si dawson

experiments in self-improvement

Category: life

June 16, 2010

TV Trains You To Expect The Worst

I was watching an episode of United States of Tara the other day when I had something of a realisation.

In case you don’t know the show, here’s the back story. Tara is a woman with dissociative identity disorder (aka multiple personalities). For the sake of TV, they are 5 (or 6) very distinct & endlessly trouble making identities. A key part of the show, of course, is the actual woman herself (played by the incredibly talented Toni Collette) trying desperately to keep her life together despite the chaos sown by her sub personalities.

In the episode I watched, she’d been taking her drugs regularly, & all her sub-identities had disappeared for several months. The family declared her life permanently changed, and everything was wonderful… for the first 15 minutes of the 22 minute show.

I sat there through this wondering why my entire body was tense. As far as everything on the screen, the family was getting on well, things were humming along, and life was normal.

So why was I stressed?

pic by james good

Then I realised. I was waiting for something to go wrong. Which eventually, of course, it did.

Stepping back from this particular show, I realised a deeper (yet in hindsight obvious) truth: TV Drama thrives on.. well.. drama.

If something isn’t going wrong, there’s no story.

Stepping back again, this applies to comedy, horror, thriller, reality TV… in fact, every genre other than educational or documentary TV.

Why? Because drama of some form is a critical part of telling a story, any story.

If the hero/protagonist doesn’t have something to overcome, how can they prove they are (or become) a hero?

Jack Bauer of 24 is the perfect (& thus oft caricatured) example of this, of course.

In other words, something must necessarily always go wrong. No matter how great things seem, something bad is always about to happen.

pic by rock creek

The real issue here is this. Time watching TV is, in a very real sense, time spent training our brains to operate in a certain way.

For example, we take it for granted, but when multiple camera TV first appeared, people had to retrain their brains to understand that shots from different angles were all telling the same story, & how to piece it all together into one linear narrative. Seeing things from multiple angles at once isn’t something that happens to our brains normally (let alone fades, swipes, crabbing, zooms, etc).

Why is this suddenly all so clear to me? Because I have been wondering recently why my entire life I’ve always been expecting things to go wrong.

Thanks TV!

At this point, I am undecided about movies – their one-off nature & longer running times have more opportunity for  flexibility & depth in story telling (eg, starting with something bad having already happened & climbing out of it from there – eg Shipping News), but I think it’s safe to say my days of watching a lot of TV are over (except maybe Doctor Who, heh).

Share:

    14 comments
    June 7, 2010

    Talking By Text Sucks (& How)

    Particularly in recent years, reading & writing have taken over our lives. We communicate primarily by text an increasing amount of the time. Facebook, Twitter, email, IM, SMS, blogs, forums, the list goes on.

    There are some very real problems with communicating by text.

    pic by alex guerra

    Asymmetry

    Unless both parties are typing an equal amount, any text based conversation is going to seem very one sided very quickly. In fact, not just a roughly equal amount of text, but an equal amount of thought, energy & attention (eg, not just blathering for the sake of word count)

    This isn’t how regular conversations work though. If you’re face-to-face and actively listening, you are communicating back, a lot: with body language, intonation (even if you’re just saying “go on”), energy, presence, being, even touching. There’s a lot going on that isn’t spoken.

    Particularly being an active listener (where you’re really paying attention to the person you’re listening to) you’re communicating a hell of a lot. With zero words.

    Depending on who you ask, as much as 93% of communication is non verbal. Of course, all of that is lost via text.

    If someone doesn’t reply to you at all, you get exactly zero information  – unless of course you’re able to deduce something from what they didn’t reply to.

    With so much of how we normally communicate unavailable to us, imbalances occur very easily.

    pic by naunau

    Context

    The other thing that text loses completely is context. In person, it’s possible to see if the other person is distracted, tired, stressed or has just spilt coffee on themselves. Via text, you have none of this, unless they explicitly tell you.

