This article is an essay written by Fae (member of CLUB1) and originally published on her personal website. Several CLUB1 members enjoyed reading the text when it was shared on the forum. We suggested that she shares it in the server's logbook!

It is also a first step towards opening this journal to forms other than technical stories, presentations of new features or meeting reports. We hope that this could help to include and highlight other voices within CLUB1.

This sensitive text from Fae also gives us plenty of ideas for future workshops concerning inclusiveness.

I'm interested in offering times where we can talk about IT (information technology) and computing through the prism of emotions and feelings. I feel like we often talk about what happens in virtual spaces in relation to the content we find there. Not as often do we talk about how we feel being in those virtual spaces. Sometimes I see them as something very concrete, and at the same time particularly difficult to define and describe. When I was on Facebook five years ago I regularly felt uncomfortable. To help me understand what I was feeling, I found an image that spoke to me. It helped me understand a situation that I experienced on a daily basis:

I'm on Facebook - I'm talking with someone - I see other people connected - I'm not talking to them but I can feel that they are here and that they also know that I'm here

I picture myself as if I were in a very large white room with no visible limits, people scattered everywhere. I talk with someone and see other people at the same time. They know I'm there and they look at me. They may be more or less far from me but there is nothing that stops the gaze in this space. Everyone can look at each other, without directly seeing the gaze of others.

I think this virtual place has been built in a way that it easily creates social pressure. It can be difficult to disentangle this pressure from the aspects that bring us satisfaction or pleasure. I've heard my friends say that a lot about Instagram, talking about the confusion they felt in front of a tool / space that has this big impact on their lives. And I think this feeling of confusion is perhaps harder to understand in a virtual space than in a three-dimensional physical space: it could be because of the strategies of the companies which manufacture those tools / spaces, to keep us in a state of half-consciousness, for all kind of reasons. It could also be caused by the recent aspect of virtual spaces in our lives / cultures / languages.

It took me a while to understand the discomfort that pushed me to leave Facebook. I had to find images like the one of the big white room to make something physical when it wasn't physical enough for me. It's difficult to explain why a graphical interface and functional design choices make me uncomfortable. I understand why going through representations of physical spaces helped me.

The fact that I am often alone when I am in a virtual space makes it even harder to talk about it when I'm experiencing it, or even afterwards, as if it had existed less than if it had taken place with other people in a three-dimensional physical space.

I feel like there is a desire to isolate individuals in the way computer hardware is designed, like the idea of the PC = personal computer, compared for example to how a game console is designed. The game console often allows you to play with several people in the same physical space. I don't know what a shared desktop computer experience could look like (several people in front of the same screen or several screens, several keyboards, several mice?) but in any case I don't think it was ever a desire to explore this as something viable, which could become a norm. Today's norm is one person = one device.

Situations where I'm in front of a computer with other people often give me a rather peculiar "oh that's unusual" feel, and it usually feels good, when it happens with people I am comfortable with. I remember a telephone conversation lasting several hours with a friend of mine where we each explored websites separately while commenting on them and suggesting things to check. It was nice and exciting. I also felt that “oh that’s new” feel. I think that there are collective IT practices to be invented and that it can be very enjoyable. The workshops I've been to where we learn together to code websites really highlight the pleasure of being together. As if it were something precious or something that can be missed when we are alone in front of a screen. It was a pretty powerful fantasy in the work of fictions of the 90s, the communion of human machine and social group, like in the film [Hackers](https://invidious.fdn.fr/watch? v=Rn2cf_wJ4f4) from 1995...

...where geeks, nerds, hackers, and computer scientists meet at underground techno parties and engage in battles against the system that seeks to silence them. There is something quite strong in this film about putting these technologies in motion, as opposed to the idea that they would keep us in a form of apathy or withdrawal from our body. The film tries to create as much movement and energy as possible in physical spaces while remaining connected to computing. This vision of computing present all the main characters as actors through their position as hackers which push them to be in action, in a sort of celebration and permanent fight.

