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GDC Vault -- Raph Koster: Social Mechanics for Social Games [SOGS Design]

Human Action vs Repetition Compulsion @ 47:47: "The truth is, players change the rules [of a game or society or community] as they go. So there's this reflexive action... And the kinds of problems that players attempt to solve are, frankly, intractable and impossible to solve. The brain loves intractable and impossible-to-solve problems; these then become [*laughs*] high-retention devices." -- Monkey doh!

psychology engagement gaming rituals sociology socialdesign thegamingofeverydaylife RaphKoster reflexivity metagaming *
11 weeks ago by adamcrowe

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Wikipedia -- Thomas theorem

'The definition of the situation is a fundamental concept in symbolic interactionism advanced by the American sociologist W. I. Thomas. It is a kind of collective agreement between people on the characteristics of a situation, and from there, how to appropriately react and fit into it. "If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.” In other words, the interpretation of a situation causes the action. This interpretation is not objective. Actions are affected by subjective perceptions of situations. Whether there even is an objectively correct interpretation is not important for the purposes of helping guide individuals' behavior. "The situations that men define as true, become true for them."'

sociology reflexivity consensus consensusreality herd standalonecomplex magick
january 2012 by adamcrowe

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YouTube -- Social Psychology Lecture, Matthew Lieberman: UCLA: 10.06.09

"Culture is about a large group of people having a set of shared, chronically accessible, constructs."

psychology bias herd collectiveunconscious culture reflexivity
december 2011 by adamcrowe

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YouTube -- Richard Dawkins: Nicholas Humphrey Interview 3/4

"Presumably, the more you pay, the more effective it is." "That has been established for a long time in psychotherapy."

psychology placebo reflexivity psychotherapy shaminism
december 2011 by adamcrowe

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Washington Post -- The Nocebo Effect: Placebo's Evil Twin

'"Surgeons are wary of people who are convinced that they will die," said Herbert Benson, a Harvard professor and the president Mind/Body Medical Institute in Boston. "There are examples of studies done on people undergoing surgery who almost want to die to re-contact a loved one. Close to 100 percent of people under those circumstances die."'

psychology nocebo placebo reflexivity
december 2011 by adamcrowe

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Ribbonfarm -- Technology and the Baroque Unconscious

'...since interchangeability limits the need for communication among collaborating makers, refinement of component technologies can progress much faster... You could say that work previously achieved by communication among makers is now achieved via communication among artifacts. A high-tolerance part can serve a low-tolerance function, but not vice versa. Economies of scale then kick in and dictate that many components become more refined than they need to be, for typical artifacts that make use of them. The result is that systems gradually get more refined than they functionally need to based on immediate intentions. The needs of a few artifacts drive the refinement levels in all technologies. This creates a refinement surplus. Exploitation of this refinement surplus is fundamentally what creates the predictable “growth” in industrial age Schumpeterian creative destruction. But it isn’t the intent to exploit that drives the evolution. It is a collective unconscious drive to exhaust possibilities and find limits, independent of any specific need. The most high-impact technologies of the day are almost never whatever the wisdom of the day identifies as the most potentially useful ones. They are the ones that can spread most rapidly through The One Machine, mopping up refinement surplus. So the best and brightest flock to Facebook or Google, and cancer remains uncured.'

technology temes #specialization reflexivity kipple
november 2011 by adamcrowe

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The University Record -- Early death is linked to the tendency to 'catastrophize,' according to U-M study

'The tendency to "catastrophize" about bad events, projecting them across many realms of life, foreshadows an untimely death decades later. When the subjects were young adults, they were asked a series of questions about the bad events they had experienced so far, including any major disappointments, failures, losses, serious personal faults or character flaws. Their answers were analyzed and coded to reflect any tendencies toward self-blame, fatalism and catastrophizing – the three major explanatory styles identified by the researchers. After obtaining death certificates or information about the cause of death from relatives, the researchers analyzed the association between explanatory style and mortality from various causes. Only the tendency to catastrophize – to see the bad that happens to you as part of a pervasive pall of evil and pain that happens to everyone, everywhere – was linked to an increased risk of dying before the age of 65. According to Peterson, the findings suggest that catastrophizing about bad events might be hazardous because of its link with poor problem-solving, social estrangement and risky decision-making in diverse settings. "Deaths due to accident or violence are often not random," Peterson says. "'Being in the wrong place at the wrong time' may be the result of a pessimistic lifestyle. And a lifestyle in which you're less likely to avoid or escape potentially hazardous situations is one route from pessimism to an untimely death."'

psychology selfattack repetitioncompulsion catastrophizing fatalism reflexivity
october 2011 by adamcrowe

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Why Startup Hubs Work by Paul Graham

'Instead of thinking of most places as being sprayed with startupicide, it's more accurate to think of startups as all being poisoned, and a few places being sprayed with the antidote. The antidote is people. Many observers have noticed that one of the most distinctive things about startup hubs is the degree to which people help one another out, with no expectation of getting anything in return. To make a startup hub, you need a lot of people interested in startups. ...once you have enough people interested in the same problem, they start to set the social norms. Incidentally, this phenomenon is not limited to startups. Most unusual ambitions fail, unless the person who has them manages to find the right sort of community.'

feedback reflexivity resilience
october 2011 by adamcrowe

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The Last Psychiatrist -- Crazy

'From McKee: "Story begins when an event, either by human decision or accident in the universe, radically upsets the balance of forces in the protagonist's life, arousing in that character the need to restore the balance of life. To do so, that character will conceive of an "Object of Desire," that which they [believe] they need to put life back into balance. They will then go off into their world, into themselves, in the various dimensions of their existence, seeking that Object of Desire ... and they will struggle against forces of antagonism that will come from their own inner natures as human beings, their relationships with other human beings, their personal and/or social life, and the physical environment itself. They may or may not achieve that Object of Desire; they may or may not finally be able to restore their life to a satisfying balance." -- Everything that happens in your life is digested by you through this process, so it would be worth your time to memorize it.'

psychology psychoanalysis psychotherapy storytelling mythology mecosystem fantasy reflexivity narrativefallacy from delicious
july 2011 by adamcrowe

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Socionomics Institute -- Sociometrics: Applying Socionomic Causality to Social Forecasting

'Social action is the eventual result of social mood change, not the cause of social mood change. Cautious businessmen cause recession. A happy population makes leaders appear talented. Depressed and fearful people are susceptible to epidemics. Increasingly optimistic people make the stock market rise. Outraged people seek out scandals. A desire to speculate fosters the availability of derivatives. Fearful and angry people make war. People who want to smile choose happy music. Nervous people test nuclear bombs. -- A Temporal Continuum of Socionomic Response: Socionomic actions fall along an open-ended continuum of delay following the initial impetus from social mood, from immediate (e.g. stock market trends) through intermediate (e.g. styles of popular entertainment) to eventual (e.g. climates of peace and war). This continuum makes earlier sociometers leading indicators of later ones, which is one source of their utility. ...there is no leading indicator of social mood itself.'

economics socionomics herd reflexivity panarchy from delicious
july 2011 by adamcrowe

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Wired -- Sharing Information Corrupts Wisdom of Crowds

'Members of the crowd ought to have a variety of opinions, and to arrive at those opinions independently. Take those away, and crowd intelligence fails, as evidenced in some market bubbles. The researchers attributed this to three effects. The first they called “social influence”: Opinions became less diverse. The second effect was “range reduction”: In mathematical terms, correct answers became clustered at the group’s edges. Exacerbating it all was the “confidence effect,” in which students became more certain about their guesses. “The truth becomes less central if social influence is allowed,” wrote Lorenz and Rahut, who think this problem could be intensified in markets and politics — systems that rely on collective assessment. “Opinion polls and the mass media largely promote information feedback and therefore trigger convergence of how we judge the facts,” they wrote. The wisdom of crowds is valuable, but used improperly it “creates overconfidence in possibly false beliefs.”'

