I know I said that I was not going to analyze much, but this book has too many good considerations (which maybe should be more of an impetus to not say anything about them). Upon re-reading this before posting, I understand that I might sound like a hypocritical old woman (totally guilty of posting on social media for connectivity), but I hope that you can resonate with the conflict that I feel towards these systems and devices that I use, am dependent on, and benefit from. I read this book in 2019, and have returned to it frequently and recommended it repeatedly.
After I moved to San Francisco, I was walking through the city and riding public transportation daily. Seeing so many people figuratively enveloped into the content on their phone sealed them from the reality that was happening around them. Of course, I understand using your technology as a defense mechanism, hiding behind your headphones, and pretending to be on a phone call to avoid someone beckoning you for money, time, or (god forbid) your attention. I was also one of those people! I started to resist the use of my phone when I realized that I was trying to maximize my time (even sitting on the toilet!) by filling it with whatever I could read, listen to, and watch (I do see the irony of making my website dedicated to that idea, too). After reading How to do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy in 2019, I started to fill my time with actions outside of the framework of my phone. I felt better. Those moments felt like spring cleaning for my brain and it also allowed me to notice more about the attention that I give, the attention that I want, and the attention that is most meaningful to me and how I think about myself in the world.
I was recently asked by someone, "What do you think about sensitivity being a weakness?" I paused. Discussions around sensitivity have often and recently been analyzed as a dog whistle for a way to quiet and demean women. He continued, "That maybe when people claim that they are 'sensitive' and do not like something, that in fact, they are showing weakness in the process?" Before you roll your eyes at the fact that a man asked this question, I admire it. He, as the asker, trusted our relationship enough to ask this question, one-on-one. He wanted to tease out a better response and analysis in a trusted context. And although the question might sound offensive, he was ultimately correct in his intuition.
I sat with that question for about a week, and during that time, I started taking an online educator's course "Visible Thinking" through Harvard's Project Zero. In the course, we started learning about ways to document student thinking and learning and how to teach good thinking to students. In a lesson of the course, I learn that sensitivity actually is a weakness. The long explanation is (of course) a bit more complicated than just weakness. The meaning of 'sensitivity' is not what we really mean when we casually through the word around to describe someone with tender emotions.
In the 1990s, education and cognitive researchers at Harvard wanted to figure out if there was a way to divide the elements that were being used when students were participating in “good thinking.” They gave students several tasks and they found that three elements need to be working together whenever “good thinking” is happening:
- Ability: People have to have the skills necessary to complete the task or thinking process.
- Inclination: In short, it is motivation. One must be inclined to use the ability or skill.
- Sensitivity: On top of having a skill and being inclined to use that skill, people need to sense or be sensitive to the times when it is appropriate to use that skill.
Sensitivity really is our weakness as thinkers. But, it also requires us to rethink what it means to be sensitive. Sensitive means that we are using our bodily senses to react based on the amount of information that they collect for us. People need to consider whether that process is happening when they claim that they are sensitive. They may also need to consider that "sensitivity" may actually just be synonymous for "reactionary" because people who claim that they are “sensitive,” should also know that when they use that word, it implies that they are discerning enough to choose the moments to be mad or angry or upset. Truly sensitive people are motivated and disciplined to draw from a more dynamic set of skills and abilities than to react solely with emotion (this is a hard pill to swallow for me because I know how good rage can feel when released on a target and how productive anger can be when used as motivation to act against that target). When confronted by negative feelings, people would be able to sense when to ask more questions or to consider another perspective or to gather more evidence or just sit back and observe to find complexity and nuance to their own thoughts and experiences (note: I am not encouraging people not take action with their anger, or to literally, do nothing. I have issues with a lifestyle totally rooted in non-reaction, but that's another essay). My friend knew that there was a connection between us that allowed him to ask the question because he also understood the sensitivity of the moment to discuss it, not just claim it as fact.
Thinking about the way that this connects to Odell's book, she investigates the effects of constantly being immersed in circulated information and its effects on connectivity and sensitivity. Odell turns to Italian, communist philosopher, Franco Berardi, who writes about the role of media and information technology in his book, After the Future. Berardi claims that connectivity is the "rapid circulation of information among compatible units." An example of this would be creating and sharing a social media post for likes. With connectivity, you either are or are not compatible with your audience. In contrast, Berardi claims that sensitivity "involves a difficult, awkward, ambiguous encounter between two differently shaped bodies that are themselves ambiguous--and this meeting, this sensing requires and takes place in time. Not only that, due to the effort of sensing, the two entities might come away from the encounter a bit different than they went in." As our face-to-face interactions disappear, so does our ability to practice sensitivity. Berardi also asks his reader to, "hypothesize the connection between the expansion of the infosphere...and the crumbling of the sensory membrane that allows human beings to understand that which cannot be verbalized, that which cannot be reduced to codified signs." Berardi and Odell might be asking us to not conflate our ever-expanding connectivity (especially during COVID-19 when everyone seems to be on the internet) with developing our sensitivity to understand when, where, and how to react to the people in our lives. Further, we should not mistake our lack of connectivity to what someone says or posts for our sensitivity.
If we apply Harvard's Project Zero findings with Odell's argument via Berardi that humans lack sensitivity to our current times, I am wondering whether all of the connectivity that people are feeling on the internet right now will lead to more efforts to develop our sensitivity now and in the future. Berardi reminds us that the attention economy "relies on the proliferation of chatter, the irrelevance of opinion and discourse, and on making thought, dissent, and critique banal and ridiculous." Odell comments, "It is a cruel irony that the platforms on which we encounter and speak about these issues are simultaneously profiting from a collapse of context that keeps us from being able to think straight." I think the current spread of information on social media is exciting and hopeful because it has turned our attention to the racism that occupies every single space that we can be in. In my most hopeful evaluation of the moment, we are re-evaluating our individual power and how to use it for collective action, how we use our voice and listen to the voices of others, and what we want to pay attention to, but I hope moving forward that it also leads to us taking collective action outside of the framework of social media to be sensitive not only to people but to the systemic imbalances that we are ever-entangled in. In Odell's chapter "Restoring the Ground for Thought" she "thinks about how much time and energy we use to think up things to say that would go over well with a context-collapsed crowd--not to mention checking back on how that crowd is responding. [...] What if we spent that energy instead on saying the right things to the right people (or person) at the right time? What if we spent less time shouting into the void and being washed over with shouting in return--and more time talking to those for whom our words are intended?"
I suggest reading the book, but this talk is an excellent start.
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