Posted by
gepr on
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/chicken-egg-gumflap-talk-tp7596911p7596916.html
Ah! I misunderstood your sentence "Empathy is about anticipation and resonance of feelings" to mean that empathy was internal. What you're saying is the *expression* of empathy is more warranted in near real time than it is in asynchronous comm. And I appreciate a generalization to scoping and locally dense.
I still disagree, I think. When I (glibly) equate gum flapping with talking, I'm trying to say that any talking, including writing a journal that only 1 person will read a thousand years from now *and* intimate conversations where you can smell another person's breath, is largely a performative act, not an attempt to communicate. Or the use of it as communication is delusional. You talk, I talk, we all talk. Then we go about whatever other activity we're headed to. The extent to which your talk modifies my future activity is not well-understandable by the semantics of the words used in the talking. It is more well-understood in terms of the motions made while talking (and the sympathetic reactions those motions caused in my physiology).
For that reason, things like emoticons, bracketed comments like [sigh], attempts to write like it sounds (like "sheeeit, I ain't seen no rats 'round here"), etc. are all attempts to *perform* such that the audience can "get in the mood". There's no emphasis on fidelity. The audience's obtained mood need not be similar to the author's implied mood. I use "obtained" rather than "inferred" because I want to de-emphasize rational inference ... something you're emphasizing when you talk about the whiteboard.
Some expressions of empathy are manipulative, sure. But some are performative. And they need not be identical (nor disjoint).
On 6/8/20 7:58 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> You remarked that punching was also a form of manipulation. I would say empathy is too. It is a mode of operation that prioritizes accommodation of a different kind of signal set. Many of those signals are not directly available in written form. Some writers will hide those signals others will try to encode them. Empathy is one mode of interaction to facilitate intimate or candid communication. If that's not the goal, then it is the wrong tool.
>
> I suppose compactness or sparsity gets at it. I was thinking of a recurrent graph that had direct connections between layers vs. a graph with connections that skipped between layers. Short term memory limitations cause meatspace conversations to be more locally dense. A whiteboard can make them a little less compact.
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