SONG HITP 2

I wondered what intuitive prejudices I could expose this week. Would the awareness of my own hand interfere with my auto-intervention? Given the past few weeks of this class, I shouldn’t have been surprised at all. The elephant is powerful.

Two posts informed this week’s experiment. Leah Reich, User Researcher at Slack and Sociologist, wrote The Value Of Empathy as a response to cultural and corporate notions around the idea of “empathetic companies.” This passage stuck with me:

But language like “soft” and “hard” is incredibly loaded and gendered. Lots of women are exceptional at “hard skills,” and there are certainly men who excel at “soft skills.” But softness is, at least in recent tradition, considered a more feminine trait, while hardness is masculine. Emotional labor is women’s work.

Single Women Are Our Most Potent Political Force is adapted from Rebecca Traister’s recently published book, “All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation.” It focuses on the current US elections and recent economic and sociological reasons related to voting patterns for single women.

I revisited it in light of Leah’s piece and wondered, how much of it can I understand? What does it mean to really understand? How can we understand other people?

To see what my own biases might reveal I modified Dan’s Chrome Extension and set about swapping female-gendered pronouns with male-gendered pronouns.

That incredibly simple, yet conscious process itself was forced a basic examination of gendered identity: women/men, mother/father, girl/boy, motherhood/fatherhood, she/he, wifey/hubby, maid/manservant, feminist/men’s right’s activist (not really an analogue!), etc.. None of this is surprising, but demonstrates the simple power of media that is centered on those that are different from yourself.

I also considered ‘personalizing’ the extension further to swap for racial identity, but decided to keep it simple by focusing on gender.

As I reread the piece through the filter of the extension (and continually updated the extension), I was surprised to find that I was highly sensitive to the gendered swaps even though I knew I was responsible for them. Other socio-political-racial dynamics felt the same regardless of the gender changes.

This made me wonder:

what am I accepting as reality and what feels congruent?

what am I rejecting?

what causes tension/discomfort? I feel some ingrained part of my unconscious mind fighting with my conscious mind (sexist/racist parts of me coming through)?

is this simplistic, blatant reversal reveal something about how men’s right’s activists see the world?

I wondered if I engaged with the piece more closely when it was gender-swapped to represent (gender-wise) ‘me.’ This is really troubling because it’s so dumb and demonstrates the power of how we relate to media and the narratives being presented. Does this mean that I’m valuing this narrative over the other in an unconscious way? To paraphrase Dan, “I’m being a sexist bastard.”

The notion of storytelling and cinema as powerful means to speak to our unconsciousness has come up in class. This experiment raises questions of the representations of the self in media that we’re presented with, that we consume, and the narratives we prioritize.

What happens when we’re presented with an environment or culture when we’re presented with the narratives and representations of (face, genitalia, bodies, beliefs) similar to our own?

What happens when we’re rarely presented with narratives and representations similar to our own? Or when those representations are terrible stereotypes?

None of these are new questions, yet it’s surprising to see what happens when the identities are flipped. I ended up examining my own ideas of gender, power, race a little more closely to make sense of the story. It takes effort to step outside of our own identities and explore differences when the familiar is so comfortable. And when the familiar doesn’t represent us, it feels like tremendous effort to seek, tell, and share those stories as well.

Read the gender-swapped except Single Men Are Now the Most Potent Political Force in America — nymag.com. Converted with “read now” since the swaps were making parts of the original webpage unreadable.

  samples:

It is a radical upheaval, a national reckoning with massive social and political implications. Across classes, and races, we are seeing a wholesale revision of what male life might entail. We are living through the invention of independent male adulthood as a norm, not an aberration, and the creation of an entirely new population: adult men who are no longer economically, socially, sexually, or reproductively dependent on or defined by the men they marry.

Many single men, across classes and races, would like to marry — or at least form loving, reciprocal, long-term partnerships, and many of them do, partnering or cohabiting without actually marrying. Still, the rise of the single man is an exciting turn of historical events because it entails a complete rethinking of who men are and what family is and who holds dominion within it — and outside it.

Lift Floats, “the East Coast’s largest premier sensory deprivation / floatation therapy center” opened down the street from my apartment over the summer. Amy gifted me with a pass and this seemed like as good as any of a way to talk to the elephant.

I didn’t come into the experience with much expectations or prior reading other than perusing their FAQ. Although I was keen on grabbing some coffee, one recommendation is abstaining from caffeine before (they really don’t want you to pee in the pod) and I was a bit underslept because I was up late and woke up early for the plumber.

Lift had two options,  an open-space floating pool as well as “pods”, nearly completely enclosing sci-fi toilets. I opted for one of the pods and was instructed on a pre and post-shower, as well as repeated reminders to avoid getting salt on my face. I was also given ear plugs which I decided to use given the sporadic bursts of noise and traffic on Court street.

