Ok, Dilruk. Thanks for dumping some bastardised Justin Timberlake lyrics on my blog.
I’ll just point out now that he wrote this blog post sitting across from me in a busy, noisy bar on Elizabeth Street at about eleven at night while the very song he’s plagiarised blared obnoxiously in the background. Foreground, whatever. It was very obvious, very noticeable, very annoying. Of course he wrote those words down. And turned them into a joke.
But what does a broken version of ‘Senorita’ have to do with Networked Media, especially this week’s concern of Double-Loop learning and noticing and all that jazz. Easy, the subject here – Justin Timberlake, I’ll assume – is having severe issues noticing that the nice girl’s boyfriend is actually a blind man, and mistaking his lack of focus on her for disinterest, assumes that he doesn’t love her. It’s a pretty simple metaphor for recognising our mistakes, as well as the issue of observation and actually noticing and ‘marking’ the things that we see. Of course, Justin does eventually come to realise his love interest’s love interest is visually impaired, but there is nothing to imply that he has gone about correcting himself further than simply admitting he was wrong. Will he apologise for his assumption? Is it relevant?
We can hope that he has learnt about making snap judgements, but how would double-loop learning help him here? Well, it probably wouldn’t. Noticing something is a difficult skill to pick up, and the assumptions that the singer has made are ones that we could all make instantaneously without actually thinking much, and thus there is little buffer for us to self-correct. That said, is there reason to self-correct our thoughts? Since a song can generally be considered a subjective stream-of-consciousness, a narrative, even, we could take this as simply a thought process, and that the poor blind man did not actually come to hear about Justin’s rudeness. What we think is fine, we could be as racist as anything up in our brains, completely bigotted, egotistic and cruel, but if we are able to filter what comes out of our mouths we might seem like the sweetest guys in the world.
That said, Justin put it in a song which Dilruk defiled (I don’t know why I keep making it sound so negative, it wasn’t that bad for the blog-equivalent of a drunk, late-night text) so there isn’t really much he left in his brain. Maybe, for the sake of Justin and Dilruk, we can conclude that the subject is acknowledging his error and is atoning for it by public admitting it. Maybe. Hopefully, he will prevent himself from making a further arse of himself by learning not to jump to conclusions straight away, though really this is a single-loop learning system. However, in this case is double-loop really worth it? No. No, not at all.
Dilruk Jayasinha is a comedian on Live on Bowen, which airs 8:30 on Friday nights on C31. Tune in!
GOODNIGHT Y’ALL