![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Libraries, Schemas, and Social Scripts
Sep. 8th, 2004 10:26 pmToday in Library Science class, we discussed metaphors, schemas, scripts, and other facets of some field called "Human Computer Interaction". I viewed this field with the deep skepticism I feel towards all social sciences. As far as I'm concerned, social science is just opinions and fancy vocabulary applied to pseudo-data. But that's my own problem. (I should make it clear that I have a social science undergrad degree, in Political Science, so I feel that I more or less know whereof I speak).
Anyway, this whole discussion of scripts, e.g. "The Restaurant Script", struck a couple of chords with me.
The first was that I remembered this way of looking at tasks from my teenage flirtation with computer science. The whole point is to imagine a complex task and break it down into idiot steps that the three-year-old brain of the computer can understand.
The second chord was to the article in the Wall Street Journal a few months back about Asperger's syndrome. Asperger's is a kind of low-level autism often accompanied by high intellectual performance. Primarily, Asperger's seems to manifest itself in a difficulty processing social signals, recognizing social cues, etc. When I returned to my college for a visit, tons of students there had read this article or heard of this condition, and many of them, especially those from technical fields, identified with the descriptions.
The way they treat these people is to teach them social scripts. They practice things like entering a room and addressing strangers, knowing when to drop a conversational thread that is making others uncomfortable. One teenager profiled even talked about having to consciously learn why he shouldn't pick his nose in public.
This article resonated with me. I remember being in high school, and the light that went off over my head as I began to understand why my social life was the way it was. By and large, it wasn't that people didn't like me: it was that my ignorance of the proper social cues made them think that I didn't like them.
Example: as a too-verbal, very bookish person, I tend to think in complete sentences. The more excited about a topic I get, the more I tend to use a formal vocabulary and complex sentences.
Other students listening to me were turned off by this way of speaking. Most people don't think in complex verbal structures; their thoughts are complex, but they are verbalizing them for the first time as they speak. To these people, my excited complex speech was confusing: it gave off contradictory cues. It felt glib, as if I didn't care, even though my body language might say I did. This made me seem sarcastic or as if I was looking down at people.
So I had to study what I call the "serious conversation" set of actions.
I'll call it a script, since that's what started this post.
"Serious Conversation" script:
1)Begin with eye contact, not speech.
2)Follow eye contact with a general phrase like "something important to me",
don't just jump into the argument.
3)Pause between every couple of words. make eye contact and use a serious expression as if speech were difficult, not an elated expression of how cool the thing that you're talking about is.
4)After pausing, look down as if thinking. Speak a key phrase.
5)Look up, repeat key phrase
6) Repeat 3-5 until idea is expressed or other person begins to speak. Remember to stutter slightly on key words and concepts, imagining that you are reaching for these ideas and they are just out of reach.
This may sound incredibly fake and manipulative, but it isn't intended to be. There are just certain social signals (stuttering,pauses, eye contact) that I've observed most people give out when expressing important or new ideas. If I want other people to listen to me, I have to express myself in the format they're comfortable with.
Learning to do things like that made my senior year of high school much more pleasant than my freshman year.
But normal people don't have to make conscious scripts out of these kinds of interactions. Which made me wonder about the mental processes of the researchers who developed these rigid "script" models. The article I read did suggest that Asperger's people are concentrated in the library and computer science fields. maybe the models that these people have developed for formal thought reflect abnormal, not abstract, thinking processes.
Anyway, this whole discussion of scripts, e.g. "The Restaurant Script", struck a couple of chords with me.
The first was that I remembered this way of looking at tasks from my teenage flirtation with computer science. The whole point is to imagine a complex task and break it down into idiot steps that the three-year-old brain of the computer can understand.
The second chord was to the article in the Wall Street Journal a few months back about Asperger's syndrome. Asperger's is a kind of low-level autism often accompanied by high intellectual performance. Primarily, Asperger's seems to manifest itself in a difficulty processing social signals, recognizing social cues, etc. When I returned to my college for a visit, tons of students there had read this article or heard of this condition, and many of them, especially those from technical fields, identified with the descriptions.
The way they treat these people is to teach them social scripts. They practice things like entering a room and addressing strangers, knowing when to drop a conversational thread that is making others uncomfortable. One teenager profiled even talked about having to consciously learn why he shouldn't pick his nose in public.
This article resonated with me. I remember being in high school, and the light that went off over my head as I began to understand why my social life was the way it was. By and large, it wasn't that people didn't like me: it was that my ignorance of the proper social cues made them think that I didn't like them.
Example: as a too-verbal, very bookish person, I tend to think in complete sentences. The more excited about a topic I get, the more I tend to use a formal vocabulary and complex sentences.
Other students listening to me were turned off by this way of speaking. Most people don't think in complex verbal structures; their thoughts are complex, but they are verbalizing them for the first time as they speak. To these people, my excited complex speech was confusing: it gave off contradictory cues. It felt glib, as if I didn't care, even though my body language might say I did. This made me seem sarcastic or as if I was looking down at people.
So I had to study what I call the "serious conversation" set of actions.
I'll call it a script, since that's what started this post.
"Serious Conversation" script:
1)Begin with eye contact, not speech.
2)Follow eye contact with a general phrase like "something important to me",
don't just jump into the argument.
3)Pause between every couple of words. make eye contact and use a serious expression as if speech were difficult, not an elated expression of how cool the thing that you're talking about is.
4)After pausing, look down as if thinking. Speak a key phrase.
5)Look up, repeat key phrase
6) Repeat 3-5 until idea is expressed or other person begins to speak. Remember to stutter slightly on key words and concepts, imagining that you are reaching for these ideas and they are just out of reach.
This may sound incredibly fake and manipulative, but it isn't intended to be. There are just certain social signals (stuttering,pauses, eye contact) that I've observed most people give out when expressing important or new ideas. If I want other people to listen to me, I have to express myself in the format they're comfortable with.
Learning to do things like that made my senior year of high school much more pleasant than my freshman year.
But normal people don't have to make conscious scripts out of these kinds of interactions. Which made me wonder about the mental processes of the researchers who developed these rigid "script" models. The article I read did suggest that Asperger's people are concentrated in the library and computer science fields. maybe the models that these people have developed for formal thought reflect abnormal, not abstract, thinking processes.
