Meet Jyothi Raj
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yt72J98d_og&rel=0&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xcfcfcf&feature=player_embedded&fs=1]
(via Ross Training)
The mythology of meaningful work
I think all of us who are employed maintain some narrative practice of explaining what we do to others.
Working for NPR, I get to talk about public radio stations and producers, how NPR has gone through some budget tightening, how radio is cooler than tv.
But at some point, conversations usually get a little more personal. “Do you like what you do?” “Could you see yourself doing this for a while.” “What do you want to do down the road.”
These questions require a little more elaboration and self disclosure. At some point, I have to use a few more brain cells to decide what to say.
‘It’s okay. I like the people. I believe in the organization. I am hoping to move up. I eventually want to work for company xyz doing abc.’
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In any event, I’m fascinated by work and meaning and how narrative functions in this space, bridging, reinforcing, and/or alienating.
Maybe because we all spend so much time working, it is depressing to think that work wouldn’t express a personal interest and compliment some internal wellspring of meaning.
I’m starting to see how narrative can be leveraged to symbolically render work more meaningful, especially if the reality of work is not all that meaningful.
Maybe, on some level, it’s an example of a symbol insulating us from the reality.
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I sometimes find that I have internalized pressure to make my job sound more interesting than it is.
On some levels, my job really is not all that interesting.
I have had some conversations with friends about this recently so I would be curious what people think. The closer I am with people, the more our job conversations quickly uncover what I wouldn’t consider the apex of meaningful human activity…
Do people feel pressure to stitch together a myth about how jobs are personally meaningful – for external and/or internal use?
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For some visual context, here are some cool photos capturing work.
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All of this just makes me realize there are way more interesting things to talk about than work…
Onan and the rest of us
I’ll never forget the scene in Pleasantville where the mom reclines in the bath tub, starts breathing heavily as objects around her turn color, and eventually twitches her way to the shot of the tree exploding in the front yard.
(This was not too long after the scene where Reese Witherspoon tells her about sex and how she doesn’t need dad to…you know)
My girlfriend at the time looked over and asked me what she was doing in the bathtub – ‘what happened? I don’t get it…’
This was the moment that being the first boyfriend of a private-schooled high school valedictorian english nerd really registered.
This Slate article and Saletan post offer more interesting fodder, and actually helped dislodged the above, decade-old memory.
I dig the tension between the natural order and the old testament.
Orca wave hunting
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rBF9cDBUakA&rel=0&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xcfcfcf&feature=player_embedded&fs=1]
Diggin this…
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpWM0FNPZSs&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xcfcfcf&hl=en&feature=player_embedded&fs=1]
(via Wooster Collective)
The escape from Crete
Today on Twitter someone compared Michael Jackson to Icarus.
Icarus grew up in captivity. His father engineered the plan for his escape. And his mode of escape eventually led to his tragic demise.
The resonance is compelling:
At first there was a terror in the joy. The wide vacancy of the air dazed them-a glance downward made their brains reel. But when a great wind filled their wings, and Icarus felt himself sustained, like a halcyon bird in the hollow of a wave, like a child uplifted by his mother, he forgot everything in the world but joy. He forgot Crete and the other islands that he had passed over: he saw but vaguely that winged thing in the distance before him that was his father Daedalus. He longed for one draft of flight to quench the thirst of his captivity: he stretched out his arms to the sky and made toward the highest heavens.Alas for him! Warmer and warmer grew the air. Those arms, that had seemed to uphold him, relaxed. His wings wavered, dropped. He fluttered his young hands vainly-he was falling-and in that terror he remembered. The heat of the sun had melted the wax from his wings; the feathers were falling, one by one, like snowflakes; and there was none to help.
He fell like a leaf tossed down by the wind, down, down, with one cry that overtook Daedalus far away. When he returned and sought high and low for the poor boy, he saw nothing but the birdlike feathers afloat on the water, and he knew that Icarus was drowned.
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RIP MJ…
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7mEQVWQgRA&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xcfcfcf&hl=en&feature=player_embedded&fs=1]
Human stigmergy
Stigmergy is a form of self organization involving organisms and the encoding of information into their environment:
Stigmergy is a mechanism of spontaneous, indirect coordination between agents or actions, where the trace left in the environment by an action stimulates the performance of a subsequent action, by the same or a different agent.
Originally used to describe termite behavior, it has generally been the monopoly of social insects.
But this is changing.
Stigmergy scales up to human activities quite well.
One of the best examples of a stigmergic human practice is graffiti: the encoding of ephemeral messages into the environment as a kind of metadata about territory and identity…literally tagging.
The broken window theory is another example of stigmergy in an urban setting:
Consider a building with a few broken windows. If the windows are not repaired, the tendency is for vandals to break a few more windows. Eventually, they may even break into the building, and if it’s unoccupied, perhaps become squatters or light fires inside.Or consider a sidewalk. Some litter accumulates. Soon, more litter accumulates. Eventually, people even start leaving bags of trash from take-out restaurants there or breaking into cars.
The internet is also the backdrop for a number of stigmergic practices:
The massive structure of information available in a wiki, or an open source software project such as the Linux kernel could be compared to a termite nest; one initial user leaves a seed of an idea (a mudball) which attracts other users who then build upon and modify this initial concept, eventually constructing an elaborate structure of connected thoughts.
Now that the internet is a shared environment for close to 1/4 the world population, stigmergy contextualizes online collaborative behavior very effectively.
I’m starting to think Kafka was onto something…