    In the days of writing letters this may not have been such a big deal. Writing a letter a week is low volume enough that whatever is immediately happening in your day will have negligible effect on the words that are sent. However, these days so much of communcation is via text – email, im, twitter, facebook, texting, you name it. There’s so much, & it’s all day every day.

    It’s quite possible that something you took to be incredibly serious & upsetting just happened to be right after they got scratched by their cat, or spilt coffee in their lap.

    Now that’s environmental context – there may be tone coming through the message that is actually utterly irrelevant to the conversation.

    The other thing that’s very easy to lose commonly occurs in formats that allow for multiple overlapping conversations at once – twitter, irc, im etc. It’s quite common for conversational context to be lost. A statement may be made, but because of the overlapping, it becomes unclear what it’s in reply to. We need to stop, reconnect the threads again & then continue. Or, worse yet, we don’t realise there’s been the loss of context & instead get completely the wrong message.

    A third difficulty is how hard it can be to both accurately convey and interpret such nuances as sarcasm.  People typically over-estimate their ability to convey sarcasm and their ability to correctly identify it. Online this can be deadly.

    pic by krazy dad/jbum

    Building Relationships

    The combination of the above two – asymmetrical & contextual difficulties, mean that text communication is frightfully prone to misunderstandings. Some studies say that as much as 50% of text communication is misunderstood.

    In terms of building a relationship then, while it is possible to do this over text, you’re making life a lot harder for yourself. Missing out on many subtle sub-cues, making it harder than ever to communicate clearly, and so on.

    Additionally unless you love text, you’re immediately disadvantaged. If you express yourself better verbally, or physically, you’re just plain out of luck.

    The worst situation is if one of you is someone that enjoys & is good at text communication, & the other isn’t (or primarily communicates through another modality).

    I’ve met some people for example who can’t write an email to save themselves, and yet in person are an utter delight, like a sunbeam dancing on a rainbow. Obviously the only solution here is to make sure you always live in the same city, so you get to fully enjoy the wonderfulness that is them.

    pic by abhi

    With all these limitations, difficulties & complications, how many otherwise potentially wonderful friendships are lost to text? Who really knows.

    All I can recommend is this:

    1. Understand, be aware & compensate for the limitations & distortions of communicating via text
    2. Get the hell out of it into a much richer medium as soon as you possibly can

    Share:

      19 comments
      May 17, 2010

      Making Friends Online

      I’ve been online a very long time. Since the late 80’s. That’s before what we currently know as the net was much more than a twinkling in a small handful of San Francisco computers.

      So, I’ve had a lot of time to think about the intricacies & common pitfalls of meeting someone online.

      The first thing to do is let go of the idea that there’s anything particularly special about “meeting someone on the net.”

      The internet is just a way of communicating. It’s no different from meeting someone face to face, via the telephone (don’t laugh, I ended up dating someone for years that I first talked to over the phone), or even really old school – by writing, aka pen pals. The only difference is the bandwidth of the medium.

      The Importance Of Bandwidth

      What do I mean by bandwidth? Simply put, how much information is transmitted while you’re communicating.

      How do you figure that out? Just think about how much you can tell someone and then how much delay there is during that conversation.

      If I can only type one word at a time and there’s ten minute delay between words, that’s not a lot of bandwidth. Compare that with being face-to-face, being able to see, hear, touch someone. That’s super high bandwith.

      In terms of bandwidth, there’s a definite hierarchy:

      1. Twitter/SMS (140/160 chars at a time, slow back-and-forth)
      2. IRC/IM (short message, but less delay)
      3. Email (can go into much more depth, nested conversations etc)
      4. Voice
      5. Skype (video)
      6. Face-to-face

      & once you’re face-to-face of course, there’s a further hierarchy.

