Monthly Archives: August 2016

Minds for the Future

In Five Minds for the Future, Howard Gardner defines and nominates five mentalities that he deem essential for preparing us for the near future.

Disciplined Mind – mastery of schools of thought, profession or craft.

Synthesizing Mind – ability to integrate ideas from difference spheres into a coherent whole and communicate it to others. The author notes that this especially important in a time filled with ‘dizzying’ amounts of information.

Creating Mind – ability to think about new ideas, unfamiliar questions, new ways of thinking. The creating mind ‘seeks to remain at least one step ahead of even the most sophisticated computers and robots’.

Respectful Mind – awareness of and appreciation for differences among human beings.

Ethical Mind – fulfillment of one’s responsibilities as a worker and citizen.

I agree these are key mindsets we should have in the world of today and into the future, particularly the Synthesizing and Creating minds. However, the author testifies that he has considered a large range of other mindsets and is willing to defend his selection ‘vigorously’. Having said that, he then opts to use partly or mainly anecdotal evidence when expanding on these mindsets. It might be the case that possessing the five he suggests might be sufficient to lead to those other mindsets. However, his case might have been more clear if he did in fact went into more details as to why these minds over the others he has briefly listed: technological mind, digital mind, market mind, democratic mind, flexible mind, emotional, etc. Nevertheless, this was an insightful article with lots to draw inspiration from.

The parts that stood out to me were mostly in the sections that delved into education:

“In our cultures of today – and of tomorrow – parents, peers, and media play roles at least as significant as do authorised teachers and formal schools.”

This put into words something I realised in my journey through this course. One or two years ago, I don’t remember the exact reasons but I went on a science documentary spree for a couple of months. Binge watching any and all scientific documentaries I could get my hands on via Youtube (back in highschool, I wasn’t very interested in the STEM subjects, particularly didn’t understand physics). But it was amazing that as my older, early twenties, self I was able to not only comprehend complicated ideas in physics but, by the end of my custom Youtube ‘course’, was able to synthesize the concepts I understood and arrive at (through my own means) other existing physical concepts. This experience made me appreciate the beauty of other disciplines and the importance of integrating all these fields to better understand the world we live in, and also gave me the confidence to pick up astronomy.

The internet and all its wonders have opened up a world of resources many times more superior than any singular school or university. And that is not to say schools and universities are redundant, they still serve us in many other ways shall we choose to pursue a discipline.

Which leads me to my other epiphany, which is the more important point: media is empowering. I finally understood the role communication and media play among other disciplines in the world. It is one of the most effective, perhaps more direct and intuitive than our current form of formal education, in communicating to, educating, and inspiring people. This ultimately changed my purpose in studying media. Rather than wanting to be an experimental filmmaker, I was suddenly imbued by a greater passion, purpose, and responsibility to affect the world, and perhaps, to communicate to, and share with others the beauty, the possibilities, and opportunities I have discovered.

“The empires of the future will be empires of the mind” – Winston Churchill, as quoted in Five Minds for the Future.

In light of our current pace in technological innovation, and trajectory toward practicality and efficiency in labour, many have been thrown into an growing global ‘existential’ crisis – our jobs, on which we have built our identities, will all eventually be replaced. We as humans are urged more than ever before to seek our ultimate value in society. What are we here for? Why do we work? What part of us cannot be replaced by robots and computers? Some think that it is our ability to be creative, to make random leaps from thought to thought. Will general artificial intelligence once day be capable of that too? Only time will tell. But we might not need to constantly compare ourselves or compete with the machines we design in order to set ourselves apart from them. Being creative, be it in the arts or the sciences, is a unique individual endeavour; and often lead to the most significant contributions to society. Unlike any other skills, I don’t believe we will ever have too many artists, too many inventors, or too many intellectual thinkers.

Last but not least:

“…I’ve discovered a particularly Sisyphean goal: “leading the world in international comparisons of test scores.” Obviously, on this criterion, only one country at a time can succeed.”

