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540 Task 2: Does language shape the way we think?

By Richard Payne

A reflection on:

YouTube. (2017, June 7). Lera Boroditsky, how the languages we speak shape the ways we think. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGuuHwbuQOg&t=2066s

[13:48] Dr. Boroditsky describes an Australian Aboriginal tribe which uses the objective language markers of North, East, West, South for directions as opposed to relative left, right etc.  I think this is a cultural adaption to the land expressed through language.  It reminded me of a familiar experience but expressed as a cultural difference within the same language (English). For example, when my family emigrated to (flat) southern Ontario on which roads and concessions are laid out on a grid from their home in the windy hilly English countryside they were surprised that locals would give directions in this manner: “Go straight, turn west for two concessions, turn north go straight until you cross the tracks, and you’ll see it on the east side”.  Therefore, I think language can adapt to geographic/cultural needs, and some languages are endemic to very specific niche cultural and geographical needs. Growing up there I always knew exactly which way north was.  Now, living in BC I have a more vague idea of exactly where north is.  A language like English has had to adapt to many environments and has many influences.  I think it would be an interesting further study to take a couple of members of said Australian tribe to a different environment that had features that their flat dessert home doesn’t, and see how in their own language they describe their mental map of the area and give directions.  Would they think about it differently based on their vocabulary?

[19:23] Dr. Boroditsky insinuates that Russian speakers can better differentiate shades of blue as their language affords them the distinction.  English speakers have a blue from green distinction and Korean with a further yellow/green distinction.  After having lived in both Japan and Korea myself I know that it is often said that the traffic light is blue (in their respective languages).  Even though they have a word for green, they see that as blue.  It is a strange concept that our eyes are seeing within the confines of the way we have defined the labels in the language which we use.  Language is intertwined with thought especially the moment we need to communicate those thoughts with others to further develop them.  Therefore, essentially most of us, think through language.  I say “some people” because as I recently in the last few years learned that some people do not have an inner dialogue and don’t think in ‘words.  Here is one (of many) such article that can be found for reference articulating that point.

[29:29] Dr. Boroditsky says “In English… we don’t strongly differentiate between things that are accidental and intentional”.  Meaning that the same phrase could be correctly used to describe two different events one of which is accidental and one of which was purposeful.  This as opposed to Spanish [30:03] in which Dr. Boroditsky describes that “The construction of ‘I did something’ insinuates that it was intentional.  Dr. Boroditsky refers to research as to how this affects how we remember an incident essentially did we pay attention to the thing or the person when it was an accident vs intentional.  I have to say as an English speaker, I didn’t fall into the expected box here.  In the accidental scene the actor threw his arms up as the balloon popped and distracted me from his face.  The research however would seem to indicate that English speakers remember the person in the accidental version as well but can’t remember if it was an accident far more than other languages.  The focus of this experiment is on memory, but I also wonder how it translates to blame.  I am curious to know if there could be any correlation as to how this influences legal proceedings in places with different languages.  The research Dr. Boroditsky refers to can be found here.

[35:00] Dr. Boroditsky explains “how we know language is causal”.  She describes an experiment in which English speakers in a control group are bombarded with non-agentive (passive) language and the other group of English speakers are bombarded with agentive language.  This is followed by applying the same afore mentioned experiment involving memory, which goes on to prove mailability of memory or thought based on descriptive language at top of mind.  Wow!  This is very fun research that could give one all sorts of thoughts of brainwashing etc.  For me however, my mind goes back to this idea of agentive or non-agentive language.  She uses the examples of in her YouTube video talk.

For me personally, I learned, to the best of my ability, two new languages as an adult (very different from learning as a child) both very different from English and they are Japanese and Korean.  In both of those languages I can remember being confused in instances where I had understood every word of the sentence spoken to me, but I had to ask “wait, are you referring to me or you? Or who are we talking about?”.   As an English speaker I rely on the subject being stated.  In Korean or Japanese which in this instance are higher context, it can in some cases be rude to directly say ‘you’ or conceded to say ‘I’.  This is a bit different to exactly what Dr. Boroditsky is referring to here, but that is where it brought be in my own life experience with such a difference.

[35:00] Dr. Boroditsky discusses different counting systems.  The Papua New Guinea system with a base 27 that uses corresponding body parts for number names was incredible. That seems unimaginably complicated.  And just as astonishing at [35:36] the introduction of an Amazon language without numbers is something I would never have imagined.  To think that a medium of communication could have evolved without a way of identifying how many multiple objects are present boggles the mind and there are so many more interesting questions that bubble up as a result.

[56:49] Audience question: “Do you think that the different way people use the language now by texting is changing the way they think?”  I thought this was a great question as Dr. Boroditsky acknowledged, and not to say she was wrong in her answer (which was essentially to brush it off as nothing more than fear of anything new) but I would bet that if she wasn’t on the spot and had chance to put more thought into it she may have answered differently.  I think it would have been smart for her to leave the door open after that statement with something like: having said that, with all the research we’ve looked at as to how languages evolved to be adaptive to their environments and they affect the way we think, how can it not be that text and many other new forms of digital textogolgy will not influence the way people reply on the language they have to think.  So ultimately time will tell as future research is done to analyze this, but we are always heading into the unknown as language and modes of communication constantly evolve.