      1. Formal situation (eg work place).
      2. Informal, but physically distant.
      3. Informal, but physically close (within a foot or two)
      4. Naked, close
      5. Naked, touching
      6. Energetically entwined/internal

      The key with physical distance is – the space around us is not empty. There’s information there. This is one reason you can feel if someone is standing “too close” to you, or why you feel uncomfortable. It’s not just about the physical, it’s their energy interacting & interfering with ours.

      So why is this even relevant? Because all human interaction is about communication, & the higher the bandwidth, the better the communication.

      The critical point here: When getting to know someone, more bandwidth is better.

      How We Make Friends

      Making friends is a pretty straight forward process. This is similar regardless of the depth of the relationship we’re building towards (acquaintenances, buddies, friends, emotional support network, intimate partners). The only difference is how far we take the process, & the level of discrimination we apply.

      1. Similar interests? (easy to determine, low invasiveness)
      2. Similar world view? (takes more time, but critical for mutual approval & understanding)
      3. Do we like them? (although it is possible to be friends, eg with people we dislike but respect, it is harder)
      4. Do we trust them? (this’ll determine how much deeper we let the relationship go)

      With low grade friendships (eg guys we hang out & watch football with) we typically only need to go as far as stage 1. With a healthy intimate partner, we’d need to go all the way to level 4.

      Once we’re ok at one level, we can choose to investigate the next.

      Of course, there is a lot more complexity here, I’m simplifying for the sake of clarity.

      How Do We Get To Know Someone?

      Fundamentally, we progress through the above process in direct proportion to how much bandwidth (ie, information) has been shared between us.

      Spend a week in close proximity to someone, you’ll get to know them a lot faster than a week spent texting. This is why you can spend years getting to know someone at a distance, but the relationship really doesn’t start in earnest until you’re both in the same physical space.

      So if you want to get to know someone, become friends with them, the trick is simple: Increase the bandwith as quickly and as much as possible.

      The longer we spend at the low bandwidth end of things (twitter, sms, facebook etc) the more likely we are to fundamentally misunderstand or misjudge someone we might otherwise become excellent friends with.

      If we want to build a quality relationship with someone, we need information before we can make a qualitative judgement. This is the “I thought you were awesome, but you’re actually a complete dick!” problem.

      If we want to know how far or how deep to take the relationship, we need information. This is the “You looked hot with the lights out, but now they’re on.. ARGH!” problem.

      If we want to know whether to trust someone, we need information. This is the “I told you my secret, but you blabbed it to everyone!” problem.

      How do we get the information we need? By communicating, of course – regardless of the medium (telephone, text, email, voice, face-to-face). The more communicating you do, the better you’ll know someone. The higher the bandwidth you’re able to achieve between each other, the more you can communicate.

      Really, getting to know someone on the internet is exactly the same as getting to know someone off – except you have  significantly more varieties & amounts of bandwidth to communicate over. It’s still not as great as spending time face-to-face, but it does enable the chance to get to know someone even if you’re not able to regularly spend time in the same physical space.

      Some Advanced Tips

      Communicating over the net has some surprising benefits that face to face doesn’t. Often people will tell you far more by what they don’t say than what they do.

      1. If someone regularly doesn’t respond to certain types of conversation – this is usually a sign they’re avoiding something. This sounds obvious, but it’s very easy for messages to fall through the cracks. It’s worth paying attention to whether the other person is just sloppy replying in general, or whether it’s always the same subject. Is it taboo in their culture/upbringing, are they shy, or is this going to be a point of contention in trying to progress the relationship any further?
      2. Are you both putting in similar amounts of effort? If one of you is initiating contact a lot more, or writing in more detail & only receiving off-the-cuff responses, a reasonable interpretation would be “they’re just not that into you”.
      3. Do you communicate at a similar level? Differences in grammar or spelling are obvious, but if one of you is only interested in talking about football, but the other would prefer to discuss the philosophical motivations that encourage societies to perpetuate acceptable proxies for inter-tribal violence, this difference may be worth paying attention to.
      4. Is communication frequency similar? Some people are happy emailing or texting once a day, or once every few weeks. Some prefer longer missives. Some prefer short bursts but more often. If there’s a mismatch, that can spell difficulties down the line. Communication is difficult enough, without the added frustration of feeling that someone is always down your throat, or never responds when you try to connect with them.
      5. Does the person show as much interest in you, your family, the things you care about, as you do in them?
      6. Are you genuinely excited to hear from them? If not, that may be telling you you’d be better off spending your time and energy on someone who does.

