income students through special programs) and becoming an Adjunct Professor at the New College of California while matriculating for my MA in Poetics and MFA in Writing and Poetics placed me further down the path to education. On this path, I began to realize the need for well-trained teachers in every field of education, especially math and science. These two subjects were always the ones I heard students complain about. I've even had some adult students say, "It's all Greek to me." Some of the SAT students coming in were unfamiliar with the basic rules of algebra that belonged to skill sets two grades below their level. Helping them to understand was both difficult and delightful, once they discovered they could do math. They would find out that, indeed, it was not a foreign language to them. In San Francisco, I also volunteered as an Assistant Instructor for Lyric House, a program designed for the students at high-need elementary schools to help develop there creativity and communication skills by writing their own lyrics and performing their songs. In this way, with music, the young students were able to share their emotions and struggles with a greater audience in a therapeutic and educational way.
Lyric House was a wonderful experience because it brought the point home that sometimes an alternative approach is needed, something outside the textbook. One of the most necessary skills an educator can have is the ability to modify teaching methodologies to each specific student. Some students are more visual, some more kinesthetic, while some are most comfortable with audio stimulus. Realizing this and being able to use an individual student's optimal learning strategy is key to effective teaching. I am able to do this while working with a student on the individual level, such as private tutoring for the Princeton Review. If a student is not able to understand a basic mathematical concept from the textbook explanation it was my job to word it in such a way that they could grasp the concept, be it with a diagrammatic approach or with a story-like explanation. This is especially needed for such an apparently "abstract" subject, like math. How does one relate the beauty of math to a student? I am always thinking of better ways to approach education and would love the opportunity to learn more about what makes a teacher great.

"one teacher in 10"

2007-07-01T02:59:00.000-07:00

It takes a book like “one teacher in 10” to reanimate my book report writing brain cells, but the necessity of its message is truly remarkable. A great deal of what we choose to do in life is dependent on our level of anxiety. Sometimes we are able to overcome this anxiety if a certain feeling of righteousness or need prevails, if the “must” overwhelms the “can’t”. In the case of whether or not to reveal one’s sexual orientation, anxiety often runs the life of those who have borne witness to crimes and prejudice against their lesbian, gar, bisexual and transgender peers. If revealing your sexual orientation opens up the possibility to being tied to a fence and left to die, then many reactions may surface. One, we choose to continue hiding for fear. Two, we choose to continue hiding for convenience, perhaps to mask fear, saying, “I don’t need to. It would just complicate things.” Three, we become outraged and come out as a statement.
Sometimes another choice rises, which is to not place yourself in a situation where the subject is broached. However, the fact of being queer is so central to identity that only a handful of occupations arise that do not involve revelations of orientation. Being a hermit, for example, would allow one to make the question quite moot.
In the case of a future LGBT educator, however, the choice to become a teacher often involves the decision of how to deal with their sexual orientation. In some cases, in some regions, the choice of coming out to the principal and staff is a difficult one to make, let alone coming out to students and parents. In some cases, it seems impossible and even dangerous. Some teachers wait until they get tenure. Some never out themselves.
The fact that some potential teachers refuse to become educators because they fear coming out or being “discovered” is only one of the problems of living in a society where social norms overwhelm basic rights. However, when coupled with the dearth of qualified professionals to teach our children, especially in math and science, this source of anxiety is detrimental to an entire nation of youth for more varied and complex reasons than most think.
The book “one teacher in 10” sheds light on the LGBT struggle in the school system, whether in coming out or going further in order for a teacher to create a LGBT club at their school. The essays are written by teachers at every level of administration and in every subject. It speaks of their passion and dedication, providing an enlightening example to any educator that needs support. It’s a necessary book for teachers, parents, gay and straight. It’s a book that will help to make our educational system more just and complete.
There are simpler things to do in life than to educate the youth of today, though nothing as satisfying. Any teacher reading this collection of essays will find the strength and support to make their school safer and more understanding of the equality of all people.