References

Dazed. (2019, May 28). The people who have no voice inside their head. https://www.dazeddigital.com/science-tech/article/44494/1/living-without-inner-speech-voice-inside-head-psychology-science

Fausey, C. M., Long, B. L., Inamori, A., & Boroditsky, L. (2010, September 12). Constructing agency: The role of language. Frontiers. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2010.00162/full

YouTube. (2017, June 7). Lera Boroditsky, how the languages we speak shape the ways we think. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGuuHwbuQOg&t=2066s

Photo credit:

Oral communication. (n.d.). Wikimedia. Retrieved from https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/75/Oral_communication.jpg.

what’s in my bag? RP

Task 1: What’s in your bag?

This is me, Richard Payne with the contents of my work bag in 2023 ~ nice to meet you!

The contents:

1. K94 mask from Korea. ‘left over’ from the pandemic I keep it in my bag for flying in case some countries still require it.
2. When travelling, sometimes a workday could end up being up to 24 hours on the go without a chance to stop so nice to have a stick of deodorant in the bag.
3. Two sanitizer wipes, I use these on airplanes to wipe down the food tray.
4. Sanitizer came in an Air Canada travel pack and just stayed in my bag.
5. USB stick. This has several presentations I need in case I don’t have access to the internet.
6. Notepad with two pens. I use this daily.  I keep to-do lists and meeting notes.  I don’t do anything with them, but the very act of writing things down helps me to remember, digest, ponder and act on ideas.  Once those notes are no longer relevant, I shred them.
7. My Think Pad Lenovo laptop. I take this to my office everyday where I attach it to my daisy chain of computer screens.  I also bring it home every day.
8. The mouse.
9. The power cord.
10. My fob and ID badge along with some business cards.
11. A pin that I sometimes wear on a suit lapel.
12. My garage door opener.
13. My front door key, just in case one day my garage door doesn’t open!
14. My wallet.
15. An external hard drive. I only bring this to and from the office.
16. Finally, my beloved Contigo tumbler. This holds my tea.

These are the contents of my daily work bag.  I’m usually in my office, sometimes visiting schools and sometimes travelling but usually in my office Monday to Friday.  My work often extends into the evening especially communicating in different time zones, so my laptop always comes with me.  I have some travel items that while I don’t use frequently, just never seem to make it out of my bag.  I don’t carry anything personal other than photos of my family in my wallet.  I have a much different bag I use in my free time which I take hiking or paddling which looks the opposite of this.  First aid kit, bear spray, snacks, water, towel, and no electronics!  While that ‘weekend’ bag might say more about me personally, I think the daily work bag inhabits much more of my life and reflects how the majority of my time is spent.

The contents of this bag point to the fact that I use technology for/at work.  In fact, much of my communication throughout the day is digital.  As it relates to this course, I reflect on:

How might these items be considered “texts” and how do they relate to text technology.

While my work is multifaceted, so much of it comes down to communication.  So much of that communication is through digital text.  As I take this opportunity to think about how these items relate to textologies, I think about the timeline of the technology.  I have several items that could be considered outdated modes of text and storing text.  For one, my notebook and pens.  I believe, and research would seem to show, that the act of handwriting itself engages the brain in a way that typing doesn’t.  In theory, digital note taking would be superior in that I can share notes, store them, organize them in far superior ways etc.  However, I do not intend to keep any of the daily notes in my notebook, I just need to go through the act of writing things out to remember, digest, ponder and act on ideas.  Secondly, why in this day in age of the cloud would anyone use an external hard drive? Perhaps this says more about me, in that for some of my work, I just don’t like keeping things in the cloud.  The laptop itself is more a versatile extension of myself as a means of communication, multi modal creation, and implementation.  While much is conveyed through video, image, and sound, still text trumps all those mediums for some applications.

What do they say about you, the places you inhabit, the cultures with which you engage, and/or the activities you take up?

From these items alone, it becomes apparent to me that I value keeping my personal and professional life separate.  There are very few personal items in my work bag.  They show that I inhabit a digital space in a time and culture in which that is important and effective.

What would this same bag have looked like, say, 15 or 25 years ago?

20 years ago, I led a very different life.  I lived in the Rockies, lived for adventure, and didn’t own a cell phone or a computer.  My bag, depending on the season, would have consisted of skiing, paddling, biking, or trekking gear.

How do you imagine an archeologist aiming to understand this temporal period might view the contents of your bag many years in the future?

An archeologist in the future, say in the year 2123 might be somewhat bemused at the machines I carried around.  The electronics would be corroded and beyond access.  The depth of all the rich text and information I carried around with me would be lost to the archaic technology.  I recently had such an experience myself while visiting my family home this summer.  I found my old collection of 1990s mix tapes, but to my chagrin, apparently magnetic strips have a shelf life.  All those musical memories forever lost… (thank god for YouTube music!).  The most communicative items to the archeologist ‘lucky’ enough to discover my work bag would ironically be the oldest of technologies in my bag, the notebook.  The notebook, which could be very well preserved and the contents of my wallet which would provide text clues to the story of who I was.  All the electronics would show is what was used but no clue as to what its contents were.

To that end, it reminds me of a striking scene in the new Mission Impossible movie (spoiler alert!) wherein the CIA had hundreds of people in a room on typewriters furiously transcribing information from digital format to ink as a super AI is contorting truth itself in the digital realm of text knowledge, and without truth only weaponized chaos would ensue.  The only way to preserve text knowledge was to revert to this older technology.

Alas, those contents of my bag provide the affordances of my day to day work life.