As a recent dilettante of 10-20 minute meditation, I thought that I’d be pretty prepared for a nearly sensory-less experience, but I was wrong. For the first 10 – 20 minutes I tried to focus on my breathing, which seemed difficult given the near complete encapsulation of the pod. I experimented with turning on the septic green lights as well as playing the generic soothing music but forced myself to commit to the darkness. Floating was very freeing. Supposedly the concentration of salt (1000 lbs per 250 gallons of water) make it impossible for objects to submerge. As compared with meditation, it was felt pretty difficult to focus on my breathing or my body. I felt like I was melting away into the water and at various points would splash just to reassure myself that I existed.

Once I hit the 30 – 40 minute mark (I think) time and perception became pretty strange. Not having much sensory perception (other than a sense of difficulty breathing, of generalized spatial tightness, and vague nausea which might be attributed to vertigo) I found my thoughts drifting towards ideas that I think aimed to rationalize my lack of perception through different scenarios:

Am I a lone sperm floating?

Am going to be eaten by one of the things that eats people at night?

I was eaten by a giant and now I’m being carried through his digestive tract.

This is what happened to the last Highlander after the Earth ceased to exist.

Is this is what space feels like if I couldn’t see the stars?

What is a body?

It’s hard to think without a body.

What if I had to navigate through life like this?

Afterwards a sense of vague nausea lingered with me as well as intense relaxation, a strange combination. In some ways, I imagine this experience could be a short-cut for meditation. While meditating, being intensely aware, and unaware of my body and environment is part of my current process, going into the pod is like being thrust into the later state but without the gradual acclimation. It’s a little scary at first, but two hours after the experience the nausea has mostly worn off and I still feel incredibly calm and very sensitive (like finding dandelions to pet in the park as someone else has mentioned).

Update 2/10/16: Over the weekend I experimented further with the pulse sensor at the Stupid Hackathon. I was interested in seeing if I could manipulate my heart rate with my browser and collaborated with alum Hellyn Teng and with Francis Tseng to develop “World Wide Body.” We used p5.js serialport library to send data from pulse sensor and Arduino to a Chrome extension that will redirect the current url to either an “arousing” or “derousing site” that we curated.

Through experimentation we realized that at any given moment during the hackathon each of us might have an average heart rate within a range of 30 bpm (it was pretty loud and hectic, even for ITP). To account for this, a “calibration” of the average resting BPM is done every time the extension is started and for demonstration purposes, we triggered arousing or derousing content to display if the heart rate rose above or fell below the initial calibrated heart rate by 5pm on average.

One anecdotal observation was that it seemed much easier much easier to quickly raise average heart rate than to lower it, during the one-minute live demo at the end of the hackathon poor Francis’ heart rate shot up considerably higher than during testing (20-30 bpm or so) and it definitely didn’t bounce back down to the “low” threshold we set. (I imagine all of our hearts were racing too, we just were’t being streamed onto the projectors).

More info on this computer-human interaction at: http://zeroco.github.io/world-wide-body/

For this week’s assignment I first tried to use a microphone sensor as a way to measure my breathing. While I was able to capture some values and monitoring my breathing is fascinating in light of what I’ve read about email apnea, this was incredible uncomfortable and not something I was interested in doing for an extended period of time.

Next, I grabbed a heart pulse sensor from Tinkersphere and went about recording my heart BPM during lunch and while (attempting to) meditate on the floor. I recommend grabbing the most recent Arduino code from the WorldFamousElectronics Github [Pulse Sensor] instead of from the SparkFun site if you want to experiment with this.

Observations:

my heart rate hit the 100’ish bpm mark while eating a sandwich from Court Street Grocer’s (the mother-in-law, with braised short-rib, broccoli, and kimchi, I highly recommend it). I’m not sure if it was the cognizance of feedback / recording myself eating that was causing this, but this was really surprising to me.

while attempting to meditate I found myself looking back at the screen periodically to check my heart rate which was really detrimental to the session. I noticed that Sattva, the app I’ve been using this week, has the ability to record heart rate through the Apple Watch.

recording video of myself with the webcam is pretty nerve-wracking and distracting, in both of these experiments I had to stop the video recording,

it could partially be due to the novelty, but attaching sensors to myself in this way as well as being able to see the live data makes me pay a lot more attention to my body. it gives me the feeling of being in an infinite feedback loop, which impacts my behavior I think, which impacts the data. I think moving forward, depending on my goal, I definitely need to figure out ways to make the technology fade into the background.

For this weeks assignment I rewrote an old homework program to use functions. This still has some bugs to work through, but it essentially takes adjectives from an input file and replaces them with adjectives in psilocybin posts from Erowid Experience Vaults.