Reflexivity

a Communication course on Media and Culture
UMass Amherst

The unreality of DayGlow’s Escape Reality tour provides reprieve to the 24/7 demands of the socially-wired digital world. Some of my students think I would enjoy the concert. It seems possible, although the behavior required to secure tickets does not appeal. Descriptions of the emotions raised by the keyboard-and-mouse competition carefully calibrated to the timing of a ticket release has all the characteristics of addiction. A fan, however, might just call it passion. To be sprayed with paint while mass dancing to great music at eardrum-blasting decibels: you’ve always dreamed of it, right? Most of the young adults taking this class could hardly imagine anything better. The encompassing sensory experience fundamentally connects them with their bodies and each other in a shared physical space and time: it is as far from online social interaction as you can get. I suppose DayGlowers may text or Tweet or update their Facebook statuses just to tweak their friends – haha, I’m here and you’re not! - but the point of DayGlow is to experience an entirely different way of being together.

It’s about Identity, Stupid!

In the final small group discussion with the teacher, one of the students in class made an identity claim about technology that encompassed everyone regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, and (to a lesser but still relevant extent) socioeconomic class. “Technology,” Jamar said, “is what makes us normal.” Orienting to society via the specific types of technology known as social media defines the digital native and simultaneously signals a potent site of contest over the future. What kind of person do you want to be? What kind of person are you now? Although these questions were not asked overtly, they underscored the Red Pill/Blue Pill debate over the prominence of technology in student’s lives. While embracing what they like and accommodating to what they must, many members of this first generation of digital natives are also deeply concerned about what it all means.

Doing Collective Intelligence

In an example of what I call social metonymy, the students’ final team video projects expose individual ambiguity about their personal responsibility for choosing the reality that will define their lives. At the same time the two videos serve to represent this choice as an either/or dichotomy between the Blue Pill and the Red Pill.  In “DayGlow Makes Us Normal,” students blend a sharp knowledge of context with an unapologetic stance in support of ‘the blue pill’ – meaning an uncritical embrace of technology, particularly in terms of how it can be used to serve the needs of the self. These young people show us that they are doing their best to deal with everything; however surviving means sometimes choosing not to know in order to have the ‘escape’ that recharges them to be able to carry on. Dfoley explains:

…when Steph approached us and asked us to research deeper into DAYGLOW, ask questions and look into the three social relations, we as a class became defensive and responded first with a stern “NO!” and then eased out of the conversation with “What if we learn bad things?” We didn’t want to know how they targeted their audiences, what producers or distributors they went through, if they were in fact illegally using music or did they work with certain music industries and is the paint made in an un-ethical environment? At this moment, we didn’t want to know any of these answers; we didn’t want to know if the three social relations that applied to DAYGLOW were good or bad. Because the truth is, DAYGLOW was and is are [sic] escape, we leave all of our troubles at the door and it facilitates an environment that is blind to color or cultural difference but sees the common ground of the human race as a whole and understands that when we enter we all are in an agreement that we simply want to be. And enjoy the overpowering feeling of the love for life you feel as you live the music.

The other video is less ambiguous, showing more of the Red Pill approach through some critical juxtapositions that seem to ask  ”Do We Have to Be This Way?” If you enlarge the Facebook commentary photograph, you’ll see a student’s explanation about the DayGlow footage being replaced by activism by teenagers in Arizona regarding changes to the curriculum there. Taken as a package, the two videos provide a fairly transparent perspective on a particular demographic subset of the Millennial Generation. What isn’t necessarily evident in the videos is learning some students described about ethnic components of their identities:

Steph talked about the fact that many of us saw things in a “white way”. We never thought about seeing things this way but it was seemingly apparent that we did. Seeing in a “white way” is similar to the idea of heteronormativity. Heterosexuality is unconsciously perceived as the correct way to live and therefore heterosexual individuals are unfairly privileged in the same way that white individuals are solely because of their race. As Sgershlak said, many white college students do not think about the opportunities they are presented with because they have always been there. Many of them have not faced much adversity if any at all and this has influenced their perspective on the world. (Kim Delehanty)

Until I was 10 years old, I lived in Boston, where the lifestyle was much laid back. Many of my friends parents would often stay home, either unemployed, laid-off, or fired. There was never a real need to have a intellectual conversation with anyone, mainly because people around you did not complete much schooling. However upon moving to the suburbs, my identity changed in order to fit in with my surrounding environment. Conversations now stemmed to “what do you want to be when you grow up”, “what colleges do you plan on applying to”. Coming from a schooling system which did not produce many graduates, to one which produced more college graduates than Boston did high-school graduates, I would say my identity changed dramatically and maybe for the best. Being the most Americanized Hispanic, also meant when it came time to identify with relatives and family, my identity would also have to change, to incorporate an Hispanic culture which has not been present for several years. (Steve Baez)

Cultivating a Growth Mindset

I assigned the students in this 100-level course a nearly impossible task – to complete team video projects representing their understanding of how media and culture combine in their personally lived experience of college today. I wanted them to demonstrate to me that they understood the concept of articulation as it is used in communication theory.

