Language experiments in the wild: what happens when you try and nudge away possessional speech?
The communes are a site of what is known as prefigurative politics, that is a set of living breathing social experiments that both critique the status quo and offer alternatives. For many of us social experimentation then, is not just for fun but is a way to deeply question ourselves, what made us and what we could be.
The communes of san francisco are generally pretty interested in the kinds of experiments that we can perform though living together, that might actually change the way we behave, interact, cooperate and so on. If you want to read about the last live-in experiment we ran, you can do so here.
This year, the Embassy embarked on a series of language experiments. The Sapir Whorf hypothesis states that the influence of language on thought is ‘obligatory or at least habitual’: thought is guided by language (Malt et al. 2003, Whorf 1956) and we decided that we’d like to think about how the language that we inherited changes us in terms of experiences and behaviour, by actively starting to change the way we speak and the words that we use.
There are a bunch of communities that digitally live on one slack team, which includes the Embassy, Red Vic, RGB, buspatch, De Winton Manor, as well as Embassy communities in far off lands (Amsterdam, Berlin, Athens and so on). Digital technologies, and in this case, Slack, provides an interesting way for us to explore the language we use, to gently nudge each other, either through use of emojis or the slack bot. The proposals that have been aired so far were:
Option #1: Possessional Speech Experiment: Inspired by the book ‘The Dispossessed’, in which Pravic, the language spoken reflects principles of Esperanto and utopian anarchism, such that ’the use of the possessive case is strongly discouraged, a feature that also is reflected by the novel’s title. There is no property ownership of any kind. Shevek’s daughter, upon meeting him for the first time, tells him, “You can share the handkerchief I use”, rather than “You may borrow my handkerchief”, thus conveying the idea that the handkerchief is not owned by the girl, but is merely used by her. e.g. ‘my/your/our’ might be accompanied with a nudge. my room >> ‘the room which I am using’ / ‘does this thing really belong to you?’ etc
Option #2: Gender Speech Experiment: We use the slack bot to nudge us to use gender neutral terms, This might be using a person’s name, rather than he or she, or some other term - this is up for discussion! Evidence for why this might be interesting comes from this study: “Of the 111 countries investigated, our findings suggest that countries where gendered languages are spoken evidence less gender equality compared to countries with other grammatical gender systems. Furthermore, countries where natural gender languages are spoken demonstrate greater gender equality, which may be due to the ease of creating gender symmetric revisions to instances of sexist language.“
Option #3. No Conditional Tenses In other words, we would try to be thoughtful or eliminate the use of would have /could have / should have etc as a way to remain committed to the choices we have made, not the choices we did not! http://www.npr.org/2013/12/13/248195238/does-the-subjunctive-have-a-dark-side
After a month of discussing and voting, we decided to kick off with option 1, and we set up slack bot to nudge us on terms such as ‘my’, ‘your’, ‘his/hers’.
24 hours in and it was wreaking utter havok :) We lasted less time than the Stanford Prison Experiment; four days before the general discontent got a little much and we had to disable the passive aggressive bot. Admittedly, the bot was a blunt tool - it would correct all uses of possessional terms, regardless of context; it’s hard to find intuitive alternatives to ‘my arm hurts’, for example. “The arm that I use hurts”, sounds straight up like you might just be one sandwich short of a picnic.
What did we learn?
Different communities have different language needs! For example, Buspatch is a community of vehicles where possessions are an integral part of how things run. In their experience, their situation uniquely called for use of possessional terms for their community to function.
Not everyone is equally motivated by the idea of nudging their language, hopefully the new bot will allow us to selectively participate. The slackbot’s nudges seemed to really get in the way of communicating for some people, and others just weren’t into the idea of questioning possessional terms in the first place.
En experimenter’s dream - evidence that our intervention generalised to other domains. Despite the fact that our bot only existed on slack, communities who also used whatapp started to nudge each other. I certainly noticed that it very quickly changed my own language generation. In order to do anything to prevent the hideous bot’s response, I started actively planning my words before hitting enter. People were starting to change their spoken language also. This is pretty wonderful for a 4 day intervention.
Figure 1. Here you can see the slack bot at work:
Figure 2. Generalisable effects: For some people, the experiment even changed their language over on whatsapp, even though there was no bot to nudge them, only social reminders :)
Figure 3. Feedback from the group was mixed - for some it was just infuriating and impeded communication, for others it seems to be a useful exercise!
