When I die, what happens online?

I’ve taken something of an accidental hiatus from the blog the past few months. “Real life” responsibilities left me rather distracted, and without a word, I “disappeared” from the face of the earth, as far as everyone at Dangerous Intersection knew anyway. Or, in my view, Dangerous Intersection perhaps “disappeared” from my radar. Either way, a community of people with whom I had communicated, traded knowledge and ideas suddenly vanished from the world entirely, and I from it. Because DI does not occupy the real world in any tangible sense for me, when I neglected it, it nigh did cease to exist. And likewise, I did not exist to the people who have known me only through it.

This concept got me thinking about the expanse of telecommunications we have in our hands, and what it may mean for real human relationships. Can we define faraway, supposed acquaintances who can vanish from our knowledge at any time (as I did) as “friends”? And, as this post’s title muses, what happens to my online network of psuedobuddies when I leave, or die?

I don’t mean to downplay the potential of online communication. People made due for centuries maintaining meaningful relationships with mere pen-pals, using a far less forgiving medium and time-frame. I think of the letters exchanged between the likes of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, for years upon years, across many miles, maintaining a friendship and respect nearly across the grave, as it turned out. Thus it can clearly …

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Speak your mind. Or mind your speaking?

Despite countless pieces of evidence to the contrary, we don’t like to think of language as an influence on our thoughts. We like to think of language as a passive tool at our disposal, one that does not err or influence our communication. But the brain does not work like a computer, nor does language processing work like a straightforward computer program. Language influences thought in an inextricable way.

That idea has come up many times in centuries past, from Bhartrihari to Boas to Kant. But the concept that language can shape thought, rather than the other way around, really took off in the 1950s upon the publication of the Whorf Hypothesis. Whorf’s hypothesis held that, though we think of language formation as a passive process, the language we use gives us the categories that assist us in making sense of the world. He wrote:

“[people believe that] talking, or the use of language, is supposed only to ‘express’ what is essentially already formulated nonlinguistically…[but] all observers are not led by the same physical evidence to the same picture of the universe, unless their linguistic backgrounds are similar, or can in some way be calibrated.”
—    (Language, Thought and Reality pp. 212–214).

Whorf came to this conclusion studying Native American dialects in the 1930s. He noticed a glaring difference in the way European and Native American peoples conceptualized time; we consider time concrete, like a place or a thing. For instance, we can use time-oriented phrases such …

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Another “excuse” to live healthfully.

With the obesity epidemic at its current rate, we can easily conclude that a lot of people have a lot of truly excellent excuses not to eat properly and exercise. In my experience, two particular excuses take the cake, so to speak: "I don't have time" and "I can't afford…

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More on sport as religion.

Back in early August, Jason wrote a post that declared sports the United States' national religion. At the time, I took Jason's observation as (slightly embittered) hyperbole about our cultural landscape's infatuation with passtimes that achieve absolutely nothing productive. A bit of an excessive rant, thought I, a mere illustration…

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Psychology’s top blunders, part one.

I don’t like the magazine Psychology Today. Instead of presenting the latest psychological findings in a layman-friendly format, the monthly instead peddles relationship advice and thinly-veiled book advertisements. So while I wouldn’t recommend a subscription to anyone (you’d better serve yourself by subscribing to a division of the APA), the magazine did feature one article in February 2005 that piqued my interest: Psychology’s Top Ten Misguided Ideas.

Composed by the Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies Director Dr. Robert Epstein, the ten-part list includes many psychological buzzwords and memes that the pop psych crowd (like most Psychology Today readers) still consider legitimate. I’d like to discuss a portion of Epstein’s list below:

1. Projective Tests

The popular images of psychology and psychiatry have a few iconic mainstays. You know the therapist cliché: a patient laid on a long couch, rambling about childhood trauma to a near-silent facilitator scribbling away. In nearly equal footing, many people associate projective tests, such as word association and Rorschach ink blots, with legitimate psychology.

The logic behind projective tests says that a therapist can quickly dig into a client’s preoccupations and mindset based on their knee-jerk responses to ambiguous things. This assumes that a patient would always see the same thing in the same ink blot; a sex addict would always recall lewd scenes; a veteran with Post-Traumatic-Stress-Disorder would always recognize carnage.

But projective tests neglect the effect of priming entirely. A wide variety of psychological studies have demonstrated that earlier access …

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