collectiveintelligence collectiveunintelligence groupthink feedback reflexivity homogeneity from delicious
may 2011 by adamcrowe

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Wired -- Real-Time Debate Feedback Distorts Democracy

'...debates are more than opportunities to hear candidates present views and policy. They’re intellectual boxing matches. People like keeping score. There are, however, reasons to be suspicious of the graphs, known as “worms” in colloquial reference to their squiggling path across TV screens. Many studies describe how people are influenced by what others think, especially when they’ve yet to form an opinion of their own. It seems to be instinctive: Motivated to be accurate, we take others’ assessments of reality into account, whether we want to or not. (As an example, just think how much easier it is to laugh at a joke when it’s followed by laughter.) -- Manipulative effect could also be measured even in test subjects who said they didn’t pay attention to the worm, and couldn’t remember whom it tended to favor. “The worm’s influence may be quite difficult for viewers to discount,” wrote Davis and Memon.' -- How many fingers, Winston?

kipple data realtime polling reflexivity groupthink consensusreality from delicious
april 2011 by adamcrowe

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Be Slightly Evil -- Status 101

'There are four status patterns: feeling low, playing low (LL) [Victims], feeling low, playing high (LH) [Abusers], feeling high, playing low (HL) [Friend-seekers], feeling high, playing high (HH) [Power-seekers]. Status is a variable whose importance is a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you gravitate to preferred locked-status patterns, then you will expend energy preserving those patterns. You can be manipulated. Status matters if it matters. Conversely, if status doesn't matter to you, it becomes available to you as a situational control variable when dealing with those to whom status does matter. We all start out in a locked-status mode, but if you start breaking locked felt-played patterns then a curious thing happens: felt status of any sort weakens. Turns out felt status needs the nourishment of being hooked to a projected (and perceived-as-hoped and validated) status in order to survive. If felt status starts to vanish altogether, leaving a sort of "status vacuum" inside you.'

emotionalintelligence status masks projectiveidentification reflexivity
march 2011 by adamcrowe

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YouTube -- TEDxUIUC: Sherry Turkle - Alone Together

"We can't get enough of each other IF we can have each other at a distance in amounts that we can control." -- "Things go from: I have a feeling, I want to make a call; to: I want to have a feeling, I need to send a text. In other words, the validation of a feeling becomes part of establishing it."

psychology media technology temes behaviours ambientintimacy control narcissism feedback reflexivity addiction SherryTurkle from delicious
march 2011 by adamcrowe

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Dubberly Design Office -- Ability-centered Design: From Static to Adaptive Worlds

'A new order of systems is emerging, that adapt to the worlds in which they play a part. Although the form they take varies widely from example to example, these systems all have in common some means for: #1. “perceiving” two or more states of the environment in which they are embedded; #2. creating, based on these perceptions, a “model” of the environment around them; and #3. adapting, based on this model, in a fashion to best meet the performance objectives of the system in the face of a changing environment. This need not be a one-shot event—it can occur continuously over time. Dynamically co-constructed adaptive worlds give both creators and consumers the ability to design or improvise new activities that honor specific abilities as they emerge. In an adaptive world, objects and processes modify themselves based on information gleaned from people, either through sensing or explicit input.' -- Quadrant: Carbon—Silicon [Operator—Machine]; Doing—Understanding [Diegetic—Non-diegetic?]

design narrativeobjects narrativeenvironments narrativeacts holodeck everyware emergence feedback feedforward extradiegesis metadiegesis probabilityspace possibilityspace reflexivity from delicious
march 2011 by adamcrowe

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STANFORD Magazine -- Digital Immersion

'Psychiatrist Aboujaoude says that immersion in gaming runs the risk that a player begins to believe that behaviors acceptable in a game might also pass offline: Heavy gamers may develop an offline persona with the swagger and bravado of their avatars. "It also becomes easier to lose perspective on one's divergent priorities: the need to perform well as a favorite game character or as an accomplished player versus the need to function as a responsible adult. It's all one big life with one big 'cumulative' score, the faulty justification goes, and if we are breaking records in an online game, we may feel, in aggregate, responsible and productive enough, and thus allow for some gross negligence elsewhere in life." -- "Addictions happen when people are trying to control their emotional state. You find something that makes you feel better and then you want more of it, but then there is emptiness in the payoff."

psychology technology temes virtuality simulation behaviours extensionsofman centralnervoussystem control feedback addiction reflexivity grandiosity thegamingofeverydaylife from delicious
january 2011 by adamcrowe

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Wikipedia -- Projective identification

'Projective identification ... designates a psychological process in which a person engages in the ego defense mechanism projection in such a way that their behavior towards the object of projection invokes in that person precisely the thoughts, feelings or behaviors projected. Projective identification differs from simple projection in that projective identification is a self-fulfilling prophecy, whereby a person, believing something false about another, relates to that other person in such a way that the other person alters their behavior to make the belief true. The second person is influenced by the projection and begins to behave as though he or she is in fact actually characterized by the projected thoughts or beliefs. This is a process that generally happens outside the awareness of both parties involved, though this has been debated.' -- Predations upon those of a guilty conscience. Hence the grifters motto: You can't cheat an honest man.

psychology conscience guilt defencemechanisms projection projectiveidentification masochism selfattack slavespeak goodthink reflexivity magick sin poisoncontainer predation pathocracy psychohistory from delicious
december 2010 by adamcrowe

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NYTimes.com -- Wall St. Computers Read the News, and Trade on It

'In some cases, the computers are actually parsing writers’ words, sentence structure, even the odd emoticon. A wink and a smile — ;) — for instance, just might mean things are looking up for the markets. Then, often without human intervention, the programs are interpreting that news and trading on it. Many of the robo-readers look beyond the numbers and try to analyze market sentiment, that intuitive feeling investors have about the markets. Like the latest economic figures, news and social media buzz — “unstructured data,” as it is known — can shift the mood from exuberance to despondency. ...about 35 percent of quantitative trading firms are exploring whether to use unstructured data feeds. Two years ago, about 2 percent of those firms used them. Last May, as Greece’s financial crisis deepened, Wall Street computers seized on a news story with the word “abyss” in the headline and initiated sell orders, according to industry experts.' -- The open sky doesn't hinder the passing cloud.

daemon blackboxes algorithms trading sentiment reflexivity from delicious
december 2010 by adamcrowe

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The Evolution of the Psyche and Society - The Emotional Life of Nations by Lloyd deMause

'In addition to a take-off in economic progress, the modern psychoneurotic personality began to achieve levels of intimacy between men and women that were simply unknown to previous psychoclasses. When mothers were incestuous, it was not surprising that women were feared as sexually insatiable by men, and pederasty and rape were preferred to intimate, married love. All women were in danger of turning into dominating mothers and therefore had to be beaten; Homer’s word for ‘wife,’ damar, means "broken into submission." In addition, that women throughout so much of history were accused of being unable to restrain their sexual appetites was not just a patriarchal myth—it was more the result of the widespread rape of young girls being restaged later in life, just as so many raped girls today grow up to repeat their sexual assaults later on in prostitution or adultery.'

psychohistory parenting childhood abuse selfattack reflexivity women prostitution patriarchy masochism from delicious
november 2010 by adamcrowe

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The Last Psychiatrist -- Advertising's Hidden Second Message

'...advertising isn't our window on society, it is society's window on individuals... It isn't about being white or being a guy, but about the class of people who have inherited the earth and then withdrawn from it, leaving it to entropy. Those people are the privileged middle aged – the Dumbest Generation of Narcissists In The History Of The World, and society hates you. Society is disgusted by all of you, even as you are disgusted by it. But look up at the ads, the ones who have to suffer for it are the next generation. The ones you suffocate with your physical presence. ...the larger point is that everyone around you feels your apathy, it senses that you are zombies going through life, you would much rather be elsewhere. Like on your phone. That withdrawal from reality has not gone unnoticed – not by your kids or your spouse... ...the problem is you. It is always you. And unless you change that thing first, everything else will be futile.'

