Pareidolia is the very human perceptual problem of experiencing things that are not there: feeling your cell phone buzz in your pocket when you're not carrying it, seeing faces in clouds and trees, hearing music in the babbling of a stream. It is the sensory subset of a psychological effect called apophenia: seeing connections in random data.
We're very good at this, and I am interested in how we see patterns in the developing, technological world around us: we assign meaning to things that may not actually be there. We feel like Facebook is connecting us to our friends similarly to how a face-to-face chat might, but is that really so? What if the Facebook feed is more like random data that we are happily judging as meaningful interaction, carefully curated by algorithms to make us keep coming back for more?
Pareidolica, with a c, is a made-up word for this idea I have that we humans get addicted to pattern-seeking to our detriment, without stepping back to wonder what's really going on inside our minds. What are the ethical impacts of the technology around us? How can we use the patterns it makes to our mutual benefit, without getting trapped in little dopamine addiction loops, refreshing the page, looking for those tiny faces to pop up and give us a burst of fake reality?
While I'm making this blog for a class assignment, who knows -- I might keep it going after. I can use it to cross-post any interesting essays that come out of my flexible option schooling, or any of my strange fictions.
On patterns and ethics: how technology impacts society.