With inadequate tools, little-to-no experience, and minimal guidance, they exceeded my expectations. We all wish the production values were higher but the meaning of these videos is the thoughtfulness with which these young people have illustrated the incredible tensions of being among the first human beings to live immersed in the digital age.

The intellectual prompt provided as an anchor for the course was obscure at first: “Digital Realities and Analog Living.” We also viewed the 1999 movie, The Matrix, for use as a guiding metaphor as well as an example of transmedia storytelling. The students composed individual videos for their midterm projects, absorbed my critique, and went to work to show me how it really is.

Popularity: 4% [?]

Science of Team Science
1st annual conference
Chicago

A vision is a product of imagination

By definition,  a vision is not the physical sense of sight by which we perceive shapes, colors, distance, and relative positions of objects in our immediate environment. We use the sensory perception of vision as a metaphor for the amorphous sensation of possibility that arises with certain synergies of thought. Possibilities may or may not be creative: likewise every possibility has some ratio of probability. A feature of good management is the skill of ascertaining the probability of achieving any particular possibility and taking action accordingly within a specific zone of risk. Drawing upon Dr John Kounios’ definition of creativity, cited in this New York Times article Charting Creativity: Signposts of a Hazy Territory, creative possibilities are those that involve an insight about how to restructure a situation in a non-obvious way. Organizationally speaking, these are the kinds of visions that earn the label, visionary.

Twin problems: expressing and placing the vision

As amorphous products of imagination, it can be challenging to craft language for expressing a visionary vision. To use a sailing metaphor, one has to tack against the wind toward a destination that is essentially mythical: the island isn’t there until you arrive on its shores and set foot on the ground, confirming its existence. The goal is regularly obscured by weather (fog, storms) and the route affected by the environment (tides, pirates). In order to navigate effectively in murky circumstances, there must be a clear reference point: for enterprises of human organization, providing this clarity is the job of language.

Communicating with language is not a linear process. Misunderstandings, for instance, provide empirical evidence of the non-linearity of language.  In every situation, in any culture, language use is transactional. Although it may seem like picking at hairs, there is a subtle difference between an “interaction” and a “transaction.”[1] Both terms refer to some kind of relationship, but interactions occur between entities that remain fixed and unchanging, whereas in a transaction all entities are affected and changed (to lesser or greater degrees, but always in some way). The precise effects on individuals engaging in transactionally-based vision planning cannot be predicted. This uncertainty can undermine or motivate the group’s dynamic processes.

Thinking in time: operationalizing a vision as an encounter with history

“Most people find it harder to
think about institutions than to think about individuals.”

~ Richard E. Neustadt and Ernest R May (1986, p. 239)
Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decision Makers

“Placing the organization,” suggest Neustadt & May, “partly because it is the least natural of the various steps we suggest, may yield a high return in terms of questions that might otherwise be left unasked or answers left unexamined” (p. 240). It may be counterintuitive to draw upon their “mini-methods” for political crisis resolution as a guide for organizational vision design and implementation, but bear with me for a moment. The practice of thinking in time is a strategy for design. Conceiving of time as a stream frames a dialogue for collaborative teams to “get forward, as soon as possible, the questions that ought to be asked before anyone says, ‘This is what we should do,’ or ‘Here’s how to do it’” (p. 240).

“…visualizing issues in timestreams. To link conventional wisdoms of the present with past counterparts and future possibilities; to link interpretations of the past with the experiences of their interpreters, and both with their prescriptions; to link proposals for the future with the inhibitions of the present and inheritances of the past – all these mean to think relatively and in terms of time, opening one’s mind to possibilities as far back as the story’s start and to potentialities as far ahead as relevant (judged, of course, from now, hence subject to revision later). That entails seeing time as a stream. It calls for thinking of the future as emergent from the past and of the present as a channel that perhaps conveys, perhaps deflects, but cannot stop the flow. (Conveys? Deflects? In what degree? A critical concern!) Perception of time-in-flow cannot help but be encouraged by purposeful study of stretches of history, regardless of whose it is or what the focus.” (p. 246)

There are intriguing parallels among Neustadt and May’s recommendations for working with time and those of Peter Block (Flawless Consulting)[2] and Marvin Weisbord & Sandra Janoff (Keeping Difficult Situations from Becoming Difficult Groups).[3]

Neustadt & May’s mini-methods:

1. Get the story, build timelines (when & what), ask journalist questions (where, who, how, why)
2. Identify options for action (defined by current conditions & capabilities), consider marketing (is it preferable to return to what was before or reach to a new, more satisfactory situation?) Principally, what can be done, now? In other words, make “…judgments of the future as a product of the past affected by presumptions about the present. This playing off of future, past, and present is important work” (emphasis added, p. 237).
3. Test/pre-evaluate: “What expectations about causes and effects makes certain options preferable to others?” (p. 238) Play “bets and odds” in terms of your own money, what would you bet on (chances to win) and what avoid (risks of losing)? Explore what would change if new evidence comes to light.
4. Placement (still before deciding on a choice of action!): “…probing presumptions about relevant people and organizations on whose active aid success depends” (p. 238).

Flawless Consulting

Peter Block distinguishes between the manager who has direct control, and the consultant who can achieve only influence. While Newstadt and May’s model assumes several people already working collaboratively on a major issue, Block focuses on the interpersonal, professional client-consultant relationship. “Sometimes,” he explains, “it is not until after some implementation occurs that a clear picture of the real problem emerges” (p. 8). Block is assuming transactionalism and time-in-flow even though he does not state this directly.

The presumption of timeflow is more apparent in Block’s assertion that competence in the preliminary phases of planning “create the foundation for successful outcomes in the implementation stage” (p. 10). Following a path represents movement in time. “Each act that expresses trust in ourselves and belief in the validity of our own experience is always the right path to follow. Each act that is manipulative or filled with pretense is always self-destructive” (p. 11). Block emphasizes the interplay of present and future: if one behaves like this in the present, one can expect that in the future; whereas if one behaves as if then events will likely work out in such and so a manner.

Focus on structural issues that you can control

“To the extent that we treat differences as a problem to be solved rather than a reality to be managed,” explains Weisbord & Janoff, “we set ourselves up for endless diagnosis and intervention at the expense of doing the work” (p. 2). They draw upon Solomon Asch’s (1952) discovery that for one person to maintain a perception of reality which differs from the rest of the group, that individual must have a known ally. Yvonne Agazarian’s (1997) research demonstrated that one can keep a group on task by finding that ally whenever a dynamic emerges that could take a group off-course.

In Weisbord & Janoff’s experience, “…when differences cause frustration, fear, or anger, people will keep working on the task to the extent that they view the situation as normal” (p. 3).  Weisbord & Janoff learned to normalize the emotion, not the difference. Recall the adage teachers use with students: if one person has the question, others have the question. In a task-oriented group, if one person feels the feeling, other people are feeling the feeling. Shared feelings generate natural allies and healthy subgroups. Normalizing the emotional life of a group enables the exploration of a full, wholistic range of questions and concerns – and answers! – available to a group, particularly a group that wants to act as a team.

The four conditions named by Weisbord & Janoff frame their philosophy of knowing “when to just stand there.” The crucial, transactional point of oscillation is between trusting the group to work through whatever dynamics are present toward task accomplishment, and intervening because of a risk to single member whose opinion or experience is dangling in solitary space.  In Weisbord & Janoff’s experience, diverse groups are most likely to accomplish their tasks when:

(1) people are well-matched to the task,
(2) enough time is allowed for each phase,
(3) everybody really knows the group’s goal, and
(4) potential conflict which might result in flight from the task is headed off by making differences and sub-grouping functional, i.e., as ‘‘contributing to growth’ (p 8).

The need to address and re-direct dysfunctional dynamics of fight or flight from the task is an acknowledgment of the streaming flow of time. What happens in the present affects the future, just as much as what is possible in the present has been significantly pre-figured by the past.

Notice group processes: when to slow down and give attention to small details

All of us are under a lot of pressure to move quickly.  The speed of today’s society is more than inertia, there is what appears to be an inexorable acceleration. The challenge is that the balance of time is held disproportionately between individuals and institutions. Institutionalized bureaucracies remain mired in slow time while individuals increase our frenzied activity as if to compensate for the plodding wheels of systemic change. Intriguingly, in the Charting Creativity article cited above, Dr Rex Jung of The Mind Research Network explains how creativity differs from intelligence. Creativity moves more slowly through the brain, wandering along “lots of little side roads with interesting detours, and meandering little byways.” This difference in pace is a remarkable finding that distinguishes “creative thinking” from the lightning-fast-firing of neurons venerated by popular culture. Slowing down, Dr Jung suggests, “might allow for the linkage of more disparate ideas, more novelty and more creativity.”

This is the kind of creativity needed for implementing visionary visions, whether for business or for science. We need to understand, better, how teams promote creativity among each other. Building teams who know how to notice and respond to the dynamics of language use is one powerful way to harness the essential transactionalism of communication so that, together, we can learn to recognize and make conscious choices between dead-end tangents that distract us from the organizational vision and growth-enhancing sidestreams that act back to concentrate intentionality in the flow of time toward achievement.