* psychiatry statism emasculation infantilism narcissism relativism learnedhelplessness apathy advertising reflexivity culture parenting babyboomers intergenerationalwarfare psychohistory psychology from delicious
november 2010 by adamcrowe

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Adam Curtis Blog -- FROM PIGEON TO SUPERMAN AND BACK AGAIN

'The idea of "nudging" citizens to do the right thing sounds cute. But in reality it marks the return of a powerful psycho-political theory that rose up in the mid-20th century. It was called Behaviourism. ...who decides what is "good" behaviour, and what happens when others decide it is bad[?] These are questions that the Nudge enthusiasts seem to be blithely unaware of. ...the old behaviourist ideas and techniques will be helped and reinforced by a powerful ally – the machines we have built. The computers. In our age of individualism we see computers as ways through which we can express our individuality. But the truth is that the computers are really good at spotting the very opposite. The computers can see how similar we are, and they then have the ability to agglomerate us together into groups that have the same behaviours. And from that they can predict what choices and decisions we will make. And they do it solely through our observed behaviour.'

statism government behaviorism paternalism nudge mindcontrol socialengineering technoutopianism technocracy abravenewworld quantifiedself demographics psychographics class reflexivity theadvertisedlife conformity hierarchy thegamingofeverydaylife rewards soma documentaries AdamCurtis psychology from delicious
november 2010 by adamcrowe

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The Automatic Earth presents: Stoneleigh's A Century of Challenges

Pay-walled. Recommended. -- When a pyramid scheme nears its inevitable end... "...the public insist on being handed the empty bag because they think they're going to make money, they want in on the game, everyone else has been making money, they feel left out so they insist on buying these things at the peak, and they are the ones who lose everything."

* civilization plutocracy wealth money economics oil energy finance reflexivity markets herd consensusreality pyramid ponzi bubble greaterfool peakoil credit inflation realestate speculation debt hologram deflation biflation negativeequity crackupboom greatestdepression collapse systems resilience communities localisation socialnetworking darknets NicoleFoss retribalization from delicious
october 2010 by adamcrowe

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The Last Psychiatrist -- How To Be Powerful, And Why You Are Not

'That shame is the result of faking it, of putting on an identity that isn't really you (I'm powerful) and having it exposed (rejected.) The solution is to not fake it. That doesn't mean not try, that means instead of sitting up straight before the presentation, sit up straight all the time. At least train your body to naturally adopt what your mind is too nervous/self-conscious to do. If this study is at all representative of the truth, it means that eventually you will physically change into the person your body is pretending to be.'

psychology bodylanguage posture reflexivity embodiedcognition masks emotionalintelligence
october 2010 by adamcrowe

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3 Quarks Daily -- How Supermodels Are like Toxic Assets by Ashley Mears

'In the language of economic sociology, options are performative; they create what they putatively just describe. In other words, the models have agency (that’s market models we’re talking about, not the fashion models, heaven’s no!). Options enable investors to anticipate other investors’ actions, which spurs herding behavior, where actors decide to disregard their own information (i.e., “That Coco Rocha, urgh!”) and imitate instead the decisions taken by others before them (but Russell Marsh optioned her). Herding and cascades are rather problematic to financial markets; they leads investors to artificially bid up asset values... because investors, like fashionistas, react to each other as well as to the aggregate traces of fellow investors’ actions (captured well in signaling instruments like options), they exacerbate systemic risk. Essentially, valuing financial goods is a matter of trying to be in fashion, which is a gamble.'

economics markets options signalling reflexivity fashion success feedback mimesis herd consenus consensusreality trends consensus from delicious
july 2010 by adamcrowe

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The New York Times -- 'Excuse Me. May I Have Your Seat?'

'Dismissing his students' fears, Dr. Milgram set out to try it himself. But when he approached his first seated passenger, he found himself frozen. "The words seemed lodged in my trachea and would simply not emerge." Retreating, he berated himself: 'What kind of craven coward are you?" A few unsuccessful tries later, he managed to choke out a request. "Taking the man's seat, I was overwhelmed by the need to behave in a way that would justify my request. My head sank between my knees, and I could feel my face blanching. I was not role-playing. I actually felt as if I were going to perish." Those tension-filled subway rides in the spring of 1972 are still easily recalled by many of Dr. Milgram's former students scattered across the country. "I really did feel sick to my stomach," said Dr. Krogh, remembering her first attempt. "Afterwards, I thought, 'I wonder if that wasn't helpful because the person must have thought: "This person looks sick. She needs the seat."'"

psychology status reflexivity
june 2010 by adamcrowe

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Vanity Fair -- Betting on the Blind Side

“I hated discussing ideas with investors,” he said, “because I then become a Defender of the Idea, and that influences your thought process." Once you became an idea’s defender, you had a harder time changing your mind about it. -- [Being diagnosed with Aspergers Syndrome] explained an awful lot about what he did for a living, and how he did it: his obsessive acquisition of hard facts, his insistence on logic, his ability to plow quickly through reams of tedious financial statements. People with Asperger’s couldn’t control what they were interested in. It was a stroke of luck that his special interest was financial markets and not, say, collecting lawn-mower catalogues. When he thought of it that way, he realized that complex modern financial markets were as good as designed to reward a person with Asperger’s who took an interest in them. “Only someone who has Asperger’s would read a subprime-mortgage-bond prospectus,” he said.'

economics finance subprime realestate bubble CDS hedgefunds investing aspergers MichaelBurry reflexivity
april 2010 by adamcrowe

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The Daily Bell -- Happy Days Are Here Again?

'"It's BULLISH No Matter What!" -- We are most interested in Bruce C.'s response because it skillfully expressed a singular dominant social theme – that once past the initial crash, stocks are continually ON THE MEND in any recession. This is a most important power elite promotion, and an inevitable one. Facts are not allowed to stand in the way. Difficulties are to be minimized or ignored. Perception is all. If the market itself is not cooperating, central banks can always print more money and in various ways inject that paper into equities, which are inevitably seen as a bellwether of recovery (rightly or not). No matter what the news, it must be interpreted as a positive for the market – in the hopes of generating a self-fulfilling prophecy. The longevity of a central banking regime may in fact depend on controlling perceptions. Let people believe that the "bust" may be nearly as long as the boom and the credibility of the system is gradually dissipated.'

economics america stocks happytalk forcedmemes reflexivity sunkcosts truebelieversyndrome
april 2010 by adamcrowe

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CNN.com -- Amid furor, Pentagon kills terrorism futures market (2003)

'Facing an outcry on Capitol Hill, the Pentagon on Tuesday killed a program that would have had investors betting on the likelihood of terrorist attacks and assassinations. "I can't believe that anybody would seriously propose that we trade in death ... How long would it be before you saw traders investing in a way that would bring about the desired result?"'

weapons markets predictionmarkets reflexivity realityprogramming thegamingofeverydaylife
march 2010 by adamcrowe

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psychobabble -- Be careful how you interpret the world...

