Welcome back, good hols?

If you missed the Nostalgia forum before the break, we highly recommend you watch the recording here. It features a hugely entertaining and insightful conversation with Maya, Sean Monahan (who has just released a great post on Bidirectional Nostalgia), Dal Chodha from Central St. Martins and our Head of Strategy, Joanna Lowry ✨ There's also a bunch of new Reports, Forums and Podcasts coming up, so make sure you're signed in and keep an eye on your inbox and our socials for updates. We've got two months of seeds to plant in your collective conscious, so let's get to it ...

Seeds

Dynamic Nominalism — as opposed to static nominalism — supposes that once assigned a label, an individual inherits all the social and cultural characteristics associated with it. Theorised by Canadian philosopher Ian Hacking, who suggests that trends are trends when assigned a name, because nothing is new, until it is labelled.

Observations

To recognise all the incredible contributors we've had over the years, we thought it would be a nice idea to feature one of their memorable (and still relevant) posts. This month it's Will Wiles on Emotional AI from 2015:

Can We Trust Emotional AI?

Will Wiles — July 13, 2015

When we think of work, it’s natural to mostly think of the practical tasks it involves. But there’s another side of work, an emotional side: we must regulate our feelings while we’re at work and do as much as we can to maintain a pleasant exterior, even when it’s only a thin facade concealing a writhing mass of stress, anger or anxiety. This psychological work is called “emotional labour”, a term coined by the sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild in 1983.

Where there’s labour, there’s potential for labour-saving technology, although when it involves human feelings it comes with an unmistakably dystopian twang. Service industry workers such as waitstaff and call centre workers are under the most pressure to put in the emotional elbow grease, to smile and be cheerful even when dealing with obnoxious or irate customers.

Although this kind of toil is hard to automate – it’ll be some time before we believe a robot voice cares about us – some call centres already use emotion-detection software that analyses wave patterns in the voice to detect stress and anger on the part of either caller or worker. As sociologists Danielle van Jaarsveld and Winifred Poster have written, this can help the workers in the centre, for instance by alerting their supervisor if a call becomes particularly heated so they can be relieved.

Continue reading ...

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