I did not intend to post this on here but, as you expected it to be so much more interesting than just an advertisement. This is a free online course that teaches people what the actual science behind their devices really is and how they work. We are looking at all aspects of it from our phones, speakers and TVs to cars, computers, cellphones, etc., and looking into the future where we may see even higher tech things like drones and autonomous robots and some real life examples of companies like Google doing this at large.
So, What Is Emotion-Oriented Technology? The definition of emotion-oriented technology is “a set of technologies used in communications to create a highly emotional user experience”. In other words, rather than simply trying to get your point across and making sure that nobody gets confused about what’s being said, it gives information about how you feel about what’s being said, what kind of feelings you have in terms of your emotions, etc. If you wanted to see video clips of exactly how much attention that technology is paying to people, how many times your phone has been checked by others while you’re talking about something else, or how often that text gets interrupted while you’re listening to the same thing on YouTube, it might be worth watching. There’s no such thing as bad feeling anymore. You’ll notice something when we say this that no other company in the world does.
They don’t care how people feel or feel anything about them. That was actually a big part of why we created this course to explain how technology can be so damn good at connecting with people in such a way that it makes us want more from it. So, the word “emotion” means getting very excited by the idea of what’s being said and if the person isn’t understanding, it shows how frustrated you are with how hard that person is, which means that you’ll do anything you can to make the situation better. These two aspects are called positive emotion and negative emotion. An example is a few weeks ago when I took one of those courses that teach you how to design for your audience. When I was a little bit worried about the fact I was going to have to make my own music videos because most people in the class weren’t familiar with what a film with a theme song was, there were different ways to go about solving problem. Most teachers in that same class taught me how good it could be to make videos to help people understand concepts like “how to read a book”, “how to solve calculus problems”, and “how to think logically”. But they didn’t tell me anything about how to do that, they had taught me a video that was very basic and it would be easy to replicate, I couldn’t figure out what I should do so I did this. The video looked like this,
And that’s when I started thinking about creating content for videos and writing articles like this so it’d be easier to explain the lessons you learned to students.
I wanted to create videos about how you can apply these ideas to real life. So, I wrote some material using this stuff and found a few videos on Youtube that were teaching you how to design for your audience. A lot of people I talked to said that they saw these videos as boring, but that wasn’t true. Some people told me about how much fun it’s been making things and how different it sounded compared to how the teacher wanted it to sound. People even said they would never watch another video of mine if it were their first. People were surprised like it’s almost second nature to talk and listen to someone for a long time. One friend of mine, who doesn’t like to talk, also had to stop telling me what a great listener I was in order to start making the things we both would do that we loved. She wanted to stop saying she was bored and start talking about her favorite foods.
I told her to keep it up and to write down how it felt to be bored and enjoy it. She wrote about how she would hate to be bored and then made a list of five things she loved about herself. Then she wrote about how she thought she would enjoy reading books while being bored and writing down how well she understood the lesson. Then she was able to write down a description of what a book is and how to interpret it. And then she went back in and wrote down her personal list of five things she likes about herself again. And then came up with a list of ten things she loves about her body, and finally got around to asking the teacher how to write about someone. By the end they all had something to say and she still had something to say about her favorite things. Because now she would know how to write about everyone on that class.
It got to the point where she stopped having to worry about what she’s supposed to say. My friend would tell me that now she needed the focus of the class to pay attention to and then she could write whatever the teachers wanted without any trouble. And the kids were more focused than they had ever been before. I told her to take everything she wrote down and put it in her blog and let it be shared. Now that she was comfortable enough to write about anything, she started making some cool slideshows showing images and stuff that were interesting to her and I knew I had to do what she was doing. I wrote some more things around the topic of boredom and people’s lives and the things we don’t realize we love. All of it became clear to me after I took classes on learning how to express myself.
I didn’t want to sit in front of a machine trying to memorize how to be bored and then learn how to express myself through a camera. Instead I started having fun and just wanting to share with the people I wanted to be happy with. I kept posting and posting and posting until what they told me was impossible. And once the school found out I wasn’t really teaching anything new, I was embarrassed but because I was doing what I loved doing, and knowing what I was doing, it didn’t matter. Now I have my website, and maybe one day I will make a movie. Hopefully it’ll be a movie about how I was always going to enjoy coming to class despite my classmates being too busy being bored by each other to give me any attention. Because right now my social media is going pretty strong, which is pretty amazing.
I think the next couple years is going to look pretty awesome for the whole field of technology, especially when it comes to education, and maybe even a job if you’ve taken a course about this I wrote this piece on. And with the advances I’ll probably find that the only profession that can match what I’m doing with technology that I think is art. I’ll never stop writing and making things, and even if you choose to not become a writer, I hope you find fun in helping people. I wouldn’t want anybody to be bored with what they’re doing or having nothing done because of what I wrote. I would want them to continue to try to be happy. Maybe someday they’ll love more than ever before or maybe maybe even try harder to do more, either way I think that will happen. No matter what they decide, I’m sure it’ll lead to more happiness.