Notices by Adam Greenfield (adamgreenfield@social.coop), page 2

So let’s talk about prosopagnosia, or “faceblindness.” I have it! What this means is that I could well have known you for twenty years, but if I see you outside of the context in which I usually encounter you, or even if you change your hairstyle (!), I may simply not recognize you the next time we cross paths. It’s mortifying! I have literally introduced myself to people I’ve worked alongside for years – who are, entirely understandably, generally fairly miffed that I’ve treated them so poorly.

This has real social consequences, as I’m sure you can imagine. People who literally feel unseen are unlikely to feel super-warmly about someone so seemingly self-involved as to forget the people they meet. So *finally*, after decades of suffering through this, I’ve figured out a modest workaround, and I really recommend doing something like this if you, too, suffer from any degree of faceblindness. It’s a little embarrassing, but it seems to circumvent that larger, later mortification:

Whenever I meet someone new that I like – which is, y’know, often, because y’all can be some charming motherfuckers – I confess my faceblindness immediately and up front. I say something like, “Hey, if I run into you on the bus or around the neighborhood, and I seem to be giving you the cut direct, I swear I’m not! Please forgive me, and, if you will, indulge me by reminding me of your name and where we met.” I cannot tell you how much grief this has prevented. https://uncommon-courtesy.com/2014/10/01/the-cut-direct-the-fiercest-etiquette-punishment/

It really is that simple. I get that doing this little song-and-dance at the very beginning of a friendship may seem a little extra, a little performative even, but I think it’s worth it if it prevents me from hurting someone’s feelings for no better reason than a few glitchy connections in my fusiform gyrus. I wish I had started doing this *years* ago, but if you’re in the same boat, hopefully you can benefit from my experience before suffering with things for much longer? 👊

And finally, on reflection, I think my faceblindness is so distressing to me precisely because courtesy, decency, politeness and the respect bound up in what we mean when we say we “see” people are so important to me. They’re some of the few things standing between us and the abyss, fr fr, they’re hanging by a thread, and ideally I want to be enacting them in all my interactions with everyone who isn’t a complete shitbird.

In this regard, something clicked for me when, of all things, I first heard Hannibal Lecter describe Clarice Starling as “courteous and receptive to courtesy.” Lecter’s own elaborate courtesy did not, of course, interfere with him being a monster of the bloodiest sort, and that’s a principle we can attend to more generally and with great profit. But the idea that the awful grief so many of us carry all the time might be buffered, even a little, by something that amounts to a theater of kindness?

Here’s a pamphlet introducing the idea of Convivial Research, from the pleasingly-named Center for Convivial Research and Autonomy. (Via Ashley Cooper – she’s not on here, is she? Damn.) http://cril.mitotedigital.org/sites/default/files/content/ccra_convivial_research_2-18.pdf

@cfiesler @edsu @ldodds @luis_in_brief See, I don’t understand what that means. And I’m someone who tried to contribute locational information for 12,000 Chicago bus stops to the project, unsuccessfully.

@edsu @luis_in_brief @cfiesler Yes, I want to be clear that @ldodds was clearly responding in optimism and good faith! The fact that I don’t, personally, think OSM is the greatest model only speaks to the very great difficulty technical initiatives face in being anything like invitational as I’ve tried to define it here.

@cfiesler @edsu @ldodds @luis_in_brief lol. I’m glad someone said it.

@edsu @luis_in_brief Right? I found it a super-helpful framing.

@edsu @luis_in_brief @cfiesler @ldodds FWIW, I have, uh, not felt that.

@edsu @luis_in_brief Uhh, let’s see: as far as “looking over someone’s shoulder” goes, someone I’d like to properly credit (but who I can’t, due to the broken search up in this place) yesterday posted a response to the thread that offered the example of “legitimate peripheral participation,” and that felt right to me – though, again, as you observe, far easier to realize in some contexts than in others. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legitimate_peripheral_participation

@edsu @luis_in_brief in material furtherance of the OS mission, but neither interfered with that mission, alone or in very small groups disconnected from the main functional areas of the hub. I’d wager that this in itself lent the space a quality of being easy to participate in, and, as you suggest, it meant too that there were always bodies available to greet, do intake and indoctrination, etc.

@luis_in_brief @edsu Very rich seam here, and you make some great points. The first thing I want to pick up (and I treat this explicitly in “Lifehouse”) is that invitationality in the Occupy Sandy case *absolutely* depended on the abundance and availability of labor, to the degree that an uncharitable observer might characterize some of the things I saw people doing at 520 as the nonhierarchical equivalent of makework, i.e. people doing self-directed, low-intensity things that may not have been

@verbman HFS, that’s…unreal. Cheers.

@Emmadrime And! And! *It’s even worse in other places* (or differently bad, but at an at-least-equal intensity).

@otfrom What would the difference be, in terms of kinds of questions asked or attitude taken by the interviewer?

@pts [sicko meme]

@franktaber Early childhood education, or more frankly conditioning, and what is praised, rewarded and encouraged (or conversely singled out for disapproval and punishment) in the highly neuroplastic years of early life. A certain amount of canny observation, as well, of the similar gradients obtaining in adult life. Even language norms, e.g. I had to move to the UK to learn the term “jobsworth,” for example. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jobsworth