I think I feel both the pain of invisibility and the comfort of invisibility at different times.
Related concepts I enjoy:
The shadow in psychology seems to be the aspects of one’s self they are denying to themselves which other people may notice about them. It’s a little like the opposite of the invisibility effect which comes from other people not noticing things about them.
The idea of “furniture” from “Going Postal” by Terry Pratchett:
Moist had a talent. He’d also acquired a lot of skills so completely that they were second nature. He’d learned to be personable, but something in his genetics made him unmemorable. He had the talent of not being noticed, for being a face in the crowd. People had difficulty describing him. He was . . . he was ‘about’. He was about twenty, or about thirty. On Watch reports across the continent he was anywhere between, oh, about six feet two inches and five feet nine inches tall, hair all shades from mid-brown to blond, and his lack of distinguishing features included his entire face. He was about . . . average. What people remembered was the furniture, things like spectacles and moustaches, so he always carried a selection of both. They remembered names and mannerisms, too. He had hundreds of those.
I feel like furniture relates well to the idea of personal branding, or branding in general, which is also the process of creating an egregore. The more people are exposed to an egregore the stronger an association it will create, so I think you can, for example, have specific outfits and accessories you wear when you want to be recognized by certain people for certain reasons and other outfits for being recognized by others or for not being recognized at all. Of course, this only works for up to a specific saturation of popularity, but as this article points out, most people do not surpass that saturation of popularity.
Less fun of a concept, the invisibility most people have in public does not apply if you are visibly out of place. You can put this on yourself by dressing or acting out of place, but visibly marginalized people do not have the option of taking off the thing that makes them stand out, and so they do not have access to invisibility and experience the situation in a different way.
Related to philh’s “no strangers noticed”, “someone noticed but didn’t care”, and “someone noticed, cared, but didn’t react” ideas, I think “context for interaction” is interesting. If you have semi-niche pop culture references as part of your outfit, people in public will feel comfortable commenting on it to start conversation. It works because it creates enough of a shared identity to break the feeling of not wanting to bother a stranger most people have. Alternatively, people seem to feel outlandish style/accessory/behaviour is worth commenting on especially if it is genuinely uncommon, not merely an alternative style. I feel as though my experience handing out flyers and setting up a PauseAI table is a more extreme form of this, explicitly saying “I am here to give you a message, if you are willing to accept or engage”. This creates a context where I am noticed and engaged with. Whether I am understood or remembered is a different matter.
Dunbar’s number suggests that “being known” is a finite resource, and the likelihood of being known falls off the further outside your social circle you go. I would expect the number of people who know of any given person follows a Pareto distribution but I’m not sure exactly why it should. I’d be interested to learn or consider more.
To your last point: the fact that “being known” spans ~8 orders of magnitude probably makes this pretty likely a Pareto distribution. Or whatever distribution is closest surely shares many of its characteristics. Also the fact that being known helps with being known. Increasing your “being known degree” by 5% is probably not that much more difficult when 100M people know you vs when 100K people know you.
Fun post. Thanks.
I think I feel both the pain of invisibility and the comfort of invisibility at different times.
Related concepts I enjoy:
The shadow in psychology seems to be the aspects of one’s self they are denying to themselves which other people may notice about them. It’s a little like the opposite of the invisibility effect which comes from other people not noticing things about them.
The idea of “furniture” from “Going Postal” by Terry Pratchett:
I feel like furniture relates well to the idea of personal branding, or branding in general, which is also the process of creating an egregore. The more people are exposed to an egregore the stronger an association it will create, so I think you can, for example, have specific outfits and accessories you wear when you want to be recognized by certain people for certain reasons and other outfits for being recognized by others or for not being recognized at all. Of course, this only works for up to a specific saturation of popularity, but as this article points out, most people do not surpass that saturation of popularity.
Less fun of a concept, the invisibility most people have in public does not apply if you are visibly out of place. You can put this on yourself by dressing or acting out of place, but visibly marginalized people do not have the option of taking off the thing that makes them stand out, and so they do not have access to invisibility and experience the situation in a different way.
Related to philh’s “no strangers noticed”, “someone noticed but didn’t care”, and “someone noticed, cared, but didn’t react” ideas, I think “context for interaction” is interesting. If you have semi-niche pop culture references as part of your outfit, people in public will feel comfortable commenting on it to start conversation. It works because it creates enough of a shared identity to break the feeling of not wanting to bother a stranger most people have. Alternatively, people seem to feel outlandish style/accessory/behaviour is worth commenting on especially if it is genuinely uncommon, not merely an alternative style. I feel as though my experience handing out flyers and setting up a PauseAI table is a more extreme form of this, explicitly saying “I am here to give you a message, if you are willing to accept or engage”. This creates a context where I am noticed and engaged with. Whether I am understood or remembered is a different matter.
Dunbar’s number suggests that “being known” is a finite resource, and the likelihood of being known falls off the further outside your social circle you go. I would expect the number of people who know of any given person follows a Pareto distribution but I’m not sure exactly why it should. I’d be interested to learn or consider more.
To your last point: the fact that “being known” spans ~8 orders of magnitude probably makes this pretty likely a Pareto distribution. Or whatever distribution is closest surely shares many of its characteristics. Also the fact that being known helps with being known. Increasing your “being known degree” by 5% is probably not that much more difficult when 100M people know you vs when 100K people know you.