There's a lot of talk these days about sentient cities, augmented reality, the "metapolis"--about how pervasive and ambient computing, combined with urbanization and the accelerating mobility of people and things, is reconfiguring inhabitance and inhabited space. Missing from this talk has been a consideration of how these phenomena reconfigure somatic experience. We are creatures of movement, specifically of rhythmic movement and of the imitation of movement. Sociality--among humans and between humans and other animals--begins with the observation and imitation of others' movements and the rhythmic synchronization of our movements--and from there our intentions and feelings--with those of others. At the base of social life stands a shared experience of kinesthetic empathy, an ongoing choreography of movement and intention that binds sentient creatures together like coupled oscillators. This we call social entrainment (Mitnahme). Today, changes in the formal properties of inhabited space are reconfiguring the spatial and temporal topologies of social presence, and with these the experience of social entrainment, at a speed and on a scale vastly exceeding previous revolutions in mediation. We are subject to a volume of social zeitgeber or entrainment cues that was unimaginable ten years ago. The result has a been a new kind of plasticity in our experience of kinesthesis and social entrainment. We have no language for talking about this, let alone probing it experimentally or addressing it through design. In this talk I offer a new take on social entrainment, one that encompasses both the kinesthetic synchronization of mood and intention and the synchronization of social rhythms over circadian and longer horizons. I discuss how somatic rhythms of rest, activity, and locomotion are becoming focal objects of self-care, notably via personal accelerometry devices such as Nike Fuel and Larklife. I suggest implications of new forms of sensorimotor and social presence for how we experience mood, arousal, attention and empathy, how we learn, and how we ascribe social statuses to ourselves and others. I draw on linguistic anthropology to propose a conceptual vocabulary for exploring changes instigated by the dramatic extension and intensification of peripersonal space. And I ask what it would mean to put kinesthetic empathy at the center of the design process.

1. the
future
of
Social
Entrainment
Josh Berson
IDEO Munich
29 May 2013

2. What role for
somatic presence
in an age of
pervasive
telepresence?

4. What do we need to specify to
imagine a brain in a vat?
Cosmelli and Thompson,
Embodiment or Envatment? (2010)
Ok, so What do we need to specify
to imagine a person
present-at-a-distance?

5. Breaking my foot:
A research opportunity

9. Big changes
in inhabited space

10. Sattherthwaite D (2007) The Transition to a Predominantly
Urban World. London: International Institute for
Environment and Development.

12. Urban Agglomeration effects result in per
capita nonlinear scaling of urban metrics
Bettencourt LMA et al. (2010) Urban scaling and its
deviations: revealing the structure of wealth, innovation
and crime across cities. PLoS ONE 5: e13541

13. The in-transit condition is
becoming universal …
[Airports represent]
hermetic systems from
which there is no escape—
except to another airport.
Rem Koolhaas
The Generic City (1994)

15. To Neurophenomenology
From Josh
Subject Presence
The extension of
peripersonal space to
encompass the whole
planet is something we
need to talk about.

16. A mouse model for too much TV?

17. We are creatures
of movement

18. Our understanding of the
world as distinct from, and
independent of, the self is
most deeply grounded in
environmental recalcitrance
in the face of our rational
efforts at motor control.
Susan Hurley
Making Sense of Animals (2005)

19. Becchio C et al.
(2012) Social
grasping.
NeuroImage 61:
240

20. Froese T, Fuchs T (2012)
The extended body.
Phenomenology and
the Cognitive Sciences
11: 205

21. Nicholas Humphrey
Sensation is
movement
short-circuited
Rodolfo Llinás
Thinking is
movement
short-circuited

22. We are creatures
of rhythm

24. Burger B et al. (2013) Influences of rhythm- and timbre-
related musical features on characteristics of music-
induced movement. Frontiers in Psychology 4: Article 183

26. Phillips-Silver J et al. (2010) The ecology of entrainment.
Music Perception 28: 3

28. Social synchronization
unfolds over multiple epochs

29. Thalamocortical
Kinesthetic
Circadian
Week, season, year …
Knowledge
Silos

30. Bilocation is human

31. Holle H et al. (2011) “That’s not a real body”. Consciousness
and Cognition 20: 720

32. Lenggenhager B et al.
(2007) Video ergo sum.
Science 317: 1096

33. Maselli A, Slater M (2013) The building blocks of the full body
ownership illusion. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 7:
Article 83

34. Copresence
is crossmodal

35. Kuhl P (2010) Brain
mechanisms in early
language acquisition.
Neuron 67: 713

36. Social personae are
getting delaminated
from bodily movement

45. Desynchrony and
hypersynchrony
are stressful

49. Involuntary
pornography

50. Emily Bazelon:
Social media create an
empathy gap.
If so, it starts with a
gap in kinesthetic
empathy.

56. (kaiju) movies
reflect our
technological fears

62. How is network
presence changing how
we move our bodies?
How to reconcile
network polypresence
with somatic presence?

63. Ihr rockt!
@porousboundary joshberson.net