I’m not quite sure how to answer. But I want to dive into the statistical side of things to try to convey how I’m viewing this and trying to explain why it’s an important observation.
Use cases for neurodivergency are outliers in the statistical sense here. You and I wearing airpods because its an aid to survive our day is a statistical insignificance compared to the population at large. This does not negate the relief nor wonder such relief brings. Instead, it sets the stage to look at the statistically significant population that otherwise does not need the aid to function daily. Then we can observe and comment on the changes that dictate social interactions and human experiences that, until now, were relatively stable and predictable. You got to the Barista, closed your book or took off your headphones, and ordered your coffee. Now many don’t interrupt their music at all. The ordering is background noise, the human to human social interaction a nuisance at worst, an interruption at best.
In this framing, a population no longer interacts with the world and each other the way they used to prior to the technological changes. Which begs a few questions all starting with why. There is a new social phenomenon here that we don’t understand. To use the newspaper on the train analogy, people are taking the newspaper with them through the station, up the stairs, to the cafe, into work, working, and only glancing up and away to conduct an interaction before going right back into the print.
In short, the barrier between personal bubble and public interaction changed. Personal space is more nebulous and obscures, or superceds (I’m not quite sure how to define it), public interactions to the degree that a brief social encounter, once normal, is now abnormal and something leaning towards one sided and purely transactional. That must have profound implications for human behavior. Not to mention human and environment interactions.
You change how > 95% of the world acts, its going to effect everyone.
I’m not quite sure how to answer. But I want to dive into the statistical side of things to try to convey how I’m viewing this and trying to explain why it’s an important observation.
Use cases for neurodivergency are outliers in the statistical sense here. You and I wearing airpods because its an aid to survive our day is a statistical insignificance compared to the population at large. This does not negate the relief nor wonder such relief brings. Instead, it sets the stage to look at the statistically significant population that otherwise does not need the aid to function daily. Then we can observe and comment on the changes that dictate social interactions and human experiences that, until now, were relatively stable and predictable. You got to the Barista, closed your book or took off your headphones, and ordered your coffee. Now many don’t interrupt their music at all. The ordering is background noise, the human to human social interaction a nuisance at worst, an interruption at best.
In this framing, a population no longer interacts with the world and each other the way they used to prior to the technological changes. Which begs a few questions all starting with why. There is a new social phenomenon here that we don’t understand. To use the newspaper on the train analogy, people are taking the newspaper with them through the station, up the stairs, to the cafe, into work, working, and only glancing up and away to conduct an interaction before going right back into the print.
In short, the barrier between personal bubble and public interaction changed. Personal space is more nebulous and obscures, or superceds (I’m not quite sure how to define it), public interactions to the degree that a brief social encounter, once normal, is now abnormal and something leaning towards one sided and purely transactional. That must have profound implications for human behavior. Not to mention human and environment interactions.
You change how > 95% of the world acts, its going to effect everyone.