Constant Calibrating

All along the way, the image of the vision must be kept in mind like a target in timespace. Its necessary conditions, and the steps required to achieve those conditions, must also be envisioned. These are also products of imagination – the steps have not yet been accomplished, the conditions do not yet exist. What one holds in mind – and talks about with collaborators, team-members, friends, and advisors – is the degree of fit between the current situation (as a snapshot of time-in-flow) with any of the previously-conceived steps and conditions (as the destination of time’s flow). Probably the trickiest part is maintaining equilibrium between management and control.

Management is your ability to direct the timestream of changing conditions and changeable steps along channels you anticipate will move you closer to the target. Control is the amount of force you exert against the nature of the conditions and the step tendencies of people in your system. The most effective and enjoyable teams are those in which all members contribute consciously to the transactional balancing act of management without control. A balanced team is alert to information and dynamics that effect the timeflow of implementation. Members of a balanced team share data, thoughts, and impressions openly; confirm differences that challenge previously accepted strategy; and maintain focus on a future timespace in which the organizational vision has been made real.

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[1] See Mustafa Emirbayer, Manifesto for a Relational Sociology, American Journal of Sociology Vol 103, No 2, September 1997, pp. 281-317 for a detailed discussion of the differences between “substantialism” and “relationalism.”

[2] 2^nd Edition, Flawless Consulting by Peter Block. 1981/2000.

[3] This article is adapted from “Principle 6: Master the Art of Subgrouping,” in Weisbord & Janoff, Don’t Just Do Something, Stand There! Ten Principles for Leading Meetings that Matter. 2007.

Popularity: 7% [?]

Building on the potential for a paradigm shift is matter of recognition, marketing, and design. These processes can proactively influence each other, interacting and changing through the development of a project. All are contained within the conception and application of strategic planning.
Strategy has to involve conceptualizing the outcome in two different yet complementary ways. First, you must imagine what you want in terms of place. In the case of the next national conference of the Registry of Interpreters for the Deaf (RID, US-based), the physical location will be some hotel in Atlanta, GA, but the more important issue is how the space of the place will be designed and implemented in order to generate the desired kinds of intercultural interaction. The second dimension that must be considered is time. By time, I do not mean the logistics of scheduling or considerations about the length of the event or even its parts. These are obviously important logistical factors that require detailed attention. However, the most important temporal factor to consider is how the conference contributes to long-term patterning of habits and attitudes for engaging in intercultural social interaction.

Not Even Related to a Deaf Adult: Buffered by Monolingualism
That would be me, and we NERDAs compose the largest percentage of the membership of RID. Most of us do not understand what it means to be Deaf. We want to understand, and we sure try hard, but our reality as native, hearing speakers of English in the United States is one of extreme linguistic privilege. No matter what other oppressions we may experience, we communicate with the same language as nearly everyone one else around us. NERDAs need to understand that we are affected by living in a society that has done more, historically, than any other country to enforce monolingualism. Unless you live or work in a dense urban city, it is quite possible that you never hear another language spoken in day-to-day living. Most Americans are protected from exposure to even tasting what it might be like to not know the language that would enable you to talk with your neighbor, your child’s teacher, shopkeepers and salespeople, peers in your classroom or a club, not to mention the doctor, police officer, realtor, banker, or the waitstaff at a restaurant where you must guarantee that there are no nuts or shellfish in the dish you want because you don’t want to risk anaphylactic shock.
NERDAs certainly cannot conceive of the intrapersonal, deliberate, conscious planning necessary to predict when and where and for how long we’ll need an interpreter, do not know the calculus of deciding why and for what reasons we’ll need an interpreter, and never have to weigh the costs – time, focused mental energy, unpredictable emotional surges – that come along with deciding, “Yes, in this situation I do need an interpreter,” or “No, in this situation I can manage without an interpreter.” Nor do we have to deal with the fallout from misjudging any of these factors: such as discovering an interpreter is necessary when it had not seemed so, or that the need is much longer/shorter than anticipated, or that the whole effort was a complete waste of time.

Atlanta 2011: Experimenting with New Norms
National conferences of professional associations occur for very specific reasons:

• to further the organization’s business and
• to provide members with professional development opportunities that are not available at home.

A critique offered by one of the other participants in the small group DEAF-FRIENDLY brainstorming sessions (described in the August 9 entry, “Embrace Change, Honor Tradition (RID 2009)” was that the conference focuses too much on training. In the immediate moment, I was most aware of the turn-taking dynamic – how her comment did not have any relation to mine – but I soon realized that her observation is significant. Why are we designing the national conference like an extension of an interpreter training program? Granted, many RID members are still in the early phases of their professional careers, but if we design the conference with students in mind, we generate a comfortable and familiar container for learning as usual.