Perhaps out of superficiality, I was greatly amused by Howard Gardner’s analogy for policymakers’ vacuous proclamations about education goals. Having said this, I think the contradiction beneath is one that needs to be addressed. The importance of finding a meaningful purpose or value in education is something that society – parents and young people themselves – needs to realise as well.

 

 

 

Finding time in a digital age

In ‘Finding Time in a Digital Age’, chapter 7 in Judy Wajcman’s Pressed for Time: The Acceleration of Life in Digital Capitalism (2015), she opens with a description of what economist John Maynard Keynes anticipated almost a century ago: increased productivity from technical progress will eventually alleviate the time and effort needed to produce and supply humanity’s material needs. Yet instead, Life is even more rushed in the accelerated digital age when the opposite was predicted. She argues that reducing of work hours as one way to alleviate time pressure. She attributes these long hour working conditions to a capitalist economy, hyper consumption, and a lack of public forum of what is a good life and what value and place leisure should have in it.

Her quote from sociologist Juliet Schor is only too relatable:

“they work too much, eat too quickly, socialise too little, drive and sit in traffic for too many hours, don’t get enough sleep, and feel harried too much of the time.” (p.167)

Whilst many have adopted the perspective that: the solution to our ‘temporal impoverishment’ is to return to a ‘naturalistic’ lifestyle and escape from technology, Wajcman’s analysis does not favour this as the answer. She highlights the complex duality technology have in our lives. On one hand, it has the ability to maximise our productivity, experience differently, and allow us to connect, produce, and operate in ways that weren’t possible before. On the other, we are constantly distracted, consuming and working as we are always connected.

The author’s commendable pragmatism, in response to the reactionary approach through returning to ‘nature’, shows great clarity and rational understanding beyond the emotional. She even proposes that we can find new approaches to adapt to our current environment. Just because technology has sped things up in our lives, doesn’t mean we can’t use technology, as we always have, to assist in improving human capabilities to adapt, to be versatile in new environments. This is demonstrated in the time management phone app that Wajcman mentions in the beginning.

“Smart, fast technologies provide an unparalleled opportunity for realizing a more humane and just society, only we need to keep in mind that busyness is not a function of gadgetry but of the priorities and parameters we ourselves set.” (p.184)

Wajcman also identified that, with the convenience of technology (particularly our personal devices, cloud services, etc), our divide between work and leisure seem to have dissipated.

This blurred lifestyle is something I experience on a daily basis, mostly working wherever I can fit it in. Some days I feel glad to be working from home and being able to spend time with my dogs, not realising that I am often not spending quality time with them, rather, bringing the mess and stress of my pursuit of my career into my ‘personal life’ and letting it invade the time i have set for other parts of my life. Whilst I have no complaints to putting in as much as I think I should for the results I desire, I have realised that I also desire and should cherish the companionship I am so fortunate to have at this point in my life. Which makes it difficult to prioritize one over the other. Incidentally, I have never thought this lifestyle I have unintentionally taken up might have anything to do with the fact that the integration of technology into our lives have made it possible to work anywhere we can, or want to.

This reading shed light on some subtle and sometimes unnoticeable factors that we should be reflecting on in our daily practices and work-life balance.

 

So Oversimplified They Don’t Get You

Why the video trump the book in the Quest for communicating his ideas

Cal Newport, 2012, ‘The Clarity of the Craftsman’ in So Good They Can’t Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work, NY Business Plus, ch.4.

Just as I was about to write a #triggered rant about this reading after I finished it, I decided to read up on who Cal Newport actually is… who he is writing to… and what he was ultimately on about.

As evident in his publications, they are mostly aimed at high schoolers or college students:

I also stumbled upon a Talks at Google video in which he makes a bit more effort than the book does in addressing the issues and explaining his ideas. But first, let’s breakdown the issues in the text.

Firstly, it is really difficult to understand the full context of this text without the rest of his book. So my critique of it is subject to the lack of certain contexts. That is, the author may have clarified or defined some of these points earlier in the book.

