our social interactions as a series of performances, blue guitar wallpaper

While about Twitter, this essay is also about the larger sphere of social interactions, in person or by way of social media, How kind are you to Twitter and how kind is Twitter to you?

Erving Goffman (1922-1982) was an eminent social theorist who had interesting stuff to say about how we present ourselves in social situations.  He described our social interactions as a series of performances – we are all actors trying to control the impression others have of us in order to avoid embarrassment and shame. Extending the performance metaphor, he describes our front-stage and back-stage performances – those we are prepared to show to our wider networks and those we keep hidden away. He also wrote about Stigma (1961) in which  he explored how people manage impressions of themselves when they carry ‘marks’ which mean they don’t conform to approved standards of behaviour or appearance. So how does this play out in your Twitter ecosystem – the people who you follow and who follow you?

This would easily apply to blogging. especially if you have comments, but the various interactive buttons: rate this post, like, post to Facebook or Twitter, and positive and negatives comments tend to be ways that bloggers play to their audience and on some level shape the content, tone and even length of posts.

As an experiment I just tweeted ‘I’ve got a big bad miserable headache’ (which is true FYI) – not the biggest share in the world but even that felt uncomfortable! Not one single person responded. But when I tweeted about my pottery lesson success then I got tons of interaction. Perhaps we only want to hear the good stuff.

I think the reactions we get probably depend on the online ecosystem we have created around ourselves. I happen to follow a lot of people who use Twitter as a source of support and connectedness to other people with similar mental health diagnoses and they routinely tweet about how they are feeling and are quick to offer support each other. Check out #BPDChat on a Sunday night at 9pm to see people with a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder sharing learning and supporting each other on a different related topic each week. It fits the social norm of that ecosystem because that is what it was set up to do. It is routinely kind and generous and affirmative.

That is an interesting phenomenon in that while the stigma associated with any level of mental health problems has improved over the years, even if relatively anonymous, the participants are exposing themselves to a vast audience of public judgments. Though as is often the case, despite the on going presence of trolls, most of the feedback on that Twitter feed is positive. Obviously 140 characters is not going to make even a mild emotional issue go away; it is the nod of acknowledgement, the digital smile as an affirmation that someone has acknowledged someone’s pain. Sometimes just knowing that is enough for a participant to feel better.

blue guitar wallpaper

Happy birthday Lydia Maria Child (February 11, 1802 – October 20, 1880) was an American abolitionist, women’s rights activist, opponent of American expansionism, Indian rights activist, novelist, and journalist and Unitarian.

black and white sunset field wallpaper, men and women are from earth

black and white sunset field wallpaper

Men Are from Mars Earth, Women Are from Venus Earth

From empathy and sexuality to science inclination and extroversion, statistical analysis of 122 different characteristics involving 13,301 individuals shows that men and women, by and large, do not fall into different groups. In other words, no matter how strange and inscrutable your partner may seem, their gender is probably only a small part of the problem.

“People think about the sexes as distinct categories,” says Harry Reis, professor of psychology at the University of Rochester and a co-author on the study to be published in the February issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. “‘Boy or girl?’ is the first question parents are asked about their newborn, and sex persists through life as the most pervasive characteristic used to distinguish categories among humans.”

[  ]…But for the vast majority of psychological traits, including the fear of success, mate selection criteria, and empathy, men and women are definitely from the same planet. Instead of scores clustering at either end of the spectrum—the way they do with, say, height or physical strength—psychological indicators fall along a linear gradation for both genders. With very few exceptions, variability within each sex and overlap between the sexes is so extensive that the authors conclude it would be inaccurate to use personality types, attitudes, and psychological indicators as a vehicle for sorting men and women.

Some people from both groups will likely object to the findings because to some degree or another both groups like some of the stereotypes about their groups. There are negative stereotypes about women, but they also have positive stereotypes like being more compassionate and more creative. Some positive male stereotypes include being more emotionally stable and courageous. Some people certainly have those traits, but they’re not especially gender dependent. It is possible for a woman to be courageous and below average in terms of compassion. It is possible a man to be creative and not score especially high on emotional stability. The researchers on this study reanalyzed data from 13 studies, many of which the public has read about in secondary sources like popular magazines, that had shown significant and frequently large differences between the sexes. While they did conclude that these past studies were sometimes flawed, they did show that men and women do, in generally, distinctly differ in some ways.