No wonder, then, that many interpreters arrive and proceed to engage in comfortable, familiar, and usual ways! An alternative would be to take MJ Bienvenu’s deconstruction by reversal to the extreme. This would create a professional development experience that would use the capacities of our national organization to the fullest potential. We already have the technology:

• knowledge of Deaf culture
• linguistic fluency in ASL and English
• professionally trained ASL-English interpreters
• extensive experience with interpreter request systems and accommodation services…

What we need is the will to apply the tools in an altered configuration, and a rationale to convince people to come.

A one-time experiment of mutual discovery
Instead of following the dominant, inherently oppressive model (accessibility provided for the Deaf), we reverse it (accessibility provided for the Hearing). This would generate an experience like none other. In some respects it would resemble an ASL Immersion retreat, and in some respects it would resemble the environment at residential schools for the Deaf. What it would offer is the intellectual and empathy-building experience of being the one who has to ask.
There would not need to be any commitment or promise to continue: we can see what happens, evaluate it, and then decide. If the storming phase re-emerges – so be it, that will be an honest, deep indicator of the organization’s developmental status. If we do establish a foundation for new norms, well, that will be incredibly exciting and everyone who attends will have bragging rights for the rest of their life:

Popularity: 2% [?]

Trevize is grumpy as hell that he’s chosen Gaia – a superorganism – instead of either the technologically-superior First Foundation or the “mentalic” (psychosocial scientifically advanced) Second Foundation as the future of humankind.

The moment of coincidence took my breath away. I opened Isaac Asimov’s fifth book in The Foundation Series, thinking I would start to read it for a few minutes to shift my mind toward sleep, having just finished watching Maya’s extraordinary documentary on Toekomsten 02068. A futurologist, Maya interviewed people who attended the 01958 World’s Fair in Brussels, inquiring as to their experiences then, their reflections on how society has changed – or not – since then, and their projections another fifty years into the future. Jose interpreted the Flemish for me, gesturing occasionally to supplement the English.

The film confirms and goes beyond the fiftieth anniversary retrospective exhibition at The Atomium, Between Utopia and Reality. I spent an afternoon there last week: incredible. Honestly, walking out of the tram station and catching my first full view of this massive structure was awe-inspiring; it felt alien. As I approached, that impression only intensified. This architectural wonder representing an iron crystal looms into the atmosphere. I wondered if my fear of heights would hamper exploration.

I detailed my enthusiasm about the exhibit to a gang of potential troublemakers, carrying on about how well the exhibit presented the spirit of achievement and optimism of attendees while posing the critical questions indicated by evident contradictions in design and implementation. Specifically, how the constructed sensibility of a joined and shared humanness across fifty-two countries and widely-disparate cultures highlighted the public demise of colonialism and the threatening battle between the Soviet Union and the U.S. The witnesses/participants in Maya’s film confirm the dominance of the Fair’s spectacle over its overt theme,”A World View, A New Humanism,” critiquing the Fair’s overt display of technological prowess and power. Mirroring the implicit message of the Fair itself, the insidious face of nationalism remains largely unnamed by the film’s participants although it is clearly recognized. One man laughs as he recalls the positioning of the U.S. and U.S.S.R.’s pavilions with the Church in-between. The visual production of the film is superb: the subjects speak conversationally in 02008 against backdrops of scenes from the Fair in 01958. The imagery is fantastic: a science fiction tableau that, while sometimes quaint, in other respects still appears futuristic today.

Listening to the film’s participants muse about what has changed or not over the last half-century is sobering. Almost universally, the bouyant hope that they experienced at the World’s Fair has faded to a grim concern. The most poignant evidence for me involved language. Many of the participants described worsening conditions of today’s society, or at least that there have been no substantive changes, certainly no improvement, since 01958. While recognizing achievements and differences between these two times, the underlying international dynamics remain essentially the same. A man who worked as a translator at the 01958 Fair spoke of how the speed of communication would increase because of all the innovations (e.g., the telephone); while telecommunications may indeed be the single driving factor in the vast transformations of globalization, the apparent need for speed unifies the present with the past.

