Seeking mutually agreeable outcomes in every interaction
Hi everyone,
This has been finished for a while, but I lost confidence that it was interesting or funny. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t check it out. If you like it, great. If you don’t, well, that confirmed my suspicion that is still needs work. But I hope you enjoy it.
Screenlifting might be a real thing. Surely some people do look at other people’s cell phones, laptops, and tablets without invitation to do so. But is it a problem? I’ve never heard anyone complain about another person looking at her screen. I’d be interested in hearing from those who have heard someone say, “God, his eyes were all over my Facebook account, looking my up and down my updates.”
For fun, though, let’s examine some different screenlifting situations.
When a stranger views your phone or laptop, your response should probably be uncomplicated. You’ll never see each other again, so unless it was some private financial information they saw, who cares? Because they don’t know you, any personal information will be out of context, less embarrassing, less likely to be understood.
People you see regularly but don’t know well, such as some co-workers, neighbors, or fellow church members, exert a lot of influence. You strive to maintain a certain reputation among them, you compete with them for promotions, seek help or alliances with them, and so forth. They are probably the people you least want to see your screen without your knowledge for fear of it being misinterpreted or taken out of context. At the same time, overt efforts to conceal a screen might foment suspicion that you harbor a lot of secrets.
People close to you such as life partners, family, good friends, should be able to see your screens without worry. It’s reasonable to hide a message about a birthday gift you want to be a surprise, or if you are working on institutionalizing that person due to an unsafe mental illness. But otherwise, if you try to keep other secrets from these individuals, you might need to re-examine your entire relationship.
If you find someone peering at your screen, let it be a door to explore yourself and another person instead of a nest to hatch hasty, ill informed judgments. Are you upset or pleased that a person is looking at your content? Would you rather the person look at you, instead of what you are looking at? Would you rather people pay you no attention, or do you only want attention on your exact terms? If you are worried about exposing your bank account numbers, what are you doing checking your balance in line at Chipolte anyway?
Such situations are ideal to explore how much space or privacy you require. All of that leads to questions about what you expect of others. And if you know your expectations, do you make others clearly aware of them? We should all know those answers about ourselves, and even more important, we why think that way.
In general I would suggest we treat this visual intrusion with more curiosity than anything. When someone looks at you or your screen, you may well discover that person does not have your best interest in mind. But don’t assume it. Not long ago, when someone felt his personal space or honor being challenged by a stare, it was common to say, “What are you looking at?” If we continue to keep interacting with our phones instead of each other, though, that question might become a new, innocent way to just start a conversation.
With every preference you choose on your phone, tablet, or laptop your life becomes a little easier, the world more centered around you. The customized bubble you design supplies you with just the right mix of ideas and entertainment plus access to the actual necessities of life. And since you can stay in your bubble and still Face-time friends and family, why burst it? It’s only isolating if you neglect to think and care about other people around you, and that can easily describe some people completely disconnected from technology. In fact, I would say it happened to people for centuries before we ever had text alerts and social media.
Why some people do not think or care as much about others as well as, others, is huge question for another day. But it seems safe to say that while our technology did not create the condition of uncaring ignorance, it certainly makes it easier for those conditions to form.
By filling your screen with this post I hope you gain some new ways to consider this issue. Participastory strives to inspire more thoughtful interaction and awareness between people. Part of that must include discovering how to integrate technology into life without reducing our humanity (and ideally enhancing it). Screens aren’t going away. Limiting our time in front of them may work for some, but for many it requires too much discipline, or even a different job. So perhaps a good first step for a lot of people to break free of their bubble is just to start looking at other peoples’ screens. They are right there in front of you in check out lines, beside you in meetings, in coffee shops. Why not?
At first glance you might think this was just a dreadfully long set up for a joke. Well, congratulations, you got it! It was a joke, sort of. I write sort of, because consciously deciding to acquaint yourself with another person by reading what’s on her laptop screen might be more efficient and interesting than the initial small talk so many of us engage in. Sure, it currently violates a lot of social norms around privacy. But our norms may change rapidly as technology becomes increasingly woven into our every day life. We already show pictures from our phones to people, and share articles, forward emails. Who is to say if the convenience of technology will make us so lazy that someday we just say, here I don’t know what you’ll like or not so just look through it yourself. Except, we won’t bother to use words, but some sort of hologram-projected emoji of our feelings. But for now, looking at others’ screens seems a violation, so much so that I have adopted the term suggestive of petty retail theft, “screenlifting”.