The New Science of Poetry

2007-06-07T05:51:00.000-07:00

“Meaning is the extension of the hands of something other: something unimagined.” Science and poetry both search for the essence of truth and existence. For this reason, they have served as a rich store of new ideas for one another from the very first spark of intelligent speech along the path of human evolution. From Shakespeare’s metaphysical “The Phoenix and the Turtle” to Miroslav Holub’s “Brief Reflection on the Theory of Relativity” the poet has utilized the emerging technologies and current theoretical thought of the time to inspire, provoke, and share new insight. The soul of science is an innocent one that along with poetry seeks beauty and harmony.

The connection between science and poetry rests on parallel modes of consciousness. Examining the similarities in thought from a phenomenological perspective, we see how the two modes reveal the ways things are perceived and how perception itself has been altered in both poetry and science. This symbiosis in thought, language, and belief from contemporary Anglophone poetry interacts with several fields of international science.

For example, German scientists and poets both write in German, but the scientific work will be published worldwide in English. The German poets’ work will only be translated if they become famous first. If a German scientist discovers the nature of uncertainty, years later an English-speaking poetry student will be writing an “Ode to Heisenberg” because of what she once read in her high school science book.

The interstices between science and poetry are many and all are possibilities for the poetry of Italo Calvino, Alan Lightman, Al Zolynas, Lavinia Greenlaw, and their peer poets. In this, we see the exchange of ideas through the discussions between science and poetry truly dissolving the once impermeable borders between all nations.

-christine rosakranse

Madness and Genius

2007-06-07T05:48:00.002-07:00

If we say that the gentle poet with gentle words is elegant and graceful, but to most invisible, then the big ideas, strange in their newness, must be required to get the attention of the public.

So what is madness? A misfiring of dendrites, creating connections in the brain where none should be or the opening of inspiration’s floodgates? Both. Then genius flows through the "mad" mind for where is writer’s block if no stop-thoughts can exist in your brain? Every place becomes a beginning. The only problem, for some, is that there is no end. Some control of this process has been lost and sleep or medication becomes the only pause.

Now there is also self-imposed madness, in the form of intoxicants, which due to metabolism have shorter durations than forever and ever. Though after long periods of use they may change the map of your brain to permanently alter perception, or to activate some latent psychology, accidentally waking the bipolar or psychotic sleeper in your genes.

The “good” side when considering madness is that there is no internal editor, no person or social restriction to coming up with the most unique perspective of the situation. Why is it that Shakespeare’s most remembered words are those of mad rants? How could he so picturesquely portray madness if he was not just a little more mad than the average man?

The Phenomenology of "Metaphysical Ideas and Scholastical Quiddities" - Poetry Paper