      None of these things are foolproof, of course, any more than body language is an exact science. However, if you look at them together, they will typically tell you far, far faster than you would otherwise know whether someone is worth pursuing any kind of friendship with. This, of course, then frees you up to spend your time & energy on those who are excited to see you, will love you as deeply as you love them, & where you will both enrich each others lives.

      Communicating over the net is no substitute for time spent in each others presence, but it truly is a wonderful way to meet & get to know people faster & more effectively than ever before.

      Share:

        9 comments
        January 30, 2010

        How To End Hate (& its nasty side effects)

        Ever heard that saying “What you resist persists”?

        Ahh yes.

        I’ve noticed a few patterns in my life recently.

        In general, I’ve spent the last few years on a bit of a spiritual journey. Clearing out, well, pretty much everything.

        The downside to this is, as I’ve got clearer, what remaining crap is there has echoed stronger & more powerfully through my life. Ahh, I wish I’d been told that when I started. Actually, probably best I wasn’t.

        The bad news is, there are parts of my life that still suck. Like you wouldn’t believe. Well, ok, I’m human. The good news is, they stand out like nobody’s business. Also, it’s much easier to see when they’re repeating.

        So, here I am, looking at my life “Wtf? Didn’t that same crappy situation happen 6mo ago? What’s going on?”

        Then, the other day, it hit me.

        They’ve all been things I hate.

        Now, of course, very early on, I went through all the core ‘negative’ (if there is such a thing) emotions, assessing all the places in my life they affected, healing them etc.

        Of course, my life drastically improved. Quelle surprise.

        When I looked at hate, I came up blank though. “Huh? I don’t hate anyone.” My Mum brought me up way to well for that nonsense. I’ve gotta say, there have been a few people I probably should (according to society) hate for the roles they’ve played in my life, but I still don’t (thanks Mum).

        What I realised lately though is – there’s a lot of things I hate.

        Guess what’s recurring?

        Situations, behaviours in those around me, limitations, frustrations, ongoing problems.

        Yep, no frickin’ surprise.

        Hate is resistance.

        I’m resisting this nonsense, so of course, I’m just drawing it into me. However you want to explain that (law of attraction, reticular activating system, self sabotage) is largely irrelevant.

        The empirical evidence is this: Stuff I hate I just see more of in my life.

        The big (& incredibly obvious) lesson? STOP IT.

        Ok, so I like to keep things vaguely useful/practical around here. Bob has great advice above, but really, how do you stop hating something?

        I’ve shared lots of ways of doing this kind of thing before, so here’s a real simple way that’s been helping me lately:

        1. Give the issue a percentage, 0-100% where 0=Hate It, 100%=I’m 100% ok with this thing happening.
        2. Ask yourself, can I increase that percentage? Say “Yes”, out loud & as emphatically as possible.

        Maybe it’s just my analytical math brain, but that really resonates for me. I typically get a number in my head instantly. Uhh, 20%, or 3%. Whatever. It doesn’t matter. It’s just a starting point.

        To work with this, there’s a core realisation. You’re the boss. You, the real You. Not your physical body, not your mind, not even your ego. The large, spiritual you. The essence of you. Your consciousness.

        For example, if you decide to stop thinking about something, who makes that decision? You do. Not your brain. Your brain is just the tool. That’s the real you making that decision. The core of your being.

        Soooo. Once you realise that you’re the boss, then everything is really just a decision. Including the decision to actually be ok with something you used to hate.