The impetus for acceleration is accompanied with a selfishness that was variously described by participants in terms of money (for us)/peanuts (for them), abundance/lack, even suggesting hoarding/poverty. A young person of today wondered why we – who have so much – cannot share more with those who have so little? I felt the most telling clue to these dynamics was an instance when a participant shifted from Dutch to English. He was describing the insistent accumulation of “us” (he may have meant Belgians specifically but my sense was the broader white west) in contrast with inequities in Africa (in particular, although again he may have meant the broader underdeveloped world). In the midst of his impassioned speech he described what he perceives as the dominant, individual attitude, abruptly codeswitching to English:

Admittedly, it is a challenge to care about people and places removed from one’s intimate, social, and professional circles. Sometimes it is difficult to care even within these microcosms. I am not sure when, during viewing, that I began thinking of Gaia. Probably at the point of temporal shift in focus, as participants shifted their gaze from reflecting on the past to imagining the future. I recalled the lecture at the University of Massachusetts last year by Dr. Lynn Margulis concerning her theory of endosymbiosis, a variation of the Gaia hypothesis. There is a commonsense-ness to this concept that adheres to the basic scientific principle of simplicity; I am astonished at the resistance in the scientific community to grant much credibility to the hypothesis. Indeed, at the lecture I attended there was not a single question from the audience – a phenomena which occurred only this one time during an entire year’s series of lectures. Of course, the common sense can be wrong, but often intellectual absolutisms are also proven false, or at least contingent. For instance, this incredible notion of “being an individual” as if no interdependence facilitates existence.

Jose summarized the overall gist of people’s articulations in the film. The older people, she explained, can attribute some meaning, some vision to the future, while the young people in the film are at a loss. Perhaps, she mused, when you are young you have not yet accumulated enough experience to be able to project ahead. Reflecting on her own life, she said the hype and hope of the 01958 World’s Fair lasted until 1965, and then something changed. “You could feel it in the air,” she said. “Maybe things were not going to be ok.”

Returning to Asimov, Trevize has decided he must re-discover Earth. Twenty thousand years into the future, Asimov imagines a universe in which the planetary origin of humanity has become lost in antiquity. “How is it possible,” Trevize wonders, “that we have all forgotten?”

Memory depends on what we say and don’t say, which stories we tell, and how we tell them. Perhaps the future does, too.

Near the end of the 02068 documentary, reflecting on its message and projecting its potential meaningfulness, is a quote by Fred Polak about an emerging sustainable vision for the future. He qualifies: “our images of this future are still very fuzzy, very poorly defined” (translated into English, 1961, The image of the future). I found info on Polak from Merrill Findlay, On the fluttering of butterfly wings, a member of an organization called Imagine the Future Inc.

Findlay describes Polak as

“a Dutch sociologist who, in the late ’40s, wrote a book about how we humans simultaneously live in the present and that Other place, the future. About how we imagine that mythic Other Place to explain our present and how our images of that place, the future, then ‘act as magnets on our behaviour in the present’ to precipitate social change.”

I’ll adapt Findlay’s question (posed in 1994) to the narratives in Maya’s film, encompassing the challenges left by the shifts in attitude from a pervasive belief, a mere five decades ago, that ‘things will get better’ to today’s stark pessimism that ‘we may not even make it.’

The thing is, we can use language to remember what we need – not just what we want. We can use words and stories to motivate and propel trajectories that lead us to the sustainable future so many of us believe is possible.

Popularity: 1% [?]

The first act of will is to decide that time does not matter.

Immersed in the presence of this new language, I forgot that I was here for a reason! “We know you love your metaphors,” Rachel teased before I came. The other roommate just laughed.

Lauren described my fourth rock balance as “precarious.” Ah – momentarily I recognized myself. “Taut control,” said Andy Goldsworthy in an excerpt of a video we watched, “can be the death of our work.” As the workshop ended, during the closing circle, Rita recalled Lila’s introduction of Hermes, the god of boundaries and the travelers who cross them. (Hermes is also the god of thieves: what greater boundaries are there to cross than those imposed by custom and law? (shhhh!))

I had forgotten. Our teacher, Lila Higgins, spoke first in the closing circle, describing the cairn she’d built a few days earlier at the crossroads leading to our final rock balancing site,



and her delight in communion with the unknown balancer who had rebuilt it in the days since. Listening to her, my consciousness was nudged to remember: I was here to mark the current turn in the trajectory of my life. Then, after others including myself had spoken, Rita recalled Hermes. How had that god slipped my mind?! It seems I had achieved – if only for a short while – the intention expressed by another workshopper,

We watched videos of Bill Dan building rock balances, and also of George Quasha. My mind required time (exposure, continuity) to shift from its usual operational state-of-consciousness (ahem) to this altered perceptual state “charged with an air of contingency” in which time has no substance. For hours at a stretch, I experience only concentration and sensation: ripples of subdued emotion (annoyance, tenderness, impatience, resolve, fear of failure, renewed commitment) and yearning for that satisfying moment when the rock finds its place.



Will my intellectual work emanate a similar resonance? I hope so. I have felt similar types of ‘click moments‘ in the past. Trusting them has led me here – to this junction, where I discover conviction deepening without reducing uncertainty.



