In Years To Come

*part of series of writing (end)

This will be the last part of my series of writing. Let's continue the topics upon literacy, and how can we get literated in the relevancy of our society, of the zeitgeist and mainstream? How can it be done? All in all, it was the means of every education in this world. Schools and teachers alike, tried their best to transferring their knowledge so that the students can pass it beyond than just some paperwork for the thesis or exam sheets in standardized test. So that the student may get the proper literacy to face the real world. Yet, nothing in the classroom had prepared us to face what's outside the school wall, not while the students knew school only for the homework and lab experiment, without ever facing the actual battlefield.

An art student who master in traditional paintings, graduated as the brightest pupil in his year. He may be appreciated best in his field, but now that he went out of his school wall and seeing the real world with his own two eyes, he saw people no longer interested in traditional painting. No art gallery hung up classic canvas in beautiful frame on their walls anymore, everything went digital. Oil colors replaced by Photoshop palette, while charcoal pencil replaced by vector tool. The art student, who master only traditional ways, now became confused. The times they are a changing. He drowned and sink deep in this digital sea.

In years to come, everything will be shift. Directions had been set from years ago. Our entire life had been mapped from the beginning, and it's time to draw some lines upon the paper so that the dots will be connected and the larger image appeared. The topography map had been laid out in front of our eyes, yet still we always failed to read it. And usually, the reason was because many people failed to see beyond the maps. What they knew was that the topography map was fixed, while in reality it was fluid and constantly changing according to the architect's hands who drawn it. Graduate education doesn't guarantee anything except 'learning about', and when they proceeds to the real world, that's when the 'learning to be' took place. But that doesn't mean we can't accelerate the pace, we can. My friend the pianist had 'learning to be' a musician ever since she was a child, and so do I. When talking about dedication and passion, it's not about apprentice and master, or newbie and expert, it's about curiousity. The will to explore and dig in further.

Nowadays, information are easily accessible. Social media had extensively grown and keep grown each day, it provides not only a large amount of learning places, it also means the expansion of access. Yes, access so that we can meet a variety of people, communities and society who had distinct understanding of knowledge. And what good does meeting with those people would do? It good to expanding our already established knowledge, add it up with new information, filtering out the unnecessary ones. Frankly, school curriculum had also tried these attempts, by committing students to learning many subject at a time: remember the day when we taught of chemistry, physics, sociology and art in one day? That was the day when the information crammed up inside us, attempts should not be given repeatedly without any good quality times to reflect back upon them. Repeated attempts tend to fall into routines, which iron out the improvisation and exploration.

From the visual media examines to the philosophy of life, I hope you can extract something out of these writings. I'm. Just. Hoping.

 

 

AFTERWORDS

But that was merely the tip of the iceberg, many can be pointed out as flaws in our education, cultural and social environment--but we won't go further into the subject of school and means of education, let's stay on the track--I'm deeply sorry if my writings here tend to overlook human as 'information sponges' who have the absorptive capacity, I may overgeneralized, at least from my point of view as a quick learner (I easily understand many things). Thanks for reading.

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--

They Who'll Give Us Name

*Part of series of writings

Bruner's distinction was highly relevant with today's world cultural climate and environment. The particular knowledge I'm talking about in the last part was referring to 'literacy' or 'prior knowledge' that was somehow tacit and intangible. Now, in this part we'll examine our first idea about visual media, and how these days we can't escape the visual regime, thus forced us to be informed and taught by them. To my generation, our entire life was shaped by them, it was the visual regime who determine the extent to which something will make meanings, and the extent to which those meanings will be taken seriously in society.

But where does information acquired from social media could took us? It depends on how we treat the incoming information, how we transfer them to ourselves and what can we make out of it. It's too true that our social surrounding promises, above all, the experience of meaningfulness. Any information gathered from our experience in social engagements, shaped us into who we are, but that doesn't mean they can give you any identity. Yes, identity, as without it, we'll be flushed away in this world of demands and harsh fact. And identity was shaped through the means of information gathering, processing (or make it into knowledge), or to be short: learning.
(Remember, by learning here, I don't assume something like 'education'--I wouldn't need to forced out this point so heavily of how that unenlightened teaching and training often pulls in the opposite direction, you can always read my rant in my other posts, hehe...) Learning and meanings, learning and identity, this sort of things were what will we discussed in this and next posts. Learning (that ended up in mastering), more than often--if it's not automatically--gave the practitioner an identity.