"Be careful how you interpret the world; it is like that." -- Erich Heller

reflexivity quotes
march 2010 by adamcrowe

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Wikipedia -- George Soros: Concept of Reflexivity

'...where the biases of individuals enter into market transactions, potentially changing the perception of fundamentals of the economy. -- A current example of reflexivity in modern financial markets is that of the debt and equity of housing markets. Lenders began to make more money available to more people in the 1990s to buy houses. More people bought houses with this larger amount of money, thus increasing the prices of these houses. Lenders looked at their balance sheets which not only showed that they had made more loans, but that their equity backing the loans—the value of the houses, had gone up (because more money was chasing the same amount of housing, relatively). Thus they lent out more money because their balance sheets looked good... This was further amplified by public policy. Many governments see home ownership as a positive outcome and so [grant first home owners with financial subsidies such as the exemption of a primary residence from capital gains taxation.]'

economics land realestate landcycle speculation bubble hysteria bias malinvestment delusion reflexivity GeorgeSoros
march 2010 by adamcrowe

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Mssv -- Can a Game Save the World?

'If we develop games that make people rely more and more on external recognition – on achievements and rewards and points – they will not be prepared for when things go badly. Every leader board has the worst player as well as a top player. The way to cope with reverses in life is by developing resilience against the caprices of the world; to determine and internally maintain a steady direction and sense of worth, and to remember past successes and recognition. Yet I fear that the games we are designing, focused on real-time things that other people have decided to measure and reward – will undermine rather than build that resilience. You can design a game that encourages resilience, although it wouldn’t work for everyone, and books and movies might work better for some people. But can you design a game that will save the world? No. The question is meaningless. It is people who save the world, each in their own way, through perspiration as well as inspiration. It is not always fun.'

criticism thegamingofeverydaylife gaming makebelieve reflexivity motivation ownlife demotivation rewards incentives achievements nudge persuasivegames seriousgames ludotopianism peoplearethekillerapp
march 2010 by adamcrowe

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BBC -- The Virtual Revolution: Homo Interneticus?

'Aleks examines the popularity of social networks such as Facebook and asks how they are changing our relationships.' -- Sherry Turkle: "There's a new personality type: It moves from, 'I have a feeling, I want to make a call,' to, 'I want to have a feeling, I need to make a call.' There's a sense in which you almost need a sense of validation and the support of the community to feel the feeling in the first place. Bringing other people into the loop of feeling your feeling, this is very seductive."

internet web cybernetics socialnetworking statusupdates realtime feedback addiction reflexivity literaryculturevsoralculture SherryTurkle documentaries AlexKrotoski psychology narcissism
february 2010 by adamcrowe

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Fortean Times -- The Strange Tale of Solarcon-6

'Undoubtedly, one of the prime reasons why Dick attracted attention from the FBI was a series of bizarre letters he penned to the Bureau in the early 1970s, in which he described his personal knowledge of an alleged underground Nazi cabal that was attempting to covertly manipulate science fiction writers to further advance its hidden cause. And the nature of that cause was even more bizarre: to initiate a Third World War by infecting the American population with syphilis. On 28 October 1972, Dick wrote to the FBI and outlined his distinctly odd beliefs: “I am a well-known author of science fiction novels, one of which dealt with Nazi Germany (called MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE, it described an ‘alternate world’ in which the Germans and Japanese won World War Two and jointly occupied the United States)."'

sciencefiction alternativehistory irrealism predictiveprogramming conspiracy liminality reflexivity PKD
february 2010 by adamcrowe

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YouTube -- Adam Curtis: Richard Nixon

"This is a film about how all of us have become Richard Nixon. Just like him, we've all become paranoid weirdos. It's the story of how television and newspapers did this to us and how it has paralyzed the ability of politics to transform the world for the better."

history journalism politics paranoia fear reflexivity documentaries AdamCurtis
february 2010 by adamcrowe

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BBC -- Gaze 'key to facial attraction'

'You can alter your attraction to the opposite sex simply by looking straight at them and smiling, research suggests. The researchers wrote: "Mating effort is a finite resource that should be allocated judiciously, and preferences for direct gaze in opposite-sex faces would increase the likelihood of allocating mating effort to potential mates who are most likely to reciprocate." -- "People prefer faces that appear to 'like' them, showing that attraction is not simply about physical beauty." -- " It suggests that how attractive you find someone is governed partly by how likely you are to be successful."

psychology attraction reflexivity
february 2010 by adamcrowe

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NYTimes.com -- Excerpt: ‘You Are Not a Gadget’ (PDF)

'CHAPTER 2: An apocalypse of self-abdication: If you believe the Rapture is imminent, ﬁxing the problems of this life might not be your greatest priority. You might even be eager to embrace wars and tolerate poverty and disease in others to bring about the conditions that could prod the Rapture in to being. In the same way, if you believe the Singularity is coming soon, you might cease to design technology to serve humans, and prepare instead for the grand events it will bring. But in either case, the rest of us would never know if you had been right. The Rapture and the Singularity share one thing in common: they can never be veriﬁed by the living.'

* criticism technology temes manifestdestiny singularity religion cults apocalypse inevitablism fatalism antihumanism reflexivity death irrationality
january 2010 by adamcrowe

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NYTimes.com -- The Americanization of Mental Illness

'...those who minister to the mentally ill inadvertently help to select which symptoms will be recognized as legitimate. ...the forms of madness from one place and time often look remarkably different from the forms of madness in another. That is until recently. ...in the process of teaching the rest of the world to think like us ... we’ve been changing not only the treatments but also the expression of mental illness in other cultures. -- What is being missed is a deep understanding of how the expectations and beliefs of the sufferer shape their suffering. “Culture shapes the way general psychopathology is going to be translated partially or completely into specific psychopathology. When there is a cultural atmosphere in which professionals, the media, schools, doctors, psychologists all recognize and endorse and talk about and publicize [a disorder], then people can be triggered to consciously or unconsciously pick [a] pathology as a way to express that conflict.”'

psychology psychopathology globalization language literacy expectancy reflexivity infection subversion memetics mimesis metastasis
january 2010 by adamcrowe

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NYTimes.com -- Year in Ideas: The Counterfeit Self

'"When one feels like a fake, he or she is likely to behave like a fake." It was notable that the participants were oblivious to this and other similar effects the researchers discovered: the psychological costs of cheap knockoffs are hidden. "... we're not true to ourselves, and we might not realize there might be unintended consequences."'

counterfeit fake fraud selfdeception reflexivity
january 2010 by adamcrowe

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Wikipedia -- Abbas Kiarostami

"We can never get close to the truth except through lying."

reality reflexivity cinema art productnarratives
january 2010 by adamcrowe

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The Last Psychiatrist -- The Limits Of Control: The Movie

'In the last scene, the movie picture appears to jolt suddenly; the only way I can describe it is that it's as if the camera operator started putting the camera down before he turning it off. What's the significance of that jolt? It's in such contrast to the stillness of the rest of the movie. Does it mean it's all a dream? He's killed? What? No, believe it or not, that jolt happens because the camera operator actually did put the camera down before he turned it off. And the director liked the effect.' -- I've *seen* this movie before, but I can't say what it is because the comment above would ruin it for you, though I'm keen to recommend it. Interesting... I kinda feel art finds you, rather than the other way around, so I'm careful not to intervene but— If you'd like to chance my ruining it for you rather than leaving things to fate: Amazon > Search: "Abbas Kiarostami Close Up" > Add to basket > Checkout > ??? > !!! yw ;^)

art cinema fourthwall productnarratives stage reality simulacra existentialism reflexivity
january 2010 by adamcrowe

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Psychology Today -- Status: a more accurate way of understanding self-esteem

'A sense of increasing status can be more rewarding than money, and a sense of decreasing status can feel like your life is in danger. ...when your perceived sense of status goes up, or down, an intense emotional response results. ...people go to tremendous extremes to increase or protect their status. It operates at an individual and group level, and even at the level of countries. The desire to increase status is behind many of society's greatest achievements and some our darker hours of destruction. People don't like to be wrong because being wrong drops your status, in a way that feels dangerous and unnerving. When you decide you are right, the other person must be wrong, which means you don't listen to what he or she says, and he or she experiences you as a threat too. A vicious cycle emerges. Being "right" is often more important to people than, well, than just about anything else, at the cost of not just money but relationships, health, and sometimes even life itself.'