I think it's interesting how this vision, this fantasy related to hacking was sold to the general public as if that could be what IT will be, while commercial desires of the GAFAM in creation were already giving less and less freedom in what can be a computer, far from hacking and daily experimentation. It reminds me if this mechanism of capitalism which makes people fantasize about lifestyles in order to sell objects, without these objects providing access to these lifestyles or means of liberations.

“We're gonna show people freeing themselves so that you can think you already did.“

The example of the Metaverse is also interesting as a collective experience of computing which could make it possible to find physical movement within virtual spaces, and for the moment it is kind of a big flop. As if our relationship to three-dimensional physical spaces was not so easily transposable into virtual spaces.

The invention of the computer desktop, the graphical interface that replaced the command terminal with the WIMP (window, icon, menu and pointing device), has also pushed computing towards the reproduction of familiar interactions that we were used to having in physical spaces: the desk on which we have our papers, our files, our scissors and our glue. The first company to market computers with a desktop-inspired graphical interface talks about their invention in this video:

I was very surprised (and at the same time not so much) to see the extent to which my first interactions with computers had been conditioned by the creation of the Xerox graphical interface. Watching the video I said to myself “wow it's like almost everything was already there”, and at the same time “they just digitally reproduced an office”. I felt as fascinated by the power of creating a first virtual space accessible to the general public as I was angry that it had become such a closed standard of what computing can be. If we move away from an attempt to resemble physical spaces from the world of work and productivity, what could our graphical interfaces and virtual spaces look like?

I think emotions in the experience of computing is something that is complicated in the same way as for physical spaces when both are designed to keep us in a state of half-consciousness, by conditioning our bodies to encourage certain activities (e.g. buying stuff as the main activity of the urban lifestyle). The large public squares that are the GAFAM's social networks are not very different from the large public squares of large cities. There is a real challenge in being able to create virtual and physical spaces that respect our consent and leave us free will and the possibility to question what we feel about the content we receive.

I imagine workshops, talking circles where we could express feelings, questions, doubts in relation to virtual spaces. We could try to put into words what makes us feel good in these spaces, what we love and what we would like to see more often. The idea of being able to create virtual spaces based on these exchanges seems really cool to me.

I like the idea that having felt emotions in front of computers is something that we can share much more easily, regardless of the level of technical knowledge.

There will always be factors that influence the specificity of the emotions felt or the ability to express them but there is something that I like about this approach. It can question the technical hierarchy and move the discussion to the terrain of emotions, which can be seen culturally and historically as being linked to femininity, in opposition to masculine rationality and the control of knowledge, scientific and technical.

This is something that I have seen in discussions around IT: the precision of the terms, the complexity of the notions, the common experience often exclude people who have been socialized as women, for so many unjustified reasons. People socialized as men are not protected from being excluded from discussions: I have been socialized as a man and I have already felt left out in discussions about computers even though I can feel quite comfortable discussing this topic in general. There will always be people who have more technical knowledge than others and that's ok I think: it can be nice not to let discussions become too complex, and ask how the people around us feel.

Even for a technical meeting where the goal is to talk about technical subjects it can be interesting to take the time to ask about everyone's feelings, in general and in relation to the suject of the meeting. It can help people who are less comfortable on these subjects to take time to express themselves in a way with which they are more comfortable, and perhaps then feel more legitimate to participate in debates and give their point of view.

I think the issue of gender and differential sociability is super important when we are talking about a subject that has experienced hegemony by a gender or a social class. It is something to take into account but also to put at the center of certain moments, discussions, collective experiences. The sharing of knowledge, even if benevolent, can also reproduce power relations which keep this technical hierarchy at the heart of collective moments around IT.

Giving more space to emotions and feelings can rebalance certain things, and also allow people who are not used to expressing their emotions on subjects they know well to try it (and potentially to find themselves in a position closer to that of people who have difficulty speaking out on these subjects).

I organized a radio show at the Cergy art school where I offered to come and talk about our relationship with social networks (mostly Instagram) in relation to our artistic practices. The invitation was open to the whole school and focused on feelings, emotions, testimonies linked to political issues. The people who made themselves available were women and queer people. It was so nice to feel like “oh this is new” and “this makes us feel good” and “this is possible”.