Carter Ratcliff introduces the artistic ethic of George Quasha (who is inspired by John Cage) with words that likewise describe the ethical center of my action research goal:

More photos of rock balancers and some rock balances produced during this workshop are on this page at Lila’s rockbalancer site.
See also hickoree, rebranca46 (Rocks Balancing), and bebalance (Super Balance: Birds, Bottle, Bricks, Birds Again…).

Popularity: 1% [?]

Heavy talk with friends, lately – about the ethos of the age being caught up in urgency and crisis, possibly such that we fail to recognize the sweep of history and our complicity with trends we would ethically not choose if we were aware of the relation between our immediate, daily lives and how the simple things we do, moment-by-moment, actually compose larger historical trends.
The NYTimes published a piece on the infamous Milgram Experiments (social psychology) earlier this month, posing the question: would you pull that switch? The article details some new findings that help to understand both the context (why were – and are :-/ – so many people willing to cause pain to others?) and the range of individual reasons for responding to the context as they actually did.
Contextually, subjects were disoriented by the unfamiliarity of the situation, and they were rushed – put under time pressure. The combination of uncertainty and urgency resulted in disorientation – with its obvious (if undetermined) influence on decision-making. This may be a stretch, but it brings to mind some audience reactions to “The Dark Knight” last night, in which people laughed at moments that seemed produced to disturb, while missing designed moments of humor. It struck me as a delayed reaction caused (possibly) by the frenetic pace of volatile action. Similar dynamics occur in interpersonal interactions too, for instance, when people laugh upon hearing awful news – a miscued reaction because of the awkwardness of the situation.
So, there is the matter of complicity – a rather unconscious going-along-with the zeitgeist (or, for some, a conscious embrace of the spirit of the times – for all kinds of reasons), and then there is the matter of compliance. Expressions of pain, per se, were not usually conclusive in convincing switch-pullers to stop. This is what is used to illustrate that the obedience factor is such a deep component of human behavior, and – more subtly – “demonstrate[s] individual differences in perceptions of accountability.” (In my imagination, it is not hard to extend this to all the ways in which we – the relatively privileged – turn away from the cries of the relatively un/underprivileged. Pain – especially that of others – is insufficient as a motivator.)
However, “the demand by the subject to stop [is now identified] as the turning point.” People who disregarded this were going to continue, no matter what – their conception of authority/authorization/responsibility/accountability simply ended at the “fact” of the social scientific structure. Those who did stop – whether sooner or later – exercised some personal judgment, “decid[ing] that the learner’s right to stop trumped the experimenter’s right to continue.”
The phrasing of this interests me, particularly in my professional role as teacher, and even more specifically as a teacher interested in cultivating critical thinking skills, using non-standard pedagogies and experimenting with the boundaries of student expectations concerning what a college class is supposed to be. There is power in this position, and I use it – intentionally, deliberately, yet – I hope – with compassion for how challenging it is to have the common or usual disrupted in service of a goal that can only be presented in amorphous and ambiguous terms.
Related information at “Psychologists find a way to replicate Milgram’s classic obedience experiment.”

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Mike said that, talking (to himself?!) as he entertained a couple of neighborhood girls by trying to figure out one of their toys.
Yesterday was full of tugs. I spent the afternoon and evening enjoyably, after taking a much longer time than usual to blog (and cook! shhhhhhh). Being on the periphery of two kidnappings with happy endings left me full of vicarious emotion. For the last three days I have been feeling a bit de-centered, as if there’s “a disturbance in The Force” (!), or – as the new roomie said, I am “out of alignment” with myself. My thinking is slow, difficult; my self-consciousness heightened. I speculate that I’m experiencing fallout from being (now) in a timespace different than expected (on land rather than still at sea), or the process of absorbing recent life lessons, or the malaise that lingers from old wounds . . .
I know I don’t have the jazzy hectoring tone considered most successful in writing on/for the web. The thing is, I don’t want to play into that collusively heeyyy cowboy insider attitude that Jack Shaffer promotes. Yet, I appreciate that friends do (sometimes, smile) actually read the blog and (rarer still, hence precious) give me feedback on my writing. Building “indexes” over the past few days must have put me in a summative mood, because I carried that mode into writing about Alf’s freedom instead of just blogging the moment. Perhaps I’m feeling it more necessary than usual to justify my existence (I got flamed!), to explain the reasons for my choices, or otherwise try to articulate how I perceive things going together? I am also prepping to teach, and I never (ever!) stop learning.
Even though I’ll probably never capture the tone of our times, my mind resonated with resemblances to another angle of Caleb Crain’s reflections on online literary style. In particular, he writes (and I insert comments):