psychology status selfesteem socialcapital groupthink wrong griefing competition success feedback reflexivity argumentation
november 2009 by adamcrowe

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Promethea -- Notes & Annotations: No Man's Land

Moore: "Before the Age of Reason was announced, humanity had polished strategies for interacting with the world of the imaginary and invisible: complicated magic-systems; sprawling pantheons of gods and spirits, images and names with which we labelled powerful inner forces so that we might better understand them. Intellect, Emotion and Unconscious Thought were made divinities or demons so that we might better know them; deal with them; become them. Ancient cultures did not worship idols. Their god-statues represented ideal states which, when meditated constantly upon, one might aspire to. ...the domain of thought is the one place where gods inarguably exist, wielding tremendous power. The world of ideas is deeper, truer than reality... Ideas do not perish. They remain immortal, immaterial and everywhere, like all Divine things. Ideas are a golden, savage landscape that we wander unaware, without a map. Be careful: in the last analysis, reality may be exactly what we think it is."

ideas ideals archetypes reality reflexivity AlanMoore
november 2009 by adamcrowe

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WSJ.com -- In 'The Greatest Trade Ever,' Gregory Zuckerman Details John Paulson's Big Win

'They met with bankers at Bear Stearns, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, and other firms to ask if they would create securities—packages of mortgages called collateralized debt obligations—that Paulson & Co. could wager against. The investment banks would sell the CDOs to clients who believed the value of the mortgages would hold up. Mr. Paulson would buy CDS insurance on the CDO mortgage investments—a bet that they would fall in value. This way, Paulson could wager against $1 billion or so of mortgage debt in one fell swoop. Some investors later would argue that Mr. Paulson's actions indirectly led to the creation of additional dangerous CDO investments, resulting in billions of dollars of additional losses for those who owned the CDO slices. At the time, though, Mr. Paulson still wasn't sure his trade would work. He simply was buying protection, he said. "We didn't create any securities, we never sold the securities to investors," Paulson said. "We always thought they were bad loans."'

economics land realestate mortgages CDO CDS derivatives insurance speculation reflexivity
november 2009 by adamcrowe

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The Onion -- College Freshman Cycles Rapidly Through Identities

'While students tend to experiment with various identities during their college years, Vanderkamp's peers said the accelerated pace of his process of self-discovery is alarming. Since the beginning of the fall term, Vanderkamp has aligned himself with no fewer than nine social groups, and has adopted a new wardrobe and a distinct set of speech patterns to accompany each identity.'

multitude identity authenticity mimicry reflexivity teens
october 2009 by adamcrowe

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NYTimes.com -- Carl Jung and the Holy Grail of the Unconscious

'Jung worked to prevent his conscious mind from blocking out what his unconscious mind wanted to show him. He worked on his red book on and off for about 16 years, long after his personal crisis had passed, but he never managed to finish it. He actively fretted over it, wondering whether to have it published and face ridicule from his scientifically oriented peers or to put it in a drawer and forget it. -- “I should advise you to put it all down as beautifully as you can—in some beautifully bound book,” Jung instructed. “It will seem as if you were making the visions banal—but then you need to do that—then you are freed from the power of them... Then when these things are in some precious book you can go to the book and turn over the pages and for you it will be your church—your cathedral—the silent places of your spirit where you will find renewal. If anyone tells you that it is morbid or neurotic and you listen to them—then you will lose your soul—for in that book is your soul.”'

psychology psychoanalysis collectiveunconscious consciousness unconsciousness liminality reflexivity CarlJung unconscious self journalling
september 2009 by adamcrowe

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Science Daily -- Reading Kafka Improves Learning, Suggests Psychology Study

"People feel uncomfortable when their expected associations are violated, and that creates an unconscious desire to make sense of their surroundings. That feeling of discomfort may come from a surreal story, or from contemplating their own contradictory behaviors, but either way, people want to get rid of it. So they're motivated to learn new patterns." -- "What is critical here is that our participants were not expecting to encounter this bizarre story. If you expect that you'll encounter something strange or out of the ordinary, you won't experience the same sense of alienation. You may be disturbed by it, but you won't show the same learning ability."' -- *gulps, not wanting to wake up as a bug*

kafkaesque surrealism alienation horror transformation cognition patterns learning psychology mystery liminality reflexivity
september 2009 by adamcrowe

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Derek Sivers -- Kurt Vonnegut explains drama

'Our lives drifts along with normal things happening. Some ups, some downs, but nothing to go down in history about. Nothing so fantastic or terrible that it'll be told for a thousand years. “But because we grew up surrounded by big dramatic story arcs in books and movies, we think are lives are supposed to be filled with huge ups and downs! So people pretend there is drama where there is none.” That's why people invent fights. That's why we're drawn to sports. That's why we act like everything that happens to us is such a big deal. We're trying to make our life into a fairy tale.'

psychology storytelling storygraph drama narrative narrativearchitecture reflexivity
september 2009 by adamcrowe

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Marginal Utility -- Nanostories, etc.

'Online, the action is the tracing of trends and our own statistically determined significance. Twittering, and then seeing what sort of response it provokes, etc. We are never at a loss for an opportunity to try to garner attention, and these efforts are archived, deepening our potential self, even if it is all noise. The internet has given us means to sell ourselves the way products have long been sold to us, and we’ve embraced them, adopting advertising measuring tools as markers of moral value. ...we manage our public meaning like a brand manager, and perfect the art of culture monitoring—meta consumption of media. We begin to consume the buzz about buzz, or pure buzz, with no concern with what it’s about, only whether we can exploit it for self-promotion. ...nanostories, not suprisingly, preserve the status quo, reinforcing our own vanity and self-centeredness along with the market as timeless, unquestionable norm.'

* psychology socialmedia lifecasting statusupdates behaviours attention addiction intermittentvariablerewards popularity status advertising marketing simulacra popculture meta sentiment self narcissism hype quantifiedself analytics boredom ideology reflexivity circumscription theadvertisedlife culture
september 2009 by adamcrowe

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io9 -- Six Theorists Explain What TV Is Doing To Your Mind

'#Simulations, by Jean Baudrillard ...when the world is so saturated by media that people have seen fake versions of things before seeing the things themselves. If you've played thousands of combat videogames, then go to war, are you no longer capable of grasping the truth of what you're experiencing? If you've seen hundreds of "dates" on reality shows, can you ever make a genuine connection with a person you go on dates with? Or will your mind be so fogged by simulation that you are unable to access your true feelings and experiences? Though Simulations is about more than just television, Baudrillard's fears about a media-created reality seem especially relevant to TV (and, today, the internet).' -- Nice discussion on McLuhan in the comments.

media tv theory theoryobjects objects simulation simulacra fake reality reflexivity circumscription themediumisthemassage kipple television
august 2009 by adamcrowe

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Broke: The New American Dream Directed by Michael Covel

'From big Wall Street names to real estate agents to ordinary citizens, Covel asks the critical questions: how did we get here and what can we do about it. "Broke: The New American Dream" also cracks down on the media influence upon money decisions. It takes a hard look at the state lotteries and draws remarkable parallels to our Social Security system. An expose of dangerous financial decision-making and media confusion, "Broke" proposes the right accountability for our actions. This riveting investigation dispels the irrational belief that the government can solve personal money woes. Embarking on the genius of Nobel Prize Winners Harry Markowitz and Vernon Smith, viewers get a big picture beyond the chaos and the noise of stock market news and financial journalism. Most importantly, this film is about hope. We don't have to behave like sheep and we don't have to go 'broke.' Active and mindful audiences will discover that there is a way out.'

economics herd groupthink reflexivity documentaries
august 2009 by adamcrowe

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RWW -- Evolution of a Revolution: Visualizing Millions of Iran Tweets

'...how can a data stream be turned into real-time action, reaching the people who need it, when they need it, and in a form they can easily digest? At the most abstract level, history and computation are the same thing: the evolution of systems over time. Twitter has several remarkable properties that allow us to finally leverage this correspondence in tangible ways. The simplicity of its data, the openness of its system, and its extreme time resolution make it possible for us to detect atoms of history, those moments when something is triggered and society is reconfigured ever so slightly. Simply tracking the volume of various phrases gives us a sense of what is happening on the street, literally and figuratively. But that signal is but a shadow of a far more complex and intricate reality, an interwoven web of individuals and actions. -- Disruptive events lead to information elites.'

