geek2geek

My friend Candy is one of the Bitch Overladies of Smart Bitches Who Love Trashy Books (yes, smart and witty people who love romance novels. They exist, I swear). They’re pretty merciless when they come upon something they really don’t like. Just read some of their pieces snarking on book covers. And, of course, the genre’s fascination with man-titties. Oh god the man-titty. But when they find something they really like, they pour praise upon it.

Point is, these are fans of Romance criticizing Romance. There’s something extra special about picking apart something you love from the inside out, as only a jilted lover can. I feel a kinship.

Recently they stumbled upon evidence of plagiarism in a very popular (but generally regarded as crap) author. The story made the rare, and very rapid, jump from blog to print press and is now in the process of blowing up into a Major Scandal. You can read the whole Cassie Edwards Extravaganza if you like. It’s interesting to watch an industry cope with Intellectual Property and Ethical Considerations live, particularly the issue of where “didn’t break the law” diverges from “did nothing wrong”.

All this has landed them quite a pile of new readers. Readers who don’t know what’s going on, and have no background. They just see this bright pink page slagging off some author. This has gotten them quite a bit of negative comments in spite of their remaining fairly restrained and objective… at least by their standards. But their glee at a bad author getting caught out oozes through.

Candy frames the problem in “Your Taste Sucks, But I Still Love You“.

…people often read a whole world of motivation and intent into my words, despite the fact that by and large, I lay it all out there for people to see and read. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I’m not especially good at keeping my opinions hidden.

So here’s one thing I want to make clear, once and for all:

I don’t want people to stop reading the things they love, even when I think they’re absolutely terrible. Why would I? They love it. That’s excellent. I may shit all over the book you love, but that doesn’t mean I want to deprive you of the right to read it and enjoy it. In fact, I want you to engage me about why you enjoyed it, and disagree with me about the points I’m making. I loves me some vigorous, informed argument. I may think you have terrible taste (depending on how bad the book is), but I promise you that I won’t think you’re stupid based solely on the fact that you enjoy something I don’t, or that you’re wrong for liking what you like. I’m a reader of romance novels, ferchrissakes; this means far too many people who don’t know me assume I’m stupid based solely on a genre I read. I’m not about to inflict that particular brand of assholishness on other people. (There are so many other superior varieties to choose from.)

Unless you can see them laughing while they do it, one person’s “vigorous, informed argument” is another person’s hateful bashing. Since I know Candy personally, I can “see” her talking and laughing as she writes and that it’s all in good fun. But if you don’t know her, or haven’t read enough of her writings to build up a picture, you might think it’s all petty piss and bile.

Like someone walking into a meeting of people you don’t know and they’re the middle of joking around and making light fun of each other. Except on the Internet you can’t see that they’re smiling or hear that they’re laughing. No emotion, just the nasty text.

Candy, being a good writer, saw and filled in that emotional gap that the combination of text and a lack of context leaves.

Heh, man-titty.

When I voiced the observation that “text lacks empathy” to a few friends of mine who are, if not necessarily trained writers, then at least a whole lot better at it than I am, they collectively went, “BUWHAT?!” Which is perfectly justified. Text can certainly invoke emotions in a reader. A good writer can make someone laugh, cry, or even kill. (A great writer can make them snort milk out their nose). So how can I say that text lacks empathy?

text strips emotion, writers put it back

Speech, and other forms of face-to-face communications, contain all sorts of undertones that we’re only dimly aware of. Let’s look at a simple question:

Are you done yet?

Were I to speak it I can convey emotion with a whining voice, slumped down in my seat showing boredom. I can say it with an excited voice while bouncing up and down conveying hope and excitement. I can say it with a neutral tone and expression, it’s a simple query. I can ask with annoyance which makes it more about expressing “you’re late and I’m pissed” then a request for information. Even the history of the conversation becomes important. Even the most polite query becomes annoying when you ask it for the twentieth time.

Now consider how a writer might write in missing emotions.

Yes, let us consider that…

I was looking for a sample of Bob Newhart doing one of his famous telephone gags where all you get to hear is his side of the conversation and all the comedy is implied and off-stage. Instead I came across this cell phone ad.

Since we’re talking about the problems of filling information voids with emotional reactions (emotional projection), I thought it apt.

(This is in reply to Sam’s comment about my solution to Warnock’s Dilemma. His response leads into a classic problem, so I hope Sam doesn’t mind that I hijack it to lead into another topic. It’s not personal, just a convenient straight line.)

Sam said,

I don’t really like this no-input-upvoting idea; I think it discourages discussion and encourages establishment of egos and mob rule. You agree? Great. Spend just ten seconds saying WHY, thanks.

I’m one of those people who will fight like hell for the ideal solution, but if it’s not going to work out will settle for a pragmatic one rather than no solution at all. It sure would be great if everyone read my stuff and wrote out their thoughts, but I can’t change how everyone else behaves (because my ORBITAL MIND CONTROL LASERS are busy with the US presidential primaries) and it’s a bit egotistic to assume that people have time to devote to my little post.