The author seem to take for granted the words he uses mean the exact same thing to everyone else, and fails to acknowledge any room for interpretation. He doesn’t define any of the terms he chooses to use repeatedly throughout the text. From the contents page down to the actual text itself, the author is prone to oversimplifying his concepts and other ideas he is referring to.  And by doing so, reveal the complex relationships between them even more.

Some semantics worth elaborating upon would be:

“Be So Good”:

Good at what? Good in what sense? Not once throughout the text does he actually elaborate on what he means to be ‘so good they can’t ignore you’. What does this author define as good? Why good and not best, or better? Good is such an elusive term!

More Importantly – One might contemplate on the varying degrees on our individual scales. What do we all think is good, or good enough? Good for you might not be good enough for me, etc.

“Crafts”:

The writer interviews a handful of performers and establishes that whoever his readers are, no matter what kind of career or work they are involved in or plan to pursue, they should take on the “craftsman mindset”. Firstly, he doesn’t explain or contextualise his case studies. He generalises and ignores the various natures of different types of work. It almost feels like he was too lazy to go into depths. By emphasising ‘crafts’, it implies to readers they should obsess over the medium or means in which they create or work and not focus on what you want to do with it. Why give it such a misleading name?

“what you can offer the world” & “what the world can offer you”:

These phrases are not only vague in what they’re actually saying, but only seem to invoke by feeling in the readers that one is good for you and the other clearly not. By saying ‘what you can offer the world’, he could very well mean something along the lines of contribution to the larger things we care about (he does provide a better example in the video). But one can easily interpret this line as offering your services to the market, which many more people (in retail/hospitality for example) actually do and think they are “serving the world”.

“Passion”:

The writer uses strong and subjective language and again, fails to elaborate when needed. In the video below, he actually does address what is it about the word “passion” that he is against. This might also be addressed in a previous chapter in the book, but it is certainly not clarified within this chapter. In the video he speaks specifically of the “follow your passion” mindset, which he explains as being problematic due to the assumption that we all have preexisting passions and can be matched or assigned to specific jobs. In other words, he is saying don’t think of passions as the jobs you seek. Which is really good advice, only he didn’t really do it justice in the text. In the text, he seems awfully bias against anything to do with passion or self discovery; which honestly befuddled me.

‘Second (reason)…the deep questions driving the passion mindset – “Who am I?” and “What do I truly love?” – are essentially impossible to confirm. “Is this who I really am?” and “Do I love this?” rarely reduce to clear yes-or-no responses. In other words, the passion mindset is almost guaranteed to keep you perpetually unhappy and confused…’

By listing a few generic examples of “deep questions” and then jumping to an extreme and far-fetched conclusion that: the passion mindset (which is not distinguished enough in the text from passion itself) will leave you ‘perpetually unhappy and confused’, He seem to assume he has achieved his explanation.

That argument projects, whether he intended it or not, a fundamental logical fallacy: Sophisticated questions are difficult to answer, so let’s not worry about them. It even sounds more like: life is not about living for yourself, it’s about ‘the quest for work you love’. Surely, he ain’t suggesting that, right? But by downplaying these philosophical questions while he continues to market his quote “be so good they can’t ignore you’ for the fifth time in the last ten pages, it positions his ideas in a very misleading context.

My conclusion is that this guy actually does make a lot of sense when he talks about these ideas in the video. But his text falls short in delivering the same. His Q&A in the video also brings out and clarifies his perspective even more.