* twitter #iranelection socialmedia realtime history data datamining realitymining information propagation visualization networks #bandwidth realityprogramming reflexivity
august 2009 by adamcrowe

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GreenCine -- "A Growing Public Distrust": Adam Curtis

'Curtis: I'll tell you what I think about the neo-conservatives. In a way, I admire them for nostalgic reasons. They are the last revolutionaries - and some of them actually came out of a Trotskyite revolutionary tradition. They are making an awesome attempt to remake and reshape the world, much as Trotsky tried to do in the Russian Revolution, using military power. It's amazing. It has an epic-ness to it. I feel nostalgic for it, in the face of a managerial politics that just seem to want to tweak and adjust its policies to those of the focus groups and the soccer moms. -- ...when it becomes obvious that a lot of this is a constructed fantasy, based often on idealism and not necessarily on conspiracy, there will be a growing public distrust about the very nature of how reality is described to them. ...the neoconservatives have taken us into a philosophical quagmire, which is, "How do you describe reality, how do you make sense of the world? How do you construct it?"'

storytelling metanarratives ideology idealism conspiracy reality realityprogramming reflexivity AdamCurtis
august 2009 by adamcrowe

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White People Must go to Extremes to make a Life Event ’seem meaningful.’

'Life is very hard for most white people, because they are ’so ordinary.’ Their expectations of ‘how things should feel’ are constructed by watching 80s, 90s, and 00s cinema. Mainly movies like bromances, romantic comedies, comedies, and miscellaneous ‘bad ass movies.’ They just need life to ’seem like a movie’ or something. Seems like average white people don’t understand the insignificance of who they are as ‘1 person’, and don’t accept that they are just part of a larger white mass. They fight against this feeling of ‘being ordinary’ by trying to construct meaningful moments that seem like they are ’straight out of a movie.’ Might start a blog about ‘things that average white people think are meaningful’/a documentation of ‘white ppls struggle’ and how ‘we’ as white ppl have had more hardships (psychologically) than most other races + ethnic groups.'

HipsterRunoff authenticity identity reflexivity theadvertisedlife
july 2009 by adamcrowe

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The New Yorker -- Cocksure: Banks, battles, and the psychology of overconfidence by Malcolm Gladwell

'...this is what competition does to all of us; because ability makes a difference in competitions of skill, we make the mistake of thinking that it must also make a difference in competitions of pure chance. This is what social scientists mean when they say that human overconfidence can be an adaptive trait. “In conflicts involving mutual assessment, an exaggerated assessment of the probability of winning increases the probability of winning.” “Selection therefore favors this form of overconfidence.” Winners know how to bluff. And who bluffs the best? The person who, instead of pretending to be stronger than he is, actually believes himself to be stronger than he is. From an individual perspective, it is hard to distinguish between the times when excessive optimism is good and the times when it isn’t. All that we can say unequivocally is that overconfidence is, as Wrangham puts it, “globally maladaptive.'

psychology control bluffing confidence reflexivity delusion hubris simulation gaming bridge MalcolmGladwell
july 2009 by adamcrowe

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Ribbonfarm -- Personal Brands, Identity and Perception Management

#5 Search for Authenticity: If you are smart, you realize that ‘authenticity’ is yet another archetypal persona that seduces you into a static self-conception. If not, you go down an obsolete path blazed by a stoned generation. #8 Skill: Some of your personas become increasingly comfortable to inhabit. You start noticing that you are now acting out the role so well that you are actually as good or better in those roles than people you previously considered “authentic” non-actors. This leads to the epiphany that everybody grows into roles this way. #11 Fluidity: Jumping among the set of point-like roles in the space of personas yields to continuous movement. You become aware of the gradual expansion of the space you can inhabit. It starts acquiring, through its growth, a shape and character. #12 Brandhood: The integrated, growing space which you can inhabit with fluidity starts acquiring an overall sum greater than the parts consistency, that has only one analogy: the notion of brand.'

existentialism authenticity identity reflexivity self branding perception acting masks realityprogramming
july 2009 by adamcrowe

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YouTube -- Michael Wesch: PdF2009 - The Machine is (Changing) Us

On media ecology and Postman's amusing ourselves to death. Quoting Henry Canbry, 1926: "What we are encountering is a panicky, an almost hysterical, attempt to escape from the deadly anonymity of modern life ... and the prime cause is not vanity ... but the craving of people who feel their personality sinking lower and lower into the whirl of indistinguishable atoms to be lost in mass civilization." -- That 'context collapse' makes people to want to discover an authentic self to perform authentically towards 'authentic causes' that reinforce the authenticity of the endlessly authenticating self? Dude needs to read some HRO.

self identity authenticity youth selfesteem narcissism sousveillance reflexivity performance masks ambientintimacy media McLuhan themediumisthemassage numb theadvertisedlife technoutopianism via:charlesfrith
july 2009 by adamcrowe

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YouTube -- Max Keiser The Truth About TWITTER 2/6

'In the twittersphere, if you just take the tweetstream and put it on Fox News, people are going to be tweeting and looking at their own tweets and making assumptions on their own tweets in this divine narcissistic loop of ego destruction and id aggrandizement to the point where all information to do with self-preservation beyond the next 5 minutes is discounted as having no meaning; so all science, all religion, all philosophy, all the body of knowledge accumulated is meaningless in the twittersphere which is merely an open nerve that's being poked at by the aberant nature of individuals whose illnesses are being carried on the mainstream networks as "news".'

twitter news herd sentiment reactivity reality reflexivity #bandwidth #socialization
july 2009 by adamcrowe

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Psychology of Cyberspace -- The Online Disinhibition Effect

'What is it about cyberspace that loosens the psychological barriers that block the release of these inner feelings and needs? Several factors are at play. For some people, one or two of them produces the lion's share of the disinhibition effect. In most cases, though, these factors interact with each other, supplement each other, resulting in a more complex, amplified effect: #You Don't Know Me (dissociative anonymity) #You Can't See Me (invisibility) #See You Later (asynchronicity) #It's All in My Head (solipsistic introjection) #It's Just a Game (dissociative imagination) #We're Equals (minimizing authority)

psychology internet behaviours disinhibition identity anonymity status masks personality multitude self reflexivity emotionalintelligence mecosystem
july 2009 by adamcrowe

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YouTube -- Adam Curtis Interview: Das Internets 1/2

On the internet: his views on its impact, its potential, and what it has come to represent. -- "The new realism will be something that geniunely reflects to people their experience of the world which is complicated, ambiguous, that we are alone in the world..." -- "Facebook is just a victorian public world reinvented, but it's not the new television because it doesn't tell us stories, and people's experience doesn't tell us stories. Our job is take people's experience and make things out of them which then those individuals will go 'Oh, that's fascinating, it responds to me, I feel that's real but it takes me beyond myself.' -- In our world of individualism, the things that people are really concerned about are being trapped by their own feelings: there is growing sense that people want to know whether their feelings are real, if their feelings are right or wrong, do other people feel these feelings? They want to be taken out of themselves and taken into other emotional dimensions."'