2007-06-07T05:48:00.001-07:00

An object in itself is a matter of perception. The same holds true for both words and for their collective amalgamation in poetry. As such, the sphere of meaning inhabited by each word suffers attrition and mutation over time, and so do terms and poems. Phonemes mingle and mash until doh and blog find their way into the OED, and become words. Diametrically opposed to these new formations, many good words have died for lack of use. One word has survived by adding new meanings onto itself like grammatical camouflage in this anti-rhetorical world.
My first recollection of the word metaphysical harkens back to my middle school days. My friend Ariella turned to me in class and said, "My dad cheated on his metaphysics exam… He peeked into his neighbor’s soul." I started cracking up, laughing that uncontrollable laugh that gets you sent out of the room. That was the definition of metaphysical to my young self. With the introduction of the term metaphysical poet, I have rediscovered its original meaning. With a little logic, the two definitions, both in their own way, can be construed as correct. After all, as Merleau-Ponty says, "poetry… is essentially a variety of existence."
When we read or take in any sensory information, our dendrites create chemical pathways. So, any one memory is not stored in a cell, per se, but in a series of connections deep within the brain. This chemically neurological factor will allow for both definitions.
The term metaphysical has undergone a radical ideological transformation in its everyday use since its inception and since it was utilized for poetry and prose writers in the 1600s. The first instance of this term, literally meaning after the physics, is found in the title of Aristotle’s treatise on first principles that followed his work on physics. Later, Samuel Johnson coined the term metaphysical poet in his Life of Cowley, writing, "about the beginning of the seventeenth century appeared a race of writers that may be termed metaphysical poets." He borrowed this term from Dryden, and before Dryden the term was used by Drummond of Hawthornden who wrote of poets who make use of "Metaphysical Ideas and Scholastical Quiddities".
In addition to its root-based and original definition of something "based on speculative or abstract reasoning", the term metaphysical, in the 21st century idiom, also signifies, as in the joke, the immaterial and supernatural. In this paper, I will make the term metaphysical undergo a reclamation of meaning by dissecting the term from a phenomenological perspective, and then sewing it back together by example into its "fine and witty" self.
The simple definition of a metaphysical poem is one marked by conceits. A conceited poem is not one that would have a title like "You’re So Vain, You Probably Think This Paper is About You", but one that contains an extended or exaggerated metaphor or simile. In the language of the contemporaries of the 17th century metaphysical poets this poetry was defined by "strong lines." Lines, in this case, mean lines of logic or reasoning, strands of thought that run through the piece, holding it together, as it were, like a sartorial thread.
The reader must unravel the poem. In 1591, Anthony Bacon, when recommending Sir Henry Savile’s translation of Tacitus, extolled Tacitus because he "hath written the most matter with the best conceit in the fewest words of any Historiographer", and followed with "But he is hard. Difilicia quae pulchra; the second reading will please thee more than the first, and the third than the second." The direction of poetry, therefore, became one of "More matter and less words."
With respect to these ancients, the poetry of the time turns denser, more tightly interlaced, and, in most cases, more brief. This concentration of style can be seen in both the poetry of Ben Jonson and of John Donne. One of the more apt descriptions of the style is "sinewy". From the metaphor of the threaded argument, we now turn to a metaphor of exposed musculature. Indeed, the well-written and well-thought out conceits of these poems can be seen as a complex body. In doing so, we can find its "soul". In Maurice Merleai-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception, he states, "It is well known that a poem, though it has a superficial meaning translatable into prose, leads, in the reader’s mind, a further existence which makes a poem."
This brings the reader to the second characteristic of metaphysical poetry, its use of conceits. This is where density of words combines with density of thought. A conceit is an extended metaphor or "comparison whose ingenuity is more striking than its justness, or, at least, is more immediately striking."
Long conceits set a task of proving the likeness to the reader. John Donne’s A Valediction: forbidding mourning introduces the conceit of two lovers being a compass, where, in this case, his wife was the fixed foot. This excerpt reveals his conceit:
If they be two, they are two so
As stiffe twin compasses are two,
Thy soule the fixt foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if the’other doe.
And though it in the center sit,
Yet when the other far doth rome,
It leanes, and hearkens after it,
And growes erect, as it comes home.
Such wilt thou be to mee, who must
Like th’other foot, obliquely runne;
They firmness makes my circle just,
And makes me end, where I begunne.
The method of the conceit is obvious, as described by Donne, and quite visual. While the reader must admit the connection between the relationship and the compass, at the same time, the reader will keep in mind the "unlikeness." It is the dual nature of these conceits that allows the term metaphysical to claim its modern meaning. The connection is immaterial, perhaps beyond natural, but quite real, as is represented in the feeling and notions felt by the reader. That which unites the dual meaning is the metaphorical correlation inherent in the metaphysical poetry.
But this knowledge must be worked out. In the words of Dame Helen Gardner, "It does not attempt to attract the lazy and its lovers have always a certain sense of being in a privileged class, able to enjoy what is beyond the reach of vulgar wits." In a phenomenological way, the conceit hits home in a more deserved manner.
Neurologically, the chemical pathways in the brain that determine memory are more rigorously utilized while reading metaphysical poetry, and, in the case of repeated readings, the pathways are continually redefined. Therefore, the memory is more permanent. The moment of "aha," more sublime. These poems use language in such a way that "the existential modulation, instead of being dissipated at the very instant of its expression, finds in poetic art a means of making itself eternal." It is this characteristic, as reflected and magnified by the seventeenth century metaphysical poets, that allows both definitions of metaphysical to be used in its description.