But as in all interpersonal interactions, if you see someone checking out your screen, or do it to someone else, there is an opportunity to learn more about that person. What could be more anti bubble than exploring other humans? Some of you may decide to engage this person immediately. “What are you looking at?” That’s a defensive, confrontational phrase that has been around a long time. It doesn’t necessarily have to apply to a person looking at another person, but I only recommend it if uttered in a calm, curious manner. In my next post I’ll discuss what you might consider about the screenlifting experience before you act.
One person’s attention can create a powerful affect on its recipient. Parents’ attention on their children shows love, lack of it, neglect. Our attention is finite, and most of us have less than we want to admit. We should use it wisely. Sometimes, though, it goes astray.
When someone starts composing or reading email on an open laptop near you, do your eyes ever drift over and start reading it? If we read an email like that, without explicit permission, that is screenlifting, the ugly cousin of hacking. Never mind that when you Google “screenlifting” you find images for tools to physically lift screens; I think it fits well in this context and I hope to see it used this way more often. And this form of visual eavesdropping isn’t limited to laptops; in fact reading others’ text messages in line at Chipotle or on the bus or subway might be even more common.
While hacked emails make headlines almost every day, we don’t hear much about screenlifting. Perhaps we don’t talk about it because we don’t think it is a problem. You never hear about important secrets being exposed because someone didn’t cover her laptop screen at Starbucks. But maybe it’s something deeper than that. Perhaps we don’t talk about it because we all do it in some way and therefore think it’s no big deal.
Not matter the reason, discussion of screenlifting may provoke some thorny emotions and thoughts about how we give attention and get it from others. We all see things about people that they aren’t necessarily aware of. Sometimes we stumble on situations or views of them before we can turn away, and sometimes we look for it. What we do with that tells us a lot about ourselves.
Here’s an example: you’re in a meeting at work, or next to someone at a crowded coffee shop. Something in the email on the screen next to you catches your attention and instantly an ethics algorithm runs itself in your brain. I’m not going to do anything harmful with this information, the person must not be too concerned about or he wouldn’t be writing it here, by knowing what’s in it I can possibly help this person…All these rationalizations grant permission to read the screen, or possibly make you feel okay about it having read it after the fact. Activity in your brain happens really fast. Suddenly you have about four or five sentences worth of information about the person next to you they don’t know you have. What do you do now?
In future posts I will explore what to do if the information is dangerous, or how to deal with people who deliberately seek to harm others. But for now let’s say you read it just because you find other people interesting and by seeing writing styles you can learn about how they think. You’ve just gained some insight into the person beside you. Should you let them know?
You might say: Excuse me, I just wanted to let you know I read your email and found it quite interesting. You have a lot of stuff going on in your life right now but seem to be handling it really well. And oh, the way you phrased that second sentence was pretty awkward. I had to read twice to get the meaning. I’d re-write that one.
Maybe the author would be grateful. She might even be flattered by your interest and glad that you had the courage to let her know your thoughts.
But those of us living on Planet Earth know this scenario is quite unlikely. Instead, you would be hesitant to share what you know for fear of being thought creepy or weird. And even if the author were an open and trusting person, she would most likely regard your revelation with suspicion and fear. And that’s the way it should be, right?
People get small amounts of information about others all the time, from a bit of gossip, a certain look, or behavior in a situation. Do we feel we need to inform others about everything we know of them? Common sense says we should not, if for no other reason than lack of time. But let’s use this weird little example to consider how much we notice about others. We should be interested in each other. When you interact with someone else, you are that person’s business. Yet, we usually want a signal that it is okay to get to know someone. For many, though, the drive to send such a signal is overwhelmed by the acute risk of rejection or concern about self-promotion.
What would society be like if most people were like this well intentioned screenlifter and grateful emailer? Where we were genuinely interested in each other, and if we realized we crossed some kind of boundary we disclosed it? If our first reaction to any slight transgression was forgiveness and understanding? Would you want to live in a society like that?
Even if you say yes, do you think you could truly feel at ease in such an open and trusting environment? Can you simultaneously let your guard down enough to trust others, while making sure to avoid sending easily misinterpreted signals? Being trusting and forgiving of others and yourself might lull some into relaxing their vigilance over self-control and improvement. But that only leads to personal dissatisfaction while giving ammo to critics of the open and trusting approach.
