My Thoughts on “Thoughtless Acts” (Part 2)

The following is a short exploration of the ideas presented in one of the sections of Jane Fulton Suri’s “Thoughtless Acts”, which I described in more depth in a previous post.

Part 2: How physical features can to dictate our responses

“Some qualities and features prompt us to behave in particular ways” –Jane Fulton Suri

General observations…

Today I went to the barber shop without an appointment. There were six or so young blond boys in line ahead of me, so I had to wait a while. It was the wait time reminded me of the Thoughtless Acts book. Interestingly enough a good example of what would fall into the “responding to our surroundings” section of the book was brought to my attention while waiting around.

For people who haven’t seen any of the pictures used in the book to describe this “responding” section, here are two examples. You can see that whoever decided to litter in so geometrically pleasing a fashion could very well have done so without paying much attention to it at the time in the picture on the left. I could see myself somebody else looking around for a trash can only to find none in sight, thus resorting to the ground or bench nearest them. Throwing it on the ground feel a bit wrong though (as it should), and it just feels right to put it on that fence over there just like that. Alternatively, opening the recycling might be nasty, smelly or dirty, but shoving an empty water bottle into the handle isn’t so bad is it? Given the option of the black trash can and the blue recycling, you did well to shove it by the blue bin, right?

In any case, back to my haircut earlier today… I realized that the act of flipping through a magazine draws heavily on both the kind of magazine you have and your surroundings, though you might not think so at first. At the object-interaction level, there are a number of ways you could interact with the magazine. How do you read magazines? I bet you have curled up in a chair and flipped through pages with your right hand, licking your fingers perhaps to facilitate the turning of the pages. Perhaps you have used your hand in a flipbook fashion, stopping to actually read the magazine only when something of interest pops us, or even just jumping a couple pages at a time by flicking your wrist sideways and letting pages fall onto your left hand. You’ve walked around with a magazine folded in half I presume, maybe if you really wanted to read a specific article, and wanted no distractions. The point is, I think most people aren’t exclusively flipbook magazine readers, or finger-licking page turners. I think everybody is a bit of everything, depending on the situation. Are you waiting at a dentist’s office with nothing to do? If so you are less likely to care about the random, outdated magazine stack that is there to distract you. If you know you will be there a long time though, you certainly aren’t going to flip through all the magazines quickly! You have a while to wait; might as well look at all the pictures, read all the article titles, maybe most of an article or two…

Your interaction with the magazine depends largely on setting: waiting at the dentist’s while your daughter gets her cavities filled, curled up in a big chair with hot cocoa at home, etc… Chances are you will not “flipbook” through your magazine at home, though this is a fairly obvious observation. You may however, flipbook through one magazine, being slow enough to accommodate the 3-5 minutes you know you will wait for your turn to get a haircut, or you will flip through lots of books or read one you like slower since you know you have 20 minutes to kill… In any case, who knew how you hold and browse a magazine involved a lot more background/subconscious thought. I just figured I picked it up and looked through it. J

-Marco
Technorati Profile