First Poetic Response: Omar Khayyam

2007-06-07T05:44:00.001-07:00

The road to Khayyam started with Forough Farokhzad. She was an Iranian poet writing in the sixties, who changed the face of Persian poetry by adding the one aspect that had been missing for 2500 years: the female voice. Unfortunately, she died rather young but her works still echoes its peace-seeking refrains through all of the Middle East.
Looking at her influences, I saw that of Omar Khayyam, a mathematician/poet of the late 11th century. He died in 1123 AD. According to Paramhansa Yogananda, from a relatively young age he was allotted a pension from Sultan Malik Shah that allowed him to devote himself to scientific and literary pursuits.
He was a Sufi mystic. "His ‘theology’ was no reasoned system, but encompassed all religions as well as no religion – that is to say, though he loved God, he embraced no formal religion.
The book I have is translated by Edward Fitzgerald, English poet and translator, born 1809, died 1883. The first translation was not well received until the poet Dante Gabriel Rosetti and Swinburne touted it. "Omar offers a delightful alternative: the nectar of divine ecstasy, which leads to diving enlightenment, thereby obliterating human woe permanently."
His greatest work was "The Rubaiyat" or The Quatrains. Of these, I will relate a few of my favorites:
{46} For in and out, above, about, below
‘Tis nothing but a Magic Shadow-show,
Play’d in a Box whose Candle is the Sun,
Round which we Phantom figures come and go.
Commentary: This quatrain directly questions the nature of reality. The everyday we take for granted is but a shadow aspect of the true nature of the universe. The delicacy of style renders the reader wholly incapable of feigning disdain.
{45} But leave the Wise to wrangle, and with me
The Quarrel of the Universe let be:
And, in some corner of the Hubbub coucht,
Make Game of that which make as much of Thee
Commentary: Awesome!! The "Wise" are but those that think themselves so. No one should take things seriously because not only is life but a "Hubbub", we are the game-players, too.
These translations are easily read for they rhyme as did the originals, but they also take a lifetime to unravel. These are but two of my very favorites, and ones that I believe everyone should be aware of. The others include many more metaphorical references as to the nature of creation. The sixty-plus quatrains each shed light on some aspect of the human condition. For this, Omar Khayyam must be commended.

We Live in Interesting Times

2007-06-07T05:42:00.000-07:00

When my brother came back from the first Gulf War, he slept with his eyes open. And you did not sneak up on him, under any circumstance. He had been on the front line, first troop into Kuwait, with a few "kills" under his belt. Though he had never seen the faces of those that he had killed, shooting them in the dark from a good distance, he had killed. And when he came back, he was a little different. More religious. More hard. And very cautious.
I know (gods willing and the creek don’t rise) that I will (probably) never have to kill a man, but if I do, I know that I wouldn’t want to see his face while I do it. I am not humanly evolved enough to lay down my life without a fight, and not medically informed enough to just wound a man instead of going for the kill shot. And that is the nature of war. My brother never saw the faces of the men he killed, but imagine if he had. What dreams would he have then? What if he had killed an innocent in the line of fire? Would he think it an acceptable loss?
We, the civilians, cannot possibly understand the horrors of war or even the brainwashing involved when the new recruits go through boot camp. They are reduced to cogs, called maggots and dirt, not even good enough to die for their country. Then they are built back up, made honorable by duty and medals and hardship and brotherhood. Then they are good enough to die. They are never told that they are good enough to live. The Armed Forces of the United States is a factory devoted to making killing machines, and a killing machine must be willing to make the ultimate sacrifice. By the time a soldier gets to the frontline, he is not the same little boy that had gone into the military straight out of high school in order to get the scholarship for college. He is a tool, a deadly weapon, a bomb.
They are told that they are killing for their country, and they are dying for an ideal.
I could write a poem about the atrocities of war, and before I was done I would have used every image I could think of to describe suffering and pain. I would run out of words for blood and flesh. I would run out of ways to describe the screams of mothers and babies. And when I was done, I would have nightmares. Terrible nightmares, but they would be tame compared to the reality of being in a kill or be killed scenario.
There are atrocities in the world that I will never experience. Terrible mutilations and sacrifices in the name of war that I will never have to bear witness to. No one should. Life is sacred. On the individual level, we must be willing to die, to be killed, rather than kill, but that is not in our programming. We are wired for survival. And this is the string that the generals and presidents pull to have an army.
As a nation, it is easy to go to war. The body of the machine is made of men, just millions of cells ready to die, programmed to find death glorious, death from above or death at the hands of a voracious enemy. The thousands of white gravestones at the military cemeteries are supposed to provide comfort to the family. Your son or daughter was one of many to die for their country, the silent stones say. What is one cell in a great body? That we have war at all is the fault of the brain.
Our current government heads are myopic and dim-witted. The president does not know the meaning of his own words. Take for instance the word necessary, which means required and needed. This would mean no other option, but War is not Necessary. War is Obsolete. However, the brain of the machine is rusted and rotten. It keeps forgetting. It will not listen. How do we relate this terror to someone who will not listen? To an entire government that refuses to listen?