And gender can be a reliable predictor for interest in very stereotypic activities, such as scrapbooking and cosmetics (women) and boxing and watching pornography (men).

There are reasons that people will not like this and those reasons likely cross cultural, religious, gender political, political party and other boundaries. Don’t give up hope. There will always be new studies of female versus male behavioral trends. The authors of this study even acknowledge that their paper  may have flaws since it was so reliant on questionnaires.

Even some of those “stereotypic” behaviors might be the result of nurture rather than nature. If a girl is brought up to ride horses and rope cattle, than that will be typical behavior for her, not tom-boyish behavior. If a male is brought up learning crafts and scrapbooking, he will become proficient at those things and think of them as normal male behavior. Except, and this happens in both cases as many parents can attest. You bring up your child to like certain things and at some point – usually mid to late teens – they decide they’re not interested in the things their parents want them to have an interests in.

the bridge of louis philippe, things not to discuss in washington, the conservative history industry

  the bridge of louis philippe, 1875, by   Jean-Baptiste-Armand Guillaumin. Oil on canvas.

Six Things You Can’t Talk About in Washington. You cannot say that Wall Street recovered from the 2008 meltdown within a year. You cannot say corporate profits are great, but we probably will not fully recover the jobs lost in 2008, perhaps as late as 2018. But if we do what conservative governors are doing and cut corporate taxes while raising taxes on the working poor ( mostly via regressive sales taxes) business will be motivated to start hiring. If tax cuts equaled jobs we would have recovered those jobs four years ago. You can’t talk about more stimulus spending, even though the first wave that Democrats passed in 2009 is what kept the U.S. from going through a European style austerity induced slump, from which they do not seem to be able to recover. Absolutely do much make any obvious observations like conservatives warning America not to slip into having a European style economy, but they are modeling their austerity plans on Europe. You cannot speak of how wages are at an all-time low in comparison to corporate executive wages. America’s elite are special, that is all anyone needs to know. Workers should be on their knees showing gratitude, rather than asking for fair compensation for their work. Do not mention that the U.S. health care system is not constrained by free market pressure on pricing, thus most Americans are either going without some medical care to save money, or doing without medical care altogether. It may seem obvious, but do not mention how dishonest and hypocritical conservative leadership is about balanced budgets.

When one lives in a bubble of disinformation, life is not easy. Reality presents constant challenges. So conservatives have created an entire industry of reality denial. One of the biggest growth sectors in the reality denial industry is historical revisionism. Like any industry, like Apple to tech, you have your industrial leaders, The Terrible Truth About the Republicans’ Favorite Historian

What does it say about Britain that today we merrily laud a historian who celebrates the most murderous acts of the British Empire — and even says women and children who died in our concentration camps were killed by their own stupidity? What does it say about the Republican Party that their most senior leaders — from George W. Bush to Dick Cheney to Karl Rove to Fred Thompson — fawn over this man?

Andrew Roberts is routinely described in the British press, and the likes of the National Review, as a talented historian with a penchant for partying.

[  ]…How should this empire exercise its power? One useful tactic, Roberts appears to believe, is massacring civilians. The Amritsar massacre is one of the ugliest episodes in the history of the British Raj. In 1919, Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer opened fire on 10,000 unarmed men, women, and children who were peacefully protesting, and about 400 died. Dyer was even repudiated by the British government. As Patrick French, an award-winning historian of the period, explains: “The biographies of Dyer show that he was clearly mentally abnormal, and there was no way he should have been in charge of troops.”

Yet Dyer has, at last, found a defender — Andrew Roberts. In his book A History Of The English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900, he says that after Dyer shot down the peaceful crowd, “[i]t was not necessary for another shot to be fired throughout the entire region.” He later comments: “Today’s reactions to Dyer’s deed are of course uniformly damning … but if the Amritsar district, Punjab region or southern India generally had carried on in revolt, many more than 379 people would have lost their lives.”

It is an extraordinary rationalisation for killing women and children in cold blood, and rejected by virtually all other historians. It was only after I exposed this passage that Roberts finally said: “I have never approved of massacring civilians.”

I tend to have a high regard for British pop music, movies from the 1960-70s and 19th century literature. The National Review is fond of and finds inspiration with British historians with sociopath tendencies. To each their own.