I am not suggesting we all start looking at each others’ screens. It’s just my lighthearted attempt to provoke thought about how we look at each other. But I do think we should welcome the curiosity of others just as we try to cultivate genuine interest in those around us. And when you encounter information about someone, try to think about it consciously, at least a little. How does what you just learned about the person affect you? Does it make you like her more or less? Does it make you think they are smarter or less intelligent? Odds are that impression will affect how you treat that person. And if we measure character by traits like kindness, honesty, and loyalty, how you manage that information may shape the kind of person you are.
The previous post provided a basic template for evaluating a person’s awareness. Accurately judging how much a person cares about other people is more difficult. A history of often getting it wrong, sometimes with very painful consequences, has given the judging process a bad name. It’s easy to be wrong. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. After all, knowing how much a person cares about others is important. Some might say the most important thing.
So how do we do it? First we must establish what care means. You can care about another person in many ways, not all good. For practitioners of the Ware Care Continuum, caring shall be considered as wanting the best for another person, even if you don’t wish to be part of that person’s life. A better definition is that caring means seeking mutually satisfactory outcomes. This only works, though, if both sides have some knowledge of what the other wants. In other words, they must have some awareness of each other. And to evaluate another’s level of care, you must need to know how much that person is aware.
For an example, let’s evaluate the care level of someone you watch interact with another person. How a person treats someone else should have a strong affect on you, even though they are not doing something directly to you. Imagine seeing someone spit in another person’s face. It’s tempting to think that the spitter doesn’t care about the spittee. Or that she cares very much about that person and wants to inflict humiliation and indignity. Since humiliation clashes with a mutually satisfaction (except in certain sado masochistic relationships), that kind of powerful caring is considered low- care.
But, what if the spitter perceived a wound on the recipient’s face, and, with no first aid kit available, and having just learned that there are antibacterial properties in saliva, thought she was doing the right thing for the person? This knowledge changes the care assessment. Would licking the wound be the more caring response? Perhaps, but again, it is possible the spitter was aware of the wounded person’s aversion to tongue contact or some other overall need for personal space.
Okay, so this is an extreme example, but one that illustrates how easy it is to misunderstand another’s level of care. A more common instance might be a man ignoring his child’s cries. It may appear that he doesn’t care, but what if he is trying to teach the child to self soothe?
So, what does an actual low care status look like? A hearing, fully capable person, who walks past someone in obvious distress without stopping is an obvious example. But it is probably less common, and might not be so useful. How about this – a person who appears to be listening to another individual express a point of view, but who just smiles, nods his head, and walks off. That would be a sign of not caring about the other person’s issue. We will continue to look for other examples, and post them here to aid in developing this process. Your help puts the “participate” in participastory.
The easiest way to assess if a person cares is to determine if they have the ability to do something, fix a problem, make a change, and yet fail to act on it. The affect we have on others often starts with how we care for ourselves. If you see a person with poor personal hygiene who also has obvious material advantages such as a nice home, car, job, it may seem obvious the person doesn’t care about his appearance. While this person may be a slob, before quickly assuming he is a low care, remember that our assessments are about interactions with others, not an individual’s personal habits. But this example begins with basic actions and expressions of existence. If he smells bad, and his body odors creep into your nostrils, that does reflect a lack of caring about the experience of others near him. Even if there is an allergy to deodorant, the person might use some sort of oil or scent to mitigate the smell. Similar examples can be made of those who don’t try to control anxiety, fear, or anger. These emotions directly affect other people. Anxiety can be as infectious as the flu. But how do you know if someone’s anxiety is controllable or run amok by abnormal neurochemical balances?
Making these assessments will be complicated. Difficulty in figuring others out may be one of the main reasons people give up and decide they don’t care. Indifference is easier than the difficult work of properly assessing others.
Staying in the same subject as hygiene, just because a person is very clean, does not mean that he cares about others. He might conceal his body odor due to fear of embarrassment and vanity. However, everyone who doesn’t have to smell him will probably be grateful, whatever the motivation. So how do you evaluate people who commit thoughtful, considerate acts for others, but don’t really care about them? Those who help others only to advance themselves socially or position themselves to exploit others? We will explore these questions and more going forward. One goal of practicing the Ware Care Continuum, though, is to understand and read people better. But in order for that to happen, we must do more than just think their assessments, we must share them.
Feedback is only useful if you share it. Please feel free to share feedback with me about this blog below.
