Think of someone whose behaviour really pissed you off, either in your personal life, or in the news. Stories?
What kind of social behaviour do you find irritating? Stories?
When you encounter behavior that upsets you, or irritates you, do you try to excuse the person? Does your forgiveness or not of the person depend on what kind of person it is?
What makes a person an asshole?
What's your definition of an asshole?
Is being an asshole mutually exclusive to being a good person? Can someone you consider an asshole also be a good person?
What makes something 'socially acceptible'?
What makes something 'standard behaviour'?
What is a 'social norm'?
Is a 'social norm' the same as a 'social good'?
How does what is accetable socially, change?
If a person deliberately follows different rules in a group, is that person an asshole?
If a person reject social norms and behaves differently, is that person an asshole?
How the Quiet Car Explains the World
"…a working definition of an asshole [is] a person who demands that all social interaction happen on their terms." Ta-Nehisi Coates
Have you ever experienced someone busting into your private space in public?
Do you consider public spaces to have a component of privacy in them?
Why do you suppose the people in the Quiet Car don't respect the rules?
What do you do when people engage in unwanted conversations with you?
How much privacy should we expect in public?
Being an asshole through technology, example 1
The Google Glass feature that (almost) no one is talking about is the experience – not of the user, but of everyone other than the user. A tweet by David Yee introduces it well:...and further:
There is a kid wearing Google Glasses at this restaurant which, until just now, used to be my favorite spot.The key experiential question of Google Glass isn’t what it’s like to wear them, it’s what it’s like to be around someone else who’s wearing them. I’ll give an easy example. Your one-on-one conversation with someone wearing Google Glass is likely to be annoying, because you’ll suspect that you don’t have their undivided attention. And you can’t comfortably ask them to take the glasses off (especially when, inevitably, the device is integrated into prescription lenses). Finally – here’s where the problems really start – you don’t know if they’re taking a video of you.
Now pretend you don’t know a single person who wears Google Glass… and take a walk outside. Anywhere you go in public – any store, any sidewalk, any bus or subway – you’re liable to be recorded: audio and video. Fifty people on the bus might be Glassless, but if a single person wearing Glass gets on, you – and all 49 other passengers – could be recorded. Not just for a temporary throwaway video buffer, like a security camera, but recorded, stored permanently, and shared to the world.
…
From now on, starting today, anywhere you go within range of a Google Glass device, everything you do could be recorded and uploaded to Google’s cloud, and stored there for the rest of your life. You won’t know if you’re being recorded or not; and even if you do, you’ll have no way to stop it.
And that, my friends, is the experience that Google Glass creates. That is the experience we should be thinking about. The most important Google Glass experience is not the user experience – it’s the experience of everyone else. The experience of being a citizen, in public, is about to change.
If you come up to me with a smartphone held at eye level and demand that I interact with you like you're not being an asshole, you are an asshole. You are demanding social interaction on your wholly weird and unsettling terms. This does not change if the smartphone is tiny and strapped to your eye and made by Google. In fact, you thinking that this excuses your asshole behavior just makes you that much more of an asshole.
Being an asshole through technology, example 2
"Men are already taking advantage of women every day with their 'bulky' smartphones. When the cameras are sitting snugly and indiscreetly on their faces, it will only get worse.
When I emailed Google to ask about the impending explosion of creepshots in the wake of Glass, a spokesperson gave me this statement: "It is still very early days for Glass, and we expect that as with other new technologies, such as cell phones, behaviors and social norms will develop over time."
The statement is right, if only because a social norm is a far cry from a social good. When cellphones were first released, who could have expected that eventually they'd be used to shoot secret photos of young women that men would then share on the internet and masturbate to? I expect nothing less from Google Glass."