What he wanted to say from this video:

  • Passion is not an entitlement nor does it preexist. It does take work to discover something we can call a sense of purpose. That purpose shouldn’t be about matching an interest to a job. And it often will overlap with what we need to contribute or offer to the world. Part of this might involve trying different roles, doing or making, dedicating those hours to immerse oneself in those environments to find out what in life fulfills or satisfies.
  • Achieving more ‘general lifestyle traits’ such as: autonomy, power, respect, impact, time, affluence, etc. are what gives people a real sense of satisfaction in what they do. Not the specific work itself. There are many possible paths that leads to these traits.
  • Building up the skills that you can offer to the market and will make you valuable. This maximises your opportunities and allow you to take control of your working life and lead towards achieving the more general traits in life that create fulfillment and satisfaction.
In my own experience:

Having gone through many of these phases throughout high school and 8 years of vocational and higher education, I can relate to his message in the video about focusing on attaining the skills or qualities you need before pursuing the larger, more fulfilling projects later in life, which will present themselves as you maximise your opportunities.

When I was in high school, family, my partner, and close friends often questioned and expected me to have a passion in the creative arts. They expected that I knew I was going to be a photographer for the rest of my life if I chose that path. I would never know how to respond to those expectations. I knew I wanted to be in the creative arts, but photography to be exact? I would tell them that I am pursuing photography until I discover something else in a similar field.

After a good 5 years in the field of contemporary art, I transferred to Media, and did a crash course in philosophy through my early electives. It wasn’t until I started being interested in the broader world that I found some sense of purpose. I became curious and begun to understand the world around me: science, technology, education, and other global and social issues. All of a sudden, filmmaking didn’t matter anymore. I had the epiphany that the medium I am training in is not the end game. It only provides the means for me to communicate or help others communicate important messages. I looked at the skills and abilities I have acquired in the past few years: art direction, photography, digital editing skills, technical knowledge and experience, experimentation, conceptual development, creative methodology, critical thinking and ability to think philosophically, crafting communication through multiple mediums. These skills and abilities can now be used to achieve a more fulfilling purposes of communicating important and valuable messages or be used to contribute to and solve more significant issues I care about.

Purpose unites skills and passion. Newport defines skills as what you can offer the world, and following your passion being what the world can offer you. On the contrary, I would argue that: Skills are what the world offers you which enables you to more purposeful work and pursue what you want to offer the world.

#Triggered

The Informal Media Economy

Ramon Lobato & Julian Thomas (2015)
Chapter 3: Work

This excerpt outlines the problematic work conditions of the informal media economy. In the rapidly growing and evolving media economy, it is a constant struggle to properly evaluate and measure the appropriate financial rewards for evolving and new emerging media work. With vastly different natures of work ranging from freelance journalism, production crewing, or game designing and programming, this chapter stresses the instability of creative labour and the challenges of regulating these industries.

This is a tricky and delicate problem. Not sure what to make of it. The current economic system and the way we value labour and resources are not in line with the work-life balance from the individual’s perspective. There is no fair standard to measure and value the quality of the work we make or hours we spend “doing” it. We are currently mostly victims of this. But if these industries become heavily regulated, would that lead to more restraints on smaller startups and independent media groups or individuals who were enabled by informal, entrepreneurial structures and crowdsourcing capabilities? Leaving the winners to be those who have large enough capital and can afford paid labour? As pointed out by the article the diverse natures of work grouped under the roof of media makes it hard to address this as a single issue. Also, I find it difficult to grasp the concept of the proposed “flexicurity”.

Future of storytelling: technologies, storytelling & reality

New media: storytelling & reality (Working title)
Bibliography: (in progress)

Ryan, M 2011, ‘The Interactive Onion’ in New narratives: stories and storytelling in the digital age, R. Page & B. Thomas ed., University of Nebraska Press, U.S., pp.35-62.

In this text, Marie-Laure Ryan outline varying definitions and opinions from theorists and authors of interactivity in new media. She then argues that, like the layers in an onion, there are different levels of user participation and interactivity in digital texts:

  1. Peripheral Interactivity
  2. Interactivity affecting narrative
  3. Interactivity creating
  4. Real-time story generation
  5. Meta-Interactivity

From predefined stories with several outcomes to games which allow users to create their own modules or levels, Ryan analyses and dissects a wide range of examples of digital texts to demonstrate the various degrees of interactivity involved.