I’ve kept a blog for several years (ditto), and although its readership is tiny (mine too), I of course notice when the hits rise and fall. (I should pay more attention!) I seem to get more readers when I post frequently, when I write about people or topics in the headlines, when I have been drawn into a conflict, and when I write something that speaks to a self-image that a group of people share. (Hmmm, it would be interesting to know if any such patterns are evident here in Reflexivity.) Over the years I’ve gradually revealed more personal details (we differ in this); I still reveal very little, comparatively, but enough to entitle me to say that I feel a tug there, too. Perhaps the tugs that I feel are a better data source, come to think of it, than my blog’s underemployed hit counter. If I were to interpret those tugs, I would say that writing on the internet tends to be more popular when it satisfies the reader’s wish to be connected–the wish not to miss out.

Funny – is Crain suggesting an internal (his own) or external (from others) tug to reveal more? Where (with whom) does the wish to be connected originate, and can it be cultivated as a social/relational force for institutional/historical change?
Only if we act on those wishes.

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Chunks of quantum wave packets defined by continuous variables of position, energy and momentum may not yield a frequency/wavelength ratio but – metonymically (something the human brain does via consciousness) – couldn’t we use this language to describe the shape of the social world?

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Work on optical illusions show how the distance from which one views a face alters the expression you think you’re seeing. Some constructions are creepy!
I’m intrigued with the function of distance. Part of what me and my committee need to sketch out is the scope of the lens I’ll use in exploring the practice of simultaneous interpretation at the European Parliament. Since each of our relative distances from the object of study differ, establishing a reasonable range might be a challenge.

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They did give me exactly what I needed during my prospectus defense, even though a hazing frenzy seemed to build as we spoke. Perhaps I still give off the vibe that being clubbed with a two-by-four is the only way to get my attention.
I had meant to mention my science fiction mind at the beginning of the presentation – not that they aren’t already aware (!), but to highlight the challenge of fitting my perceptions into academic boxes. Science fiction was the first wholistic knowledge system that I encountered, followed by fantasy. The frame of a person being randomly at a juncture in time and space from which things unfold seems, as near as I can tell, to be the deepest level of neuronic organization in my brain: cognition overlays the rhizomic net.
They want me to fix the time/space of the study in accordance with pre-established knowledge. This is the tricky one. The other feedback about clarifying and expanding the details of methodology is useful and productive: although I have confidence that I will successfully navigate whatever happens during the fieldwork process, anticipating the possibilities (a series of “if-then” imaginings) can only help. Most of this nitty-gritty I have intended to do in August anyway; now I just need to organize it sensibly for them as well.
The crux of the matter seems to be a concern that I won’t deliver something that they expect, emphasis on lack of surprise. We are entering into a contract, and my conformity to the terms of the deal is demanded. The conservative bent of academia weighs heavily here, and the question of whose authority is in play is, in fact, the very point of the entire exercise. What else is voice if not the ability to put words into action? I clamber through my own extraordinarily limited exposure to this world, (this lifeworld?), taking in so much: not “feeling” as in mere emotion, but sensory perception. English lacks common vocabulary to distinguish among types of “feeling,” hence I am often in trouble/at risk of conflation.
Not only that, I’m not so keen on reifying institutionalized authority of any kind. So, for instance, in this moment of spacetime, I do a Google search (gasp!) to see if there’s anything out there right now that complements the notions I have in mind. Nice! So what that I can’t translate the text of Blommaert’s rejoinder; or that the “lifeworld” reference I found has to do with computer science – these two references say what I intend:

“The concept of a lifeworld will not appear as a specific mathematical entity in our formalism. The intuition, however, is this: while there is an objective material environment, the agent does not directly deal with all of this environment’s complexity. Instead it deals with a functional environment that is projected from the material environment. That projection is possible because of various conventions and invariants that are stably present in the environment or actively maintained by the agent.”

Such an eclectic, synergistic mode of knowledge construction is anathema to the stable march of paradigmatic knowledge sanctioned by universities. How, why can I trust the authority of these authors? What if they “got it wrong” and I, foolish and naive that I am, perpetuate the error?
Now we’re into morality.
Granted, I have not always understood the nuances or sophistication of certain ideas at particular times. So what? I have understood others. Yes, I am not always as clear as seems desirable – not only to others, to me, too – and (!) clarity is also an interactive accomplishment. The challenges presented by my committee carve edges into the frame of what this study will actually become.
What environment is being actively maintained by discourses about simultaneous interpreting in the European Parliament? What stable conventions and invariants are currently present? Which functional environments are being projected? My role in the projections of Members of Parliament and EP Interpreters matters just as much as their role in mine: this is what makes the proposed research action and process-based. Nonetheless, all that swirl does have a center: a contractually fixed point-of-reference in the practice of simultaneous interpretation.

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