Million Little Gods

*part of series of writing

Notice how far we've come from the first idea of visual media to the shaping of identity, but somehow if you managed the thin red line among these writings, you'll get it (after all, it was all about 'information' and 'knowledge', let's see if you can extract something out of it. Haha) Now, let's continue the latest topic about identity, now we shift a bit to the means of information transfer, and how can we conduct it to be knowledge. 
I'll talk about the 'tacit knowledge' that came after a mastering--an intuitive insight that came without any external physical stuff.

An example, I know a named photographer who were able to distinguish a 'fake' photograph from 'natural' one. That means, he knew exactly, if the scene freezed in the photo was naturally taken (that is by perfect timing, almost accidentally), or whether it was staged and arranged before (i.e the scene was prepared before), though from different perspective, I should said from 'common' eyes, there was no discernible difference. How did he got those ability? Magic? Sixth-sense metaphysics ability? No. Big no. He learnt it from practices. Hours of practices. Years of practices. It was something (apart from that it was logically correct) that was taken as being non-sense for most people, particularly in the rigid environment such as school or university. (Again, I talked about it. Hahaha) People usually rejects the intuitive reasoning, for they can't see where it comes from. Yeah, honestly , it come from a very, very logical event named PROCESS. The fact that people didn't see the process (of how my friend the pianist in the last chapter learning about music theory, or me examining Batman's detail) made them became unbeliever.  All and all, the intuitive reasoning I talked about can be called as literacy—albeit in the particular photographer, it was a miraculous one—but I guess everyone had their own literacy, at least in their own field.

Literacy is one thing that commonly forgotten in the society, for instance, despite of how many you knew about Shakespeare, and years you spent on learning his poems, how could you talked about Shakespeare among the people who were trained to determine standard error in statistics? No matter how hard you pushed them to swallow the info about Shakespeare, they won't understand it deeply, they won't be as good as you--the one who had great literacy in Shakespearean stuff. A photographer won't fit in the room full of business officer, for even though they can communicate each other, there'll be no meanings transferred, if both party didn't have literacy in each dimensions of understanding.

And speaking of literacy, it associated deeply with identity. Like in the second part of this writing, knowledge is usually attributed to a particular person. A practitioner. I could talk hours and hours with my friend a moviegoer, for both of us had literacy in it. For years we've read about movie books, we watch tons of movie, we knew the differences between an IMAX camera and the usual 35mm, for we--albeit so little--have plunged ourselves to the literal world of movies and films. The fact that we only 'know about' movie, sometimes could bloom into 'know how', maybe sometimes any of me or my friend would make our own movie, who knows what'll happen when you have those commitment and passion?
Yet the fact that literacy--sprung from love and passion of particular subject(s)--can gave us identity can't be denied. I can easily point my finger to my friend the pianist whenever someone asked me, "Who's around here that knowing something about music?" or I can easily introduce my friend the moviegoer when someone asked anything about movie.

Does literacy means we had to be such an asshole who knew everything? To some extent, yes. At least know everything in your field. If you're a pianist, go get to know everything about piano and music. If you're an illustrator, eat and drink every information you know about illustration and drawings. The danger of possessing half-information could be dangerous, you might get wrong interpretation of it. As Abraham Maslow put it precisely, all of our entire life was endless learning. A lifelong education where everybody is forever teacher and forever pupil. You're going nowhere if you insist to play it by the book and according to the rule. Play both sides, inside and outside the book, so you might reflect back what've you done these whole times, so you might see the coordinates you mapped yourself and plan some new continuum along the straight lines of your Cartesian diagram of life. 

--TO BE CONTINUED--