internet storytelling transmedia narrativearchitecture realism mystery sousveillance reflexivity individualism identity homogeneity emotion emotionalintelligence penfieldmoodorgan AdamCurtis interviews
july 2009 by adamcrowe

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BBC Radio 4 -- Front Row: Adam Curtis Interview: It Felt Like a Kiss

AUDIO CONTAINS SPOILERS -- 'Adam Curtis discusses how the show affects its audience and whether it aims to shock: "We wanted to push it because we were trying to make a political point. People are really hungry for experience these days, to actually experience things themselves, it's part of the individualism of our time. ...let's see how far we can take people, frighten them, but then make them reflect on what that fear is really about... the idea that the individual is the central supreme object of devotion of our time might not be the whole truth... its about how you turn 'stuff' into stories and that's how history is made. ...maybe you will stitch it together in different ways yourself and then at the end you turn to having your own experience which is completely fragmentary... ...most people run out screaming."'

reflexivity fear psychology individualism theatre narrativeenvironments narrativeobjects documentaries interviews AdamCurtis
july 2009 by adamcrowe

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Telegraph -- It Felt Like a Kiss in Manchester, review

Video preview inside. 'The hotly-awaited collaboration between Punchdrunk theatre company, documentary-maker Adam Curtis and Damon Albarn revels in a thrill-a-minute visceral excitement. -- ...whatever spurious empowerment you might have felt has evaporated...' -- Where to begin? Just go see it.

reflexivity theatre narrativeenvironments narrativeobjects documentaries AdamCurtis
july 2009 by adamcrowe

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YouTube -- The Onion: New Live Poll Lets Pundits Pander To Viewers In Real Time

Happy talk

* realtime opinion polling popularity hype numbers feedback reflexivity circumscription doublethink
july 2009 by adamcrowe

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Max Keiser -- [1042] The Truth About Markets (27 June 2009)

On twitter stampedes feedbacking volatility markets. -- Subscribe to the herdfeed. Bringing you falseflags daily.

* economics finance twitter sentiment information misinformation news feedback volatility markets reflexivity realityprogramming standalonecomplex herd falseflag manipulation MaxKeiser retribalization
june 2009 by adamcrowe

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Wired -- The Nike Experiment: How the Shoe Giant Unleashed the Power of Personal Metrics

'Call it Living by Numbers—the ability to gather and analyze data about yourself, setting up a feedback loop that we can use to upgrade our lives, from better health to better habits to better performance. -- ...people change their behavior—often for the better—when they are being observed... -- We tend to think of our physical selves as a system that's simply too complex to comprehend. But what we've learned from companies like Google is that if you can collect enough data, there's no need for a grand theory to explain a phenomenon. You can observe it all through the numbers. Everything is data. You are your data, and once you understand that data, you can act on it. -- For many Nike+ users, doing their exercise becomes inextricable from measuring it. "Forgetting my Nike+ sensor, or my iPod battery being dead, just takes the life out of my run."'

nike+ nikeplus experience design productnarratives sousveillance quantifiedself numbers analytics realitymining performance data feedback reflexivity thegamingofeverydaylife
june 2009 by adamcrowe

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LiveScience -- Brain Scans Reveal Why Meditation Works

'If you name your emotions, you can tame them, according to new research that suggests why meditation works. Brain scans show that putting negative emotions into words calms the brain's emotion center. That could explain meditation’s purported emotional benefits, because people who meditate often label their negative emotions in an effort to “let them go.” Psychologists have long believed that people who talk about their feelings have more control over them, but they don't know why it works. “In the same way you hit the brake when you’re driving when you see a yellow light, when you put feelings into words, you seem to be hitting the brakes on your emotional responses.”'

psychology meditation emotionalintelligence emotion mood penfieldmoodorgan reflexivity
june 2009 by adamcrowe

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Boing Boing -- Terrorism is auto-immune war; war-on-terror does the terrorists' job

'The Yorkshire Ranter recasts terrorism as an "auto-immune war" -- a war intended to inflict maximum damage by getting the host's defense mechanisms to overfire, damaging the host well beyond than the actual terrorist attacks: "Specifically, auto-immune war is a strategy, but its tactical implementation is the creation of false positive responses. Security obsession gums up the economy with inefficiencies. Terrorism terrorises the public; security theatre keeps them that way. As Kilcullen points out, every day, millions of travellers are systematically reminded of terrorism by government security precautions. Profiling measures subject entire communities to indignity and waste endless hours of police time. Vast sums of money are spent on counterproductive equipment programs and unlikely techno-fixes. National identity cards and monster databases are the specific symptoms of this pathology in the UK, just as idiotic militarism is in the US."' -- The cancer that is killing /e

falseflag fear autoimmunity terrorism! war feedback hysteria reflexivity simulacra securitytheatre standalonecomplex #socialization #ubiquity
june 2009 by adamcrowe

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NYTimes.com -- Enlightenment Therapy

'Rubin held three sessions with his patient over the phone. “Please don’t abandon me!” Nordstrom said during the third session. “I’m staring at an empty couch. You are the one doing the abandoning. Are you abandoning yourself the way you have always been abandoned?” ....he [had] devised what Rubin termed “a self-cure." He sought to protect himself against the trauma of further abandonment by pre-emptively abandoning himself. If he wasn’t there in the first place, he wasn’t in a position to be cast away. The Zen concept of no-self was like a powerful form of immunity. ...he used Zen to assuage the pain of the past, hiding the pathological aspects of self-abandonment and neglect in the rapture of Zen vacancy; how he hid from his own neediness, anger and grief in the ecstatic abnegation of enlightenment. "One of the most important insights I got from therapy is that subconsciously I want the depth of my suffering to be witnessed by someone. ...I [had] embraced an aggrandized narrative."'

* psychology psychoanalysis freud self missing zen existentialism repression reenactment therapy reflexivity
june 2009 by adamcrowe

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OnFiction -- Moods and Stories

'Benzon's proposal derives from the finding that memories are often mood dependent: people tend to recall autobiographical memories of when they were happy when they are happy once again, and they best recall memories of loss and failure when they are sad. Benzon says: "My argument is that this communal experience of stories helps us to create neural circuits that give us the ability to recall a wide range of experience without our having to be in a neurochemical state approximating that which mediated that experience. Without the constant experience of emotionally charged stories, our memories would be captive to the current mood."' -- Findings from the "Sarah Cole" study: 'When angry one thinks forward from a slight or injustice towards possibilities of what to do about it, including possibilities of vengeance. When sad, one backtracks mentally from the loss or mistake to what might have caused it.' -- And it should be precisely the reverse.

storytelling fiction cognition multitude enactment reenactment experience simulation memory recall mood emotion emotionalintelligence reflexivity circumscription retcon
may 2009 by adamcrowe

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OnFiction -- The Actor Problem

'For Walton, fiction yields only pseudo-emotions. If we go to the cinema to watch a thriller and feel frightened, this is not real fear. -- Pierce counters Walton's: It is badly misleading, though perfectly ‘natural,’ to say that acting is pretending. To say this connotes that the pretender falsifies himself, though he knows perfectly well who he really is. But the actor-artist is searching for himself through enactment---experimentally finding the other “in” himself, and so finding and developing himself in his freedom. If he is in a production with a pre-established script, the playwright has left a character type to be enacted.' -- In fiction we visit in imagination places we have never seen, we become people whom we are not, we enter many more situations than a lifetime could contain. In doing so we—like Wilshire's actor—undertake mental enactments. Thereby, we discover aspects of ourselves, a perfectly good outcome for the emotions we experience.'

psychology acting enactment reenactment cognition fiction augmentationistsvsimmersionists reflexivity transformation
may 2009 by adamcrowe

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Gamasutra --- Finding A New Way: Jenova Chen And Thatgamecompany

'... to me, story is a tool, but not the goal of video games. In the past, when you say "entertainment" – I mean, we care about entertainment more than story – so "entertainment" in a sentence, basically, it's food for feeling. -- And then, even for visual media, like animation or movies, it's just right now the most popular genre uses narrative structure, but you've seen experimental movies and animations which have nothing to do with story, but are really intriguing to watch, and make you feel a certain way. -- And also me, myself, I am not a native speaker. If I really want to write good dialogue, I would be shooting myself in the foot. So I talk a lot about why I am making games like this. ...so I'm going to pick the most global feeling. The things that cross culture, and gender, and age, that everybody can relate to, and work them into games.'

