Class 7 Reflection

I really enjoyed Dr.Tonkinwise’s talk, it gave me a new perspective of social practices. I think what really helped me understand what they are was the coffee example. It helped me understand the differences between the meaning, skills, and things. The lecture also helped me understand worlds and practices a little bit more. I found the example of the hammer interesting and how a hammer isn’t really a hammer until we start hammering. It made me realize that to understand what is real you need to understand how the thing is participating. I also found it interesting to relate things to space and time, it really made me think of everything I use and the practices that they are. Moreover, I found the conversations about taste regimes and the internet super intriguing. It makes a lot of sense that there are machine learning algorithms that are able to understand our taste regimes by our likes or dislikes on social media. It explains why we get such targeted ads and to a point, you can’t really control that. The internet has so much of our data that it can really create unique experiences that are designed for our taste regimes. I know we talked slightly about Spotify and I looked at the Article professor put in the chat. It is insane that AIs and algorithms can take one small bit of our data and figure out our entire personalities. It also reminded me of an article that I saw where Spotify filed for a patent that may allow them to start listening to our conversations to recommend music based on your mood and personality. It really makes you think, how far will technology go to identify our taste regimes. Will it ever get to a point where we stop giving in to these systems and start messing with them to see what would happen?

Furthermore, when we talk about the internet it becomes interesting to think about how people organize by style and interests. We talked about how to learn a practice is also to learn to speak about the practice in a particular way. If you begin to take a deep dive into the harmful facebook groups that spread information, there is a certain type of vernacular that people use. There are keywords that keep coming back and help you understand who is someone that is skilled and been in the conversation for a long time. It made me wonder if you can de-practice (I don’t think that's a word, but I hope it makes sense). Do you become less skilled at practice when you don’t exercise the skill every day or is it a switch you can turn on and off? Obviously to become a skilled player in practice your body needs to become attuned to the specific world. Will your body always be attuned to that world or does it become less attuned as the practice begins to evolve over time. I feel like you need to keep attuning your body in order to keep up with how fast practices evolve with new technology.

This may be a meta-question, but I have also been thinking about where practices have come from. For example, when we talked about laundering and how we all know and do it in somewhat of the same way. Where did we all learn this practice, who decided to do it in that particular way? What world is it in? I think it is also interesting how practices change over time due to innovation but they are somewhat similar as they change. You can’t just change one practice because it affects all the other practices in the system. So when is the time to start changing practices in a way that won't completely overhaul your life? I feel like there isn’t an exact answer to that other than moving your location completely.

Lastly, I wanted to touch on Pierre Bordieu’s The Forms of Capital, the article discussed how the different types of capital can be derived from economic capital. I think it makes so much sense that economic capital is at the root of all the other capital types. We live in such a capitalistic society that economic capital matters in every aspect of your life. Your economic capital is what determines whether you can get a job, a house, and even sometimes in relationships. I’m taking a class called Love Actually and we talked about how much economic capital means in a relationship, it is usually at the root of a lot of big relationship problems and can be why friendships and romantic relationships end. It was also eye-opening to learn that you need to have economic capital in order to get social and cultural capital. Which leads back to the point that capitalism is such a huge part of our lives.