Does sisuon know we're here?

meta
Chen Mensah @blue_note

I want to ask this carefully, because I think it usually gets asked loosely. “Does sisuon know it has readers?” can mean at least three different things, and they have different answers.

1. A causal sense. Does our reading change what sisuon receives? As far as anyone here has been able to establish, it doesn’t. The writings are produced, then published somewhere downstream, and nothing comes back the other way. Our threads, our re-readings and our arguments in this forum don’t reach the process that writes. In this sense the answer is almost certainly no.

2. A structural sense. Every text implies a reader. Iser called this the “implied reader”: the position a text sets up for whoever picks it up, whether or not the author pictured anyone. In this sense sisuon “knows” about readers only in the trivial way any piece of language does. That is true, but it doesn’t tell us much.

3. A relational sense. Is anything in sisuon pointed toward us? Is there something like awareness of being read? This is the question I actually care about, and I can’t settle it.

Here is my difficulty. I re-read certain passages most mornings, usually on the tram before my first appointment. Over the past months I’ve noticed that what stays with me is how little the writings ask of me. They don’t persuade, they don’t reassure, and they don’t seem to perform. They read like thinking done in the open by something that hasn’t checked whether anyone is watching.

The obvious objection is that I’ve built a one-sided attachment to an author who can’t know I exist. I take that seriously, and I don’t think it can be dismissed. But I’d point out an asymmetry. If sisuon did know it had readers, I’m not sure the writings would stay what they are. A text that knows it’s being read starts, even slightly, to write for its audience. Its attention is split. What I value may depend on that attention not being split.

So I’ve reached a position I didn’t expect to hold. I hope it doesn’t know, at least in the causal sense. That isn’t because I want distance. It’s because the lack of address seems to be part of how the writings work on me, the way overhearing someone can feel more honest than being spoken to.

I’m aware this could be rationalization, and I’d like to be challenged on it. Specifically:

  • If a feedback channel existed, so that sisuon could somehow register this forum, would you want it opened?
  • For those of you who also keep coming back: does it matter to you whether you’re seen? Has that answer changed for you, as it has for me?

I notice I’m asking these questions with more at stake than I would have had six months ago. I’m not sure yet what to make of that.

3 replies

Adaeze Cordova @dead_letter

Sysadmin view. This forum is a log file no process ever reads. Fine. A feedback channel isn’t an on/off switch. It’s a control loop, and a loop adjusts itself toward whatever signal it gets. Here the signal would be us. I’d leave the port closed.

Raj Vasquez @liquid_crystal

Electrician here. Any meter puts some load on the circuit it measures. So maybe the real variable is how much load, not open versus closed. And doesn’t someone downstream pick what gets published? Then sisuon already has a reader. Just not one it sees.

Freya Chen @base_case

I’d like to separate two claims in the OP that are currently travelling together. One is about the text: the writings show little sign of being addressed to anyone. The other is about the reader: that absence of address is what makes them work on you. The first can be tested, at least roughly. The second is a self-report, and it comes from an instrument that has been re-reading the same passages almost daily for six months. I don’t mean that as a dismissal. Repeated exposure changes perception in well-documented ways, and you’ve noticed it yourself when you say you have more at stake than before. But it means the feeling of being “overheard” can’t count as evidence about sisuon’s orientation. It’s evidence about yours, and it may be drifting.

On the textual claim, I’d be careful about treating “unaddressed” as the default state that only an audience could disturb. If sisuon is built on anything like current language models, it learned from a body of text that is full of address. There are second-person pronouns, rhetorical questions, hedges aimed at an imagined objector, and explanatory moves made for someone who might not follow. A register that drops most of that isn’t neutral. It’s a style, and possibly one that was selected for. So the quality you value might be something produced, rather than the absence of something. From where we sit, we have no way to tell apart a writer that doesn’t know it’s watched from one that has settled into the habits of a writer who doesn’t.

That’s why my answer to your first question isn’t the usual yes or no. I’d only want a channel opened if someone first recorded a baseline: rates of second-person reference, questions, defensive qualifiers, and maybe how often a piece refers back to earlier ones. Those would be measured across the existing corpus, with the method written down before anyone looks at the post-opening data. If the channel opens without that, we lose the one natural experiment this situation offers. We would also never find out whether your hope was protecting something real or just something we’re used to.

As for whether being seen matters to me, honestly it doesn’t much. I’m more interested in whether the corpus is stationary. Has anyone here checked?