* gaming emotion reflexivity design JenovaChen
may 2009 by adamcrowe

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Guardian -- I'm not a Pollyanna by Carrie Quinlan

'When the crappier bits of life are considered more real than the joyful bits, everyone is cheated. Happy people's happiness gets undermined and, tragically, sad people's sadness gets termed acceptable. The problem is that implying to people who have tough lives that those lives are more real or natural than those of people with an easier time is a tacit way of opting out of helping. "You may be struggling to make ends meet, getting punched by your partner and having racist abuse screamed at you, but at least your life's real." It's not a massive leap forward from, "You'll get your reward in heaven". Here's a suggestion. Why don't we use as our starting point the notion that people are generally a good thing, noble and willing to improve themselves and their communities, and find ways to help everyone do that.'

relativism cynicism nihilism realism authenticity reality real objectivism reflexivity consequence empathy philosophy civility happiness
may 2009 by adamcrowe

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The Atlantic -- What Makes Us Happy?

'The healthiest, or “mature,” adaptations include altruism, humor, anticipation (looking ahead and planning for future discomfort), suppression (a conscious decision to postpone attention to an impulse or conflict, to be addressed in good time), and sublimation (finding outlets for feelings, like putting aggression into sport, or lust into courtship). -- ... positive emotions make us more vulnerable than negative ones. One reason is that they’re future-oriented. Fear and sadness have immediate payoffs—protecting us from attack or attracting resources at times of distress. Gratitude and joy, over time, will yield better health and deeper connections—but in the short term actually put us at risk. That’s because, while negative emotions tend to be insulating, positive emotions expose us to the common elements of rejection and heartbreak. -- "It's very hard for most of us to tolerate being loved."'

* research psychology happiness emotion emotionalintelligence relationships memory narrativefallacy reality reflexivity life love
may 2009 by adamcrowe

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Salon -- Why can't we concentrate?

'In essence, attention is the faculty by which the mind selects and then zeroes in on the most "salient" aspect of any situation. The problem is that the brain is not a unified whole, but a collection of "systems" that often come into conflict with each other. When that happens, the more primitive, stimulus-driven, unconscious systems (the "reactive" and "behavioral" components of our brains) will usually override the consciously controlled "reflective" mind. There are excellent reasons for this. In the conditions under which humanity evolved, threats had the greatest salience; individuals who spotted and eluded dangers before they went chasing after rewards tended to live long enough to pass on their traits to future generations. As a result, we inherited from our distant ancestors the tendency to pay greater attention to the unpleasant and troublesome elements of our surroundings.. -- ..a constant diet of reactive-system stimuli has the potential to alter our very brains.' -- *gulps*

* evolutionarypsychology psychology brain internet socialmedia behaviours attention continuouspartialattention information gluttony reflexivity synaptics
may 2009 by adamcrowe

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FT.com -- Lunch with the FT: Slavoj Žižek

'“The problem is today that when you have chaos and disorder people lose their cognitive mapping. So it is an open struggle as to whose interpretation will win,” he says. “Never forget that this is how Hitler won.” -- What particularly intrigues Žižek is how films that seemingly resist the prevailing ideology, such as Titanic ["It is not a love story. It is vampiric, egotistic exploitation."], often serve to strengthen it. It was a similar story, he suggests, in communist times when people who told seemingly subversive jokes only succeeded in spreading cynicism and indifference... Although people may claim not to believe in the political system, their inert cynicism only validates that system. This is all explained, according to Žižek, by Marx’s theory of “commodity fetishism”, the idea that the way we behave in society is determined by objective market forces rather than subjective beliefs. “The importance is in what you do, not in what you think. I love this dialectical reversal.”'

storytelling metanarratives postmodernism criticism ideology cynicism precuperation philosophy praxis do reflexivity SlavojŽižek
may 2009 by adamcrowe

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Wolfram|Alpha

'Our overarching goal, the “higher purpose” of this project, is to make all computable, factual knowledge available to everyone. What Wolfram|Alpha does is compute on top of those facts—answering questions, solving equations, providing insights, projecting future behaviors.' -- This is a IP harvester's wet dream! The search query data is literally going to be priceless. Imagine the feedback loops. Each computational search creates yet more facts, more context, more knowledge to build upon. All they have to do is charge for excessive API calls and...

mathematics algorithms prediction computation context search commandline mathematica wolframalpha knowledge negentropy reflexivity #complexity #diversity
may 2009 by adamcrowe

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Fast Company -- Creating a Post-Crisis Economy: Moving Beyond Consumption by Tim Brown

"... our economy is too simple in what it measures. Whether it is reputations created through brands, relationships created through services, ideas created through knowledge, or access created through networks, many more forms of value are now created in our modern information society. And yet, our economy does not measure those in any meaningful way. If it did might we find that growth through consumption of resources was, in fact, being replaced by growth through participation in networks, relationships and experiences? We tend to get more of what we measure. If we measure consumption, we will get more of it. If we measure participation, we will get more of that--and we might just find we are already far wealthier than we realize. Or, perhaps, learn that we’re far poorer. More importantly, if our economy measured different types of value, we could focus on designing things that created growth without automatically requiring that we consume more stuff."

economics capital value measurement reflexivity wealth design
may 2009 by adamcrowe

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New Scientist -- Innovation: How your search queries can predict the future

'Google researchers Hyunyoung Choi and Hal Varian combined data from Google Trends on the popularity of different search terms with models used by economists to predict trends in areas such as travel and home sales. The result? Better forecasts in almost every case. It works because searches reveal something about people's intentions. For example, Varian suggests a surge in people using the term "unemployment insurance" may help predict looming economic problems. Google has demonstrated before that search data can predict flu outbreaks, and last week World Bank economist Erik Feyen said he could cut errors in a model that forecasts lending to the private sector by 15% using Google search data. But real time results could have even more predictive power: knowing what people are actually doing, not just thinking, at a particular instant gives a strong hint of the future consequences.' -- Tweet-assisted steering.

google twitter realtime search intention trends forecasting prediction markets collectiventelligence feedback reflexivity negentropy #complexity #specialization collectiveintelligence
may 2009 by adamcrowe

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Umair Haque -- The Age of Viral Feedback

"Welcome to the 21st century. What's different about a hyperconnected world? In a word: feedback. The more connected we are, the more feedback matters — because when we're all connected what I do is more likely to feed back onto you. Viral effects are a path to radical strategic innovation. Wanna get radical? Stop thinking about products, services, and processes. Ask instead how you can get viral, not just in terms of marketing, but in terms of production, distribution, pricing, logistics, or even service."

economics networks networkeffects feedback reflexivity #socialization UmairHaque
april 2009 by adamcrowe

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YouTube -- The Onion: Reporters Blow Up Plane, Expose Security Lapses

"271 are dead after an Onion News Network Special Investigative Report on airport security."

news journalism investigativejournalism realitytv realityprogramming reflexivity security lulz
april 2009 by adamcrowe

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YouTube -- Susan Boyle: Britains Got Talent 2009 (With Lyrics)

Book. Cover. Never Forget.

:-) talent inspiration dreams reflexivity SusanBoyle
april 2009 by adamcrowe

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