To improve our interdependence, we should invoke John F. Kennedy. Ask not how someone or something makes you feel, ask how you make others feel. That’s not always an easy conversation to start, unless you step on their toes, spill hot coffee in their lap, cut them off in traffic, or turn them on in some irresistible way. That gets quick feedback. The rest of the time, though, asking about feelings evokes a sense of privacy, intimacy, and for some, weak sentimentality. So let’s call it how we affect other people. That sounds more neutral, less vulnerable. How do you learn how you affect others? Do you just ask? Maybe sometime we can get that direct. But for now we probably need to give something of ourselves first, namely we can share information about how they affect us.
It’s usually easy to tell someone if she has made a positive affect on you. It can be much harder when an interaction is unpleasant. Negative impressions stick with us. We often avoid giving feedback about the experience for fear of upsetting the person, saying the wrong thing, or we actually say the wrong thing that makes the situation worse. When your interests are offended, it’s easy to conclude that the person doesn’t care about you. The person might care, but lack awareness. Using the Ware Care Continuum can help you avoid some unpleasant reactions associated with a negative interaction by increasing your understanding of the person. It can also open up ways to share your impressions of others in case that person wants help with personal growth.
Here’s how it works. When someone upsets you, interrupt the counterproductive chain of reactions with questions. Instead of thinking, this &^%# just cut me off, or interrupted me, or wasted my time, ask, did this &^%$ know I am here, or aware I wasn’t finished, or think I wasn’t busy right now? If calling that person an expletive helps relieve a little tension, go ahead. But only in your mind. And keep your face neutral too. Sometimes your expression can call a person a douchebag without you saying a word. The curiosity behind the questions should replace some of the animosity, and what you learn should give you better options in handling the situation.
This inquiry should get at how this person affects you, not other aspects of personal preferences, tastes, and so on. Remember, though, that we are not promoting self-centeredness, but interdependence. Ask specific questions about areas the person can control. Some qualities like how a person speaks, looks, moves, for example, are outside control. They may annoy you, which is an affect, but one that shouldn’t change your reaction. If it does, you need to examine your own sense of tolerance. To know how a person affects you, ask how much is the person aware and cares.
Is this person aware of me, of my presence? That’s the most basic level of inquiry. Then, is this person aware of what I’m doing? Am I driving? Talking to someone else? Busy at my job? That’s a lower to medium level. A low ware or med ware. Is this person aware of how I am doing right now? If I am in pain? Distress? Happy? Sad? Angry? Knowledge of these mental states range from a medium level of awareness to high. Some folks mask their emotions well or simply always have flat affects. Is this person aware that I like her? Dislike him? Is this person aware of my thoughts, my cares? If yes, that signifies a high ware.
Your evaluation of the person’s awareness indicates your level of expectation. In other words, by evaluating that person you are also examining yourself. Why do I think that person should know my name? Have I introduced myself properly? Am I friendly and engaging? Do I think I am well known in this area? The answers to those questions might help you interact better with everyone else you meet. It will start a path for you to understand how you affect others. And if your warecare assessments are shared properly, they might help others.
It’s taken me a long time to write this post because I’ve made so many revisions to it. I’ve even changed the name of the process from Care/Aware Index to the Ware Care Continuum. I hope the latter is better. Another big question was about the best names or descriptors to use. These descriptions need to be short, and preferably pleasing to the ear. To start, we will modify high, medium, or low along with care and aware to create the phrases high ware, low care, med ware high care, low ware, low care, and so forth. I’m sure when someone blocks you in the hallway without seeming to care, or gets upset about something that wasn’t your fault, calling or thinking of them as a low ware may lack the satisfying sense of power that asshole or SOB provides. But understanding the person better should be satisfying on a deeper level. Now, if you dig into the situation and discover the person is a low ware, low care, or worse, high ware, low care, you may find they are in fact an a-hole. At least now you will have something to back it up. And by participating in the development of the WareCare Continuum, you might discover ways to help someone overcome such a personality deficiency. Isn’t changing someone better than just judging him?
The Care Aware Index is meant to focus your thoughts about other people in ways that can easily be expressed as feedback to start valuable dialogues. It might seem ideal to apply these assessments to everyone you meet, but that’s probably not a good place to start. Our schedules won’t allow it and the human brain may not have that much processing power. And even once we can augment our mental abilities technologically, do we want to assess everyone we see on the street? It is possible to care too much and we’ll discuss that later.
It’s tempting to think that the first people we should assess are our friends and family. Aren’t your odds of success better with people Continue reading “Where to Start”