Instead of lamenting “if everyone would just do it my way there’d be no problem” I’ll adapt my technique to fit how everyone else acts to get something like the result I wanted in the first place. One might call this manipulation, and it is, but it’s not a dirty word it’s a tool. One you should have in your toolbox and know how to use. Setting up circumstances so that people do what you want without their even thinking about it is a central idea of usability design, and the usability is just another expression of geek communications… but that’s another post.

I agree with Sam’s sentiment about mob rule — you’ll note that the votes don’t do anything — but rather than no input at all I’ll take some input, even if it’s flawed, and apply the necessary grains of salt. It is better than, in the absence of any information, making shit up (which is wholly reserved for these posts).

(Sam, you’ve been a good sport. If you’ll just remain under the microscope for a few more moments this will all be over soon. It’s for science. And stop wriggling, you’ll throw off the readings and we’ll have to start all over again!)

Speaking of making shit up, it’s interesting to observe Sam’s tenor towards the users who don’t reply or just give a +1. It comes across as decidedly negative, the “thanks” is bitter and sarcastic. As if he’s already decided that the people who didn’t give a thoughtful reply are bad people. They’ve done something wrong. And this is the interesting thing about information voids, we abhor them and tend to fill them with negative emotions. Who knows why they didn’t reply? That’s the crux of Warnock’s Dilemma, you can’t know. Yet a decision has already been made at some level. It is particularly interesting that the +1 equivalent in real life, a head nod of agreement, does not illicit such a negative reaction. Why is that? Perhaps because the thing keeping us all basically positive social creatures in Real Life is empathy hard-coded to faces. But that, too, is another post.

(Thank you, Sam. You’re free to go.)

Before I continue on with my grand dissertation on empathy, I would like to take a moment to talk to you about a problem which is currently very near and dear to my heart as a first time bloggeristo: Warnock’s Dilemma.

Has this happened to you? With much excitement you post up your fantastic idea that will OBVIOUSLY change the world and make everyone rich and smell nice and create world peace while still leaving a place for violent video games. And then you wait… and wait… and wait… and no response. Nobody says anything. At this point you are caught in Warnock’s Dilemma.

Named for Bryan Warnock who first fully expressed the dilemma in the early days of the design of Perl 6 — oh god was that EIGHT YEARS AGO?! — the dilemma is how do you interpret a lack of response? Bryan identified five possibilities…

Please go on!

Are you sitting down? Good, then let’s begin.

There is something wrong with our preferred communications technologies (email, IM, IRC, blogs, web forums, SMS…) and it is this:

text lacks empathy

More accurately, text lacks secondary channels to communicate emotion but you can’t put that on a t-shirt.

Speaking with someone face to face has many lines of communication. First, there are the actual words. This is the text of the conversation but it is certainly not the whole of the meaning.

There’s the tone and inflection, how each word is spoken and where the stresses are placed. Let’s lump that all together into the audio component. Body and hand gestures add more emphasis and emotion even filling in gaps in the text. (How do you get an Italian to shut up? Handcuff them.) Eye contact conveys interest (hey baby). Fidgeting conveys nervousness (and perhaps interest as well). And then there’s the whole range of facial expressions.

Text contains none of this. You just get the words stripped of all the implied emotions we’re used to.

That’s my observation. Next we’ll look at the consequences.

It’s been almost half a year since I set up this blog and a mailing list to discuss geek2geek communications. Geeks communicating with other geeks and also mere humans. The subject got a lot of attention at OSCON and BarCampBlock. As these things go, I never got around to writing things up. Well, it’s a new year so let’s get things started.

Of course, where to start. I’ve been having trouble with that, everything’s so interconnected. So I’ll begin at the beginning, where the idea came from.

For the non-programmers out there, I promise it’s not going to be all about programming but you might have to indulge me my coding metaphors while I get to the point.

This all started when I was preparing for my big OSCON tutorial last year, the ambiguously titled “Simple Ways To Be A Better Programmer” aka “What Works in Software Development” aka (my favorite) “How To Be Lazy Without Really Trying”. This is a tutorial I’ve given many times before for many years. It’s my opportunity to have 200 programmers captive while I brainwash them for 3 hours. The title is clever and vague so they don’t know what they’re getting into. Usually I teach whatever it is I think programmers are struggling with that year. Particularly things they don’t teach you in college. Not that I’d know, I failed out.

Usually it focuses on things like version control, documentation, names, testing, refactoring and so forth. Mostly coding issues. This year I proposed the same basic thing as always but it didn’t get me terribly excited. Then right after it was accepted I got a much better idea. Typical. As with all good things, the idea came from my kitchen.

Alton Brown’s show Good Eats could be instead titled Analytical Cooking. (If you hate cooking shows, watch this one.) He breaks down cooking into methodologies and techniques, rather than a series of recipes you’re supposed to follow by rote and guesswork. The cookbook associated with the show, really more of a cooking textbook then a traditional list of recipes, is I’m Just Here For The Food. Emblazoned on the cover is a simple equation that sums his grand philosophy:

food + heat = cooking

He breaks down cooking not by dish but by heating method and focuses his efforts on teaching them.

It’s simple and poignant. Where do I get one of those?

Where indeed? The answer is provided…

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