“I don’t agree with you.” Why do we need to feel (and not feel) with each other?

Nobody likes a grammar strict.

English is not my native language, and I am certainly guilty of using unclear words or unclear pronouns. I take comfort in the fact that proper usage is an ever-evolving concept and that the line between error and poetic license can be delightfully blurry. Yesterday’s misbehavior shapes today’s alternative definitions, and anyone who takes pleasure in pointing out others’ mistakes should remember that manners matter and rules change.

But when an error offends logic, reason, and good taste, even the most tolerant grammarian may lose his mind completely.

Take the word “ring”.

We all know the literal meaning of the verb: to make a loud, clear, deep, and sustained sound. We’ve all loved its metaphorical use: we hear something (an idea, a story, a concept, a joke) that speaks to us personally and clearly enough that it makes a loud, clear, deep, and sustained sound. It’s a beautiful metaphor, isn’t it? And it’s easy to visualize. Sound resonates in space, just as an idea resonates in our minds.

But recently, I’ve started hearing this word used in a way that defies the powers of my imagination. “I react to this idea.” What on earth does this mean? To illustrate this metaphor, I find myself imagining a kind of… being john malkovich A scenario where a little person wanders within the walls of an idea. Surrealism may be laudable, but language tends to serve us best when it makes sense.

I can’t help but think of the “I respond to” trend as a cry for help dressed up as a terrible grammar. As the Anthropocene gives way to the life-centered economy, we humans feel thrown off our thrones. We want to go back to being the subject of the sentence, the active voice, the controlling agent. When something resonates with us, we are reduced to the object, the future of the verb, the agent whose fate is shaped by another force.

Singer-songwriter Nick Cave Believes The key to overcoming writer’s block is to acknowledge that the problem may not be the musician’s inability He writes The song but their inability to do so Receive That’s when he arrived.

Is it possible that we are passive to the experience of resonance? Do we only hear those loud, clear, deep, constant sounds—perhaps the heartbeat of the universe—when we lose control and let the wind blow us where it wills? Do our rules know more about the world than we do? Do they embody the wisdom that eludes the modern mind?

What resonates – and what doesn’t?

The thing about resonance? It’s unpredictable. A long-awaited Broadway musical, written by a star composer, could boom at the box office and become a blockbuster movie. to fail This season. An obscure song by an unknown artist can top the charts Billboard layout Out of nowhere. A Czech writer who died a century ago can become The champion of the TikTok generationWe can study data, trends, formulas, and probabilities, but there is still no surefire way to predict where the market will go and what will happen.

As a curator, I know this all too well. I’ve planned lectures that were supposed to be all-around success stories—a great speaker, a relevant topic, an engaged audience—but for some reason, they failed. It’s often hard to pinpoint the main culprit. Instead, these failures make you realize the hubris of planning to make an impact. You can’t try to engage. Engagement, after all, is beyond us. Like happiness, it can’t be a goal.

I think shyness is resonance’s best friend. Shy people are often better at listening to the world and taking its cues. They tend to be more in tune with the “frequencies” of others. They don’t “react to others”, they are very sensitive to how others react to them. It is no coincidence that many artists are known to be shy, despite having a confident creative vision or a social theatrical personality. Artists teach us another valuable lesson about resonance: what resonates with you is likely to resonate with others as well.

Ringing is ringing.

Echo and resonance

This begs the question: does the resonance inside the echo chamber increase?

Like resonance, the term resonance chamber has both a literal and a figurative meaning that is related, but not the same. In the first sense, an resonance chamber is an enclosed space that naturally amplifies an original audio signal. Literal resonance differs from echo because it is based on the idea of ​​vibrations (good or bad). Physically, resonance occurs when an object or system achieves harmony between its natural frequency and an external source of vibration. In other words, resonance is the moment when both the external stimulus and the internal frequency vibrate and sound at the same frequency. Play a G on a cello and the G string on a nearby cello will begin to vibrate as well.

These differences have important implications when we look at the figurative meanings of both words. German sociologistHartmut RosaIt is believed that ringing has social value. According to him, resonance changes the role of an object. When listeners hear an idea that resonates with them, they get creative. When followers hear instructions that resonate with them, they become engaged. In his 2016 book,echoRosa studied the philosophical and political dimensions of the phenomenon, defining resonance as a mutual vibration between an object and a subject, or between two subjects, through collective experience, emotions, or any other harmony of energy.

inA conversation with fellow researchers Thijs Lister and Robin SelikatisRosa imagines resonance as a descendant of Emile Durkheim’s concept of “collective activity,” the ecstasy shared by participants in music, sports, dance, or spirituality. Rosa believes that tuning ourselves into this intense sense of invigorating companionship is a necessary alternative to measuring, mapping, analyzing and exploiting the world. In this sense, resonance is the interpersonal brother of the more introverted concept of mindfulness. It’s like placing dozens of tentacles on objects and people around you so that they collectively vibrate and share an experience.

Rosa emphasizes that resonance is not a tool at all and therefore cannot be used to achieve maximum results. It does not aim to achieve a goal. Unlike harmony, it allows room for dissonance. In fact, resonance requires a certain friction. Paradoxically, when two people completely agree on a point, or when their experiences are completely identical, or when an idea meets no resistance, there is less resonance than when friction brings about changes in energy. Rub your hands together for a minute and you will feel it. Or just look at social media, and the temptation of debate and heated debate.

Echo chambers lack this friction. So do “filter bubbles,” which are essentially the digital embodiment of echo chambers. In his bookFilter WorldKyle Chayka explores how personal search, algorithms, and online behavior are flattening our culture by offering more of what we have already consumed, shrinking our digital worlds.

AI will not improve this in any way. New research suggests that artificial intelligence reduces complexity, or at least our experience of it. A recent study shows that artificial intelligence reduces complexity, or at least reduces our experience of it. Platonic representation hypothesisHe explains that as AI models become more powerful, they form increasingly similar statistical representations of the world. The result is that we are effectively simplifying our understanding of the world and then propagating that simplification. If this trend continues, we may find ourselves living in a reality that is far less complex, richer, and multifaceted than the one we know now—a monochromatic world at the same frequency level but with no resonance at all.

The main point of concern here is not that an LLM like GPT-4 is reductive in its representation of reality, per se; it is that different AI models, each reductive in their own way, are converging. An echo chamber of echo chambers of echo chambers.

Interestingly, echo chambers also come with benefits, not just for the “residents,” but for society as a whole. In fact, they may be essential as markers of—and creators of—shared identity and values, places of belonging and comfort. Isn’t any society, by definition, an echo chamber? Beautiful business houseThe community I helped found certainly is. And we have no illusions about that (even if one member once described us as “the most heterogeneous community in the world”). What we can try to do—and what human therapy alone can so far make possible—is to find creative ways out of the house of mirrors. “Leave the door open on your way out” is one of our commandments, an invitation to bring parallel worlds and universes, adversaries and dissenters, rebels and insurgents into our beautiful bubble, to deal with other echo chambers in some way. Which produces the kind of friction that leads to resonance.

Whether bad or good, we must look for vibrations. It is the difference between an economy that only manages life and a living economy, between code and poetry, and between a filtered world and a world full of beauty.

I hope this resonates with you.