The article addresses different foundational theories previously applied to new media interactivity, and objectively reviews the different narrative structures and levels of participation in the demonstrated examples. This text can be useful as a guideline to interpret the levels of interactivity in current and future new media works. However, this article was published in 2011 (five years ago). Given the fast-shifting landscape of new media, there may have since been more recent experimental new media works which have challenged or transcended the defined levels of interactivity listed above.

Pavlik, J.V. & Bridges F 2013, ‘The Emergence of Augmented Reality (AR) as a Storytelling Medium in Journalism’ in Journalism & Communication Monographs, Vol. 15, No. 1, pp. 4-59.

This monograph is a study of augmented reality and its transformation of storytelling in journalism and the uses of it in journalism storytelling in the past, present, and future. The article begins b providing a detailed background to: the transforming of journalism content, the infrastructure for wireless AR, and the diffusion model established by Everett M. Rogers. The article is broken down into a case study of the situated documentary, extensive interviews on mainstream AR applications, followed by a round table discussion with media experts, and future projections for the implementation of AR storytelling in journalism.

Using a multi-method research approach, this article provides a detailed report into the current industry speculations for augmented reality storytelling in journalism and media. Published in 2013, this study remains relatively up to date but as mentioned in previous annotation, the new media landscape is rapidly transforming.

Alexander, B 2011, ‘Chaotic Fictions; or, Alternate Reality Games’ in The new digital storytelling: creating narratives with new media, ABC-CLIO, Santa Barbara, pp. 151-161.

In this chapter of Bryan Alexander’s book, he explains the history of the alternate reality game (ARG) in literature and its rise in the digital realm. Alexander explore examples of ARG storytelling used as promotion for films and other transmedia brands. The author also refers to an analytical approach proposed by Sean Stacey, founder of the website Unfiction, to analyse ARG projects:

  • Authorship: how much of the content is created by ‘puppet masters’ or players
  • Coherence: how clear are the boundaries of the narrative
  • Rule-set: How much of the content is predetermined

Alexander is a researcher, educator, consultant and futurist. His book, in which this chapter belongs to, attempts to contextualise the recent and future trends in new media technologies and their influences on the innovation of storytelling. There are many examples in this chapter which demonstrates the elusive nature of ARGs and its various experimentation to blur the lines between fiction and reality. However, the analyses of these examples are brief and there are yet to be enough theoretical discourse on ARGs to draw upon. This source can be used as an overview to the topic of alternate reality games or narratives.

Alexander, B 2011, ‘Augmented Reality: Telling Stories on the Worldboard’ in The new digital storytelling: creating narratives with new media, ABC-CLIO, Santa Barbara, pp. 163-173.

In this chapter, Bryan Alexander looks at examples of augmented reality (AR) content. Whilst the chapter mainly outlines the technologies and applications of AR, the author addresses some interesting challenges the AR landscape will face in the near future towards the end of the article: technical demands such as processing power; usability, adoption and resistance; and legal ramifications regarding copyrights or intellectual property.

Alexander is a researcher, educator, consultant and futurist. His book, in which this chapter belongs to, attempts to contextualise the recent and future trends in new media technologies and their influences on the innovation of storytelling. The chapter offers only a brief analysis of the implications of AR on storytelling and instead leans toward a general outline of the technology. This source can be a well-structured breakdown of the key aspects of this topic; particularly the practical applications of AR.

Pangburn, D.J. 2016, ‘Sci-Fi Vlog Tells an Anatomically Strange Story of Body Parts’, The Creators Project, blog post, 15 April, viewed 1 August 2016, <http://thecreatorsproject.vice.com/blog/sci-fi-vlog-tells-the-anatomically-strange-story-of-the-modular-body>

Kondoz, A & Dagiuklas, T 2014, “Introduction” in 3D future internet media, Springer, New York, pp.1-5.

Kondoz A & Dagiuklas T 2015, “Introduction” in Novel 3D media technologies, Springer, New York, pp.1-7.