"A Kleptomaniac of the Mind" - Poetry Paper

2007-06-07T05:40:00.000-07:00

On Marianne Moore’s explication of the everyday in its interconnected reality

Marianne Moore drew poetic inspiration from every source available to her, filling her many notebooks with "random" sayings, odd facts, curious details, and scientific truths. She had an excitement for the reality of the everyday, and brought these revelations to the fore in her poetry. One of her many leitmotifs is the question of the subjective versus the objective, questioning where the poet ends and the observation begins. This paper will focus on the scientific and analytical inspiration behind Moore’s poetry in a manner that will reveal (with examples from the poem "An Octopus") an evolution of thought behind Moore’s work, developing her poetry into "observations."
Upon reading the first stanza of the poem "An Octopus", we come across an octopus of ice, the nature of which is revealed to us as one of deception based on falsity. It is "deceptively reserved and flat" with "pseudo-podia" or fake feet. It is an "invention" by definition, something which is written of and exists only in reference to the poem. Further relating the speciousness of the octopus we have that, although it is in some places five hundred feet thick, it is of "unimagined delicacy" "misleadingly like lace."
Moore is, of course, relating much more information to the reader than a simple description of a scene, real or imagined. She is expressing her own questioning nature and that of any justly poetic work. In the process of relation and description, the poet utilizes metaphor and other literary devices, much like a scientist must when explaining phenomenon. However, for Moore, problems of semantics arise, explosive as a volcano. We are attacked by what Costello refers to as "particularity of a nonpoetic nature [that] overwhelms association."
The trap is set for the logician/reader. The question evolves as to the true nature of something which cannot necessarily be well-defined. What happens to the reader and poet alike when faced with the problem of subjective discourse?
"Completing a circle,/ you have been deceived." The reader has been reading along, following the chain of logic, when the poet informs the reader that they have been fooled. "You have not progressed at all," she says. It was only a circle, as are all chains of logic that may be connected beginning to end.
She develops the image of "The Goat’s Mirror" for its false reflection. Through this, the poem states one of the problems that surfaces when writing poetry, that in pointing out one fact, conversely, the writer must leave out others. One develops prejudices, perhaps for beauty, or in the case of this writer, for exactness.
The list of elements located in the first section beginning with "vermilion and onyx" is now revealed to be incomplete. Reading further into the structure of the mountain, there is wondrous life, but "concealed in the confusion." We are still dealing with a verisimilitude of an environment with its "waterfall that never seems to fall." After this, we have a confession that seems to come directly from the poet, the true "fear of being stoned as an impostor." Can the reader be "happy seeing nothing?"
It is never truly known to a writer if the audience of the poem gets every little detail and is able to put it together in their minds in the same way that the poet intended. Doubt rules. She returns to fear, but does not get wedged into this needling idea, instead comparing this situation with a similar one faced by Henry James. The poems corrects itself with the line "not decorum, but restraint" which is, to her, the quality required for writing with this type of exactness with relation to the inherent subjectivity of the writing process.
At one end of the spectrum we have every fact and every nuance of existence, including the darkness of the soul, crime and excess. Marianne Moore does not include certain aspects of the scene. In fact, critics argue that she was polite to the point of prudishness, that "there is no sexuality" in the poetry of Marianne Moore. To both sides, she is "first and last a proper lady." But there is science and like science, she evades the crude and improper. She almost says, "Let’s take the fact of it up an octave," bringing the art of exactness in poetry to a celestial level. She espouses "Relentless accuracy" through the "octopus/with its capacity for fact."
Grace Shulmen relates this philosophy of Moore: "set forth in "Poetry" and reiterated throughout her work, the artist may never attain ideal perception, or "the genuine," but it is all in the trying." In the end, we ask ourselves if Marianne Moore did achieve "Neatness of finish!" Knowing the eye would dissect the last lines for exactness, she carefully chose and placed each word with, yes, neatness. She is nice, as in precise.
From the great to the little, we small humans as readers are placed in direct contrast to the grandeur of the mountain of poetry, in its wide-reaching scope and voluminous sources of inspiration. In a poem where each word is a gem itself, and the related imagery goes far beyond the readers’ eyes, Moore does indeed help us to realize "the humanized sublime" with her observational dialectics.
Costello, Bonnie. Marianne Moore: Imaginary Possession. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981.
Shulman, Grace. Marianne Moore: The Poetry of Engagement. New York: Paragon House, 1989.
Title from: the class reader, MM and the 17th Century Prose

