We are constantly broadcasting emotional data
tonyrice.me
tonyrice.me
He would walk around the streets all day, yelling, and swinging fists exactly when someone passes by him.
People from the neighborhood know him, and are not afraid. He never actually hits anybody, no matter how near his fists come to you.
One day, I saw the guy passing near the photo studio in my building, and the fake Santa that works there said something to him. Our crazy guy stopped and they had a conversation. I was passing by, and from the little I overheard he sounded like a completely normal person. Totally not matching his everyday crazy behavior.
I have no idea what made this transformation possible. My theory is that the Santa guy was probably a neighbor of his, and knew him from before he went crazy.
We're like walking flash drives constantly associating, downloading and updating our storage.
Disarm people with absurdity. I'd rather not test it out though
I misquoted the line, using "brighter than" instead of "nothing like".
The title was apparently based on his use of that phrase.
I read the whole thing and I'm still not getting it.
More broadly, yes emotions are meant to be shared. As someone with emotions, I'm already aware of this. I'm broadcasting mine right now... underwhelm.
It feels to me like an intro to a deeper insight that's missing the main body of the piece.
That is an interesting idea because we see this loss everywhere even in writing, photographs, etc. long before we ever considered "data points". It's such a profound loss that when an artist manages to capture even a tiny glimmer of emotional ambiguity they are hugely celebrated.
We are all starving for this while the world we build insists on throwing more and more of it away.
For example the gentlemen that we crossed. His rage, contempt, anger, disgust, whatever it may be, was a signal and the way that we interreacted had a profound impact on the other signals that came to surface.
I believe when we look at these signals from a functional perspective and truly consider the "subjective" nature of the signals, then it makes sense that they are some of the most important signals we have.
You put your hand in hot scolding water, most people immediately take note of the signal and act accordingly.
There's been a lot of devaluation on the actual supportive and objective nature of our own emotional and cognitive signals.
The mere idea that a corporation is tracking emotional data becomes absurd because at the end of the day, we're all kind of doing that ourselves. The tone of how we associate is a bit dysfunctional if you ask me.
There's a lot of conflict around sharing emotional signals intentionally without realizing we're already doing that.
I personally believe that emotions are best to be understood regardless of what party is considering them, businesses, partners, society, etc.
On this point in particular (that we’re broadcasting these signals), in one of the AoA courses I took there’s an exercise where you and a partner take turns guessing at the emotion the other person is feeling. You’re just staring into each others’ eyes on zoom, and one person is going “angry. sad. joyful. fear. Angry again.”
When I was the guesser I had no idea if I was even in the ballpark.
But when the other person was guessing my emotions, they were probably 70% accurate with what I was feeling. We discussed afterward and they had the same experience (I had apparently gotten most of them right). It was wild.