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🌰 Recognition Matters Human Beings Need To Feel Understood

The way William Davies and Charles Taylor talk about the human need to feel recognized…I think they mean humans need to feel understood by others.

  • A sense of belonging and acceptance of their true self.
  • Social media creates a format that makes people feel the urge to be recognized, but never actually fulfills that need.
    • By creating a scarcity of attention pyramid, folks never seek to recognize each other, they seek to win the engagement game.
    • Sometimes they seek employment or payment, which leads them to hiding their true self and instead expressing their commoditized self.
    • This leads to a negative feedback loop, in which people chase engagement in order to feel recognized but because engagement is not recognition, because of the scarcity of attention pyramid, that recognition is never fulfilled. People feel bad about themselves, feel as though they don’t belong, and continue to seek out recognition by posting more.

“Recognition” defined this way appears again in Richard Seymour’s book The Twittering Machine. As Daniel Bessner writes in his review “Can We Live Without Twitter”:

Seymour recognizes that Twitter and other social media platforms “address legitimate wants: they offer opportunities for recognition, for creative self-styling, for interruptions to monotony, for reverie or thinking-as-leisure-time.”

This reminds me of Dale Carnegie’s classic How to Win Friends and Influence People in which he says:

Remember that a person’s name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language.

It could be ego that sweetens us to the sound of our own name, not recognition. But there are cases where I think recognition is factor. Take, for instance, Carnegie’s story about Sid Levy and his customer Nicodemus Papadoulos, often called “Nick”. One day, Levy decides to call him Nicodemus instead. The customer responded:

“Mr. Levy, in all the fifteen years I have been in this country, nobody has ever made the effort to call me by my right name.”

That feels like recognition, understanding, and caring to me.

Inspired by: The Politics of Recognition in the Age of Social Media

  • my notes on the full essay was: “This article was extremely dense and worth reading again maybe.” I had difficulty fully understanding it and getting through it. Would definitely appreciate alternate takes if I missed something.

Related to:

commonplace book

A place to collect relevant quotes and ideas:

Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood. - George Orwell, 1984

From a Tumblr post:

consider: teenagers aren’t apathetic about everything they’re just used to you shitting all over whatever they show excitement about

My manager had commented on how hard these kids work and I said, “they’re starved for positive feedback. They go to school all day then come to work all evening and no one appreciates it because it’s expected of them, but they’re still kids. They need positive feedback from adults in their lives.”

I used to have a coworker who only spoke Burmese. … So this one day I realized we had all kinds of “hey, great job!” cards on our little recognition board thing for almost the whole crew, but none for Susu, because “she won’t understand anyway.” So I [used a translation app to make one for her in Burmese. She was over the moon.] … Everything changed after that. She started using her limited English more, picking up new words here and there … enthusiastically participating in things. … People just want to be known. Sometimes that’s all it takes.

Don't want to do that? @ me on twitter or mastodon

Every post on this blog is a work in progress. Phrasing may be less than ideal, ideas may not yet be fully thought through. Thank you for watching me grow.

Updates

  • : Renamed
  • : Added Dale Carnegie bit
  • : Added commonplace book