An Information Architectural Destiny

2007-06-07T05:38:00.000-07:00

We hold these truths to be self-evident, which means obvious.
That everything is Everything being connected to everything else…that in fact, there is nothing else, but that everything requires some definition.
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A list of definitions will help the matter of is-ness. We define in two ways. Saying what something is and saying what something is not.

Sometimes the lines are ambiguous, but ultimately decisions are made and these each have a ripple effect into other realms of society.

For example, Where do YOU end?
Your fingers, maybe, and your toes. And your hair, at those split ends are you split? Perhaps that’s your answer. And that’s it.
Well, what about your stomach? It’s inside you, right. The food inside it, that came from outside of you, through digestion becomes you, your muscles, your blood. So sometimes you are food. And your lungs occupy the inside of your chest, right. And the air inside them, that came from outside of you, through the alveoli enters your bloodstream. So sometimes you are air.

So where do you end? At the skin? Don’t be silly. What about the air and the food and the drink and whatever else that was?

Or maybe you are like Superman’s outfit, magically indestructible because it was within one centimeter of his body. Do you end one centimeter from your body?
Does the idea that "Any part of you can be taken out of you" scare you? Maybe you’ll say that they can’t take my heart, but you know that’s wrong even before you say it. The heart is an organ with a plastic equivalent. Oh, but they can’t take out your brain and replace it with a new one. Nope, not yet. They can take out most pieces though. Are you a brain stem?
So you are a little self inside of the Big Es Self.

We want to know "How do actions affect the world from the one-person reality?"

My belief is as follows: The way to happiness is (and we all want to be happy, even if your happiness is monastic) BEING fully conscious of circumstance. No man is an island. Let’s say being happy to you, in the small sense, is (the American dream): a family, a car, a home, and money enough to secure food and all the necessities. More specifically, you would want a happy family, a happy home, a happy car, and happy money. Why? Could you be happy when your spouse is crying or your children are screaming? If that is your happiness, then please throw this away and don’t tell anyone about it. In fact, please shut yourself in a cave somewhere, for my sake. Make me happy.
So happiness in the general locale of your being is important for you to be happy. Well, then everything sort of echoes out like rings in a pond and for the people around those other people to be happy, then the people around them have to be happy. And so on. You’ve seen the opposite happen everyday. Some coworker is cut off in traffic while driving to work. So, he’s pissy and takes it out on the secretary when she walks in. Then she sends out an e-mail about how crappy Bob is with a funny photoshopped picture of Bob at the company picnic with devil horns. Then someone ccs it to Bob and he goes home and beats his wife, who slaps the kids, who kick the dog. Happens every day.

Treat your fellow human brother like your arm, like an organ because he is a part of you. And also, something that is not you.