so I'm in a particularly fuck academia mood this week probably because of all the time I'm putting towards [NDA'd corporate funded project] and sitting here reading a paper that concludes with "so if all we show people is body language, they have no idea what the intent behind it is" is apparently setting me off too
in one sense I'm fine with this result, reconfirming things other disciplines have been saying for hundreds or thousands of years (theater says hi) is all well and good. But here's the wrinkle that always gets me, if you read anything about the way people relate to each other, it's extremely layered and when components are extracted and held up on their own, they rarely convey very much
you can also think about it like this meme:
and this is even missing things like verbal tone.
so I don't know. My boy Zeami is writing about acting back in fifteenth century Japan and saying things like "communicate first by hearing, then by sight" when talking about how physical gesture isn't specific enough by itself to convey something like crying to an audience. We have known this sort of thing for hundreds if not thousands of years
Yes confirming it in new contexts is good, but I do feel like the lionization of science over everything has sent us backwards a lot, especially when it comes to using new technology for anything. I'm admittedly saying this as a playwright who can off the cuff program various graph search algorithms in multiple languages, and I of course think my approach to being interdisciplinary is the best (because that's what you do as an academic), but do we not have a responsibility to do the RE part of REsearch. Find things again, bring them new places, not just reinvent the wheel with shinier spokes