        How/Why Does It Work?
        1. Saying ‘yes’ puts you in a positive mindframe rather than negative (ie, resistant, hating). Salesmen have known this for eons, of course. Nothing new there.

        2. Saying ‘yes’ releases resistance to the issue. Even just accepting it a little can help shift things, open you up & let go of that hate (or secret shame, as is often the case with deep hatred) and thus resistance. Once the floodgates open, voila, you’re on your way.

        I know, sounds crazy, but give it a bit of a go, be patient & watch what happens.

        Of course, if you feel like using EFT, releasing, reiki, NPA or anything else at the same time, so much the better. Whatever helps.

        When you do finally get up to 100% you’ll realise. You just don’t hate it any more, in fact, you couldn’t care less. Know what? You’ll stop seeing it in your life too.

        For me, I got a piece of paper, on the left wrote “Things I f’n Hate”, on the right “% Ok with it” then just made a list. Going down, even just saying “YES, I hate …” it’s the craziest thing, but I could feel the hate lifting off & that percentage rising.

        Another interesting side effect? All this saying yes. I’ve had inner tension (that my sensei can feel, but is hard for me to pinpoint) for, well, probably my entire life. With this? I can actually feel it easing. Don’t know how, or even what it is, but it’s definitely lifting.

        Whoever thought being positive would be beneficial? *grin*

        Share:

          5 comments
          November 26, 2009

          The Moments That Define Us

          Now, from a title like that, you may be thinking I’m talking about those lifetime events that mark our place in history – ala Bill Gates selling DOS to IBM, or Lawn Chair Larry.

          No, I’m talking about the moments that define our character, and as a result, ultimately us as human beings.

          It breaks down like this. Anyone can be magnanimous, compassionate or loving in good times. What truly defines us is how we behave when things go wrong.

          That’s right, when something or someone pisses us off. The neighbour runs over our dog, our girlfriend runs off with a leper or someone just doesn’t quite behave the way we want them to (which is really a control issue on our part, but I digress).

          lawn_chair_larry.jpg

          I once heard the definition of maturity as “The difference in time between our emotional & rational responses to a situation.”

          That’s succinct, but I don’t necessarily believe that what’s rational is always what’s best.

          Is it rational to be unconditionally loving towards someone that is treating you like shit? No, but it sure as hell is the fastest way to defuse the situation. See also: Gandhi. It worked out pretty well for him, except for, you know, right at the end.

          A less succinct but more accurate definition might be “The difference in time between our fear & love based responses to a situation.”

          As we get more mature, our love based responses get closer & closer to the surface, and that time delay between fear & love gets ever shorter until it disappears altogether.

          For example, I know when I was younger, kids screaming or leaving mess everywhere used to drive me mad. I mean, really crazy. Growing up as the oldest of eight might have done that to me. Heh. These days though, I watch myself, & my first reaction is just “Is it happy screaming? Ok, that’s cool.” As for mess, well, they’re kids. You gently guide & provide a consistent example over a period of years, & eventually they’ll sort it out, but there’s no rush, they’ve got a ton of other learning to do too.

          gandhi_face.jpg

          This is where those minor daily upsets are actually a good thing. They provide feedback in two ways:

          1. Are we still instinctively reacting badly?
          2. How long is it taking us to calm down afterwards?

          The first tells us whether we still have more healing/growing to do in this area, while the second is a quantifiable measure of the progress that we’re making.

          This doesn’t mean I think you should welcome bad/upsetting events into your life, but given that these sorts of things tend to happen anyway, why not take advantage of them?

          Ultimately, it’s this ongoing collection of upsetting or unexpected situations & our reactions to them. That’s what defines us as people.

          As we grow & improve, these things bother us less & less.. & we become better people.

          I guarantee you one thing. If you can remain positive & loving when everything is falling apart around you, you’re going to be incredible when times are good.

          Share:

            2 comments
            Mastodon