I have this one friend of mine who was identified as 'musician' among our friends, she was a pianist, and that social recognition given by the society for her amazing 'tacit knowledge' and ability in music, particularly the piano. The second example would be myself (hahaa) who was often identified among my friends as 'illustrator', 'designer' or anything that are related with visual art. One day, both of us (me and my friend the pianist), talked together. And from those talks, I recognized what Bruner's point in 'engage on activities' means. My friend talked heavily about how she shaped herself into an able pianist.

First, as an information gathering activities, she dived herself to musical theories, she submit herself to listened to many named composer and pianist, such as Rachmaninoff or Debussy, Bubi Chen or Herbie Hancock. These were taken as meaningful experiences for her, how she gather the information about music and musician, just the same as how I first interested in Herge's Tintin, Batman comics, or Disney's animation. I took them as information, I examined particular detail in Batman's shadowing, the dynamic movement in Tintin's comic panel, and/or coloring in Disney's animation. Our exploration, ended up in understanding, for we're not taking the information as something that was taken for granted. We consciously process them, not only remembering them.

The second part was meaning making, engage in the particular activity we loved to do. My friend, she then started to summon an instrument for herself: a piano. Learn to play it, compose a music out of it, practice it. The same as how I grab a pencil, make a doodle in my bedroom wall (and forced my father to repaint again and again the wall, haha, sorry dad!), before I start to moved on to paper. And what does the previous information gained for both of us? What good did music theories for my friend, and what good did shadowing and coloring did for me? It's good for expanding. Soon as my friend start to playing guitar and bass guitar, so do I can expand myself to oil paint and charcoal stick. For us, it's easy to move on from one instrument to another, for we're not taking it as our object of affection. We're not limiting ourselves to the instrument only, we learn the subject, and that's why the mediated tool never a problem for us--well, maybe there'll be a bit 'adaptation problem' at first, but as the proverb says, "these too will pass." Now that my friend can record himself in digital sound, transferred in PC speaker, so I can managed to handle Adobe Illustrator and Macromedia Freehand. Instruments are not the great emphasize, like my first idea how physical product doesn't guarantee instant literacy, it only 'help' us, it doesn't ‘make’ us.

The third was mastering and social recognition. It required us not to became indulgent practitioner, we need to contribute in society. My friend, she commit herself to the church choir, a band and any zeitgeist that supports them, while I bring my illustration in printed shirt for an organization, publication posters or promotional video. This is where we got those recognition. We make some implications to society, give them something out of us. We can meet up the society demand, for we--with our extensive learning--are prepared with the supply. We can transformed the information we gather to something 'real'. It took us beyond theory and concepts (no matter how I loved them), and encourage us, knowing that we were able, to contribute in society.

 

--TO BE CONTINUED--

Those Who Speak, Dwell In Darkness. Those Who Stay in Silence, Enlightened.

*Part of series of writings

The gap I'm talking about in the previous part of these writings was the distinction between 'know about' and 'know how'. Many people today misinterpret something about knowledge and information. They thought it was the very same thing, yet to be honest: it was totally different. Knowledge is something like 'tacit information', it became some sort of 'intangible' in our minds, while information it is merely a remembered facts or concepts acquired by our five senses. A physical products may guarantee you informational value, but not knowledge and deeper meanings. In simple, having a book, doesn't guarantee you understand what's in it, right? Okay, we began this part by asking what's something that knowledge catches but that information does not?

The distinction may not seems so obvious between knowledge and information, but one thing that act as a constituent for knowledge is this: process. Remember, not physical products, not the instrument that mediating them, it was the activities, the process that shaped it in. There are three distinctions that strike us as particularly interesting between knowledge and information.

1. Knowledge entails a knower, that is where people treat information as independent and more-or-less self sufficient, they seem more inclined to associate knowledge with someone, for example you may find information scattered around waiting to be picked up ("where can I find reliable sources on temperament theory?", "can I googled something about the new-released Seth Godin's book?"), but in knowledge, you may asked this particular question, "Who knows about that?"

 

2. Knowledge appears harder to detach than information, because people treat information as a self-contained substance. Information is something that people usually pick up, possess, pass around, put in database, lose, find, write down, accumulate, count, compare and so forth. Knowledge, in opposite, doesn't take as kindly to any ideas of shipping, receiving and quantification. Knowledge is hard to pick up and hard to transfer. You might expect, for example, someone to send you or point you to the information they have, but not to knowledge they have.
Take example: a painter might told something to their pupils or disciples how to correctly draw a geometrical shape like square or rectangle, but that was just information. Even when the painter held one of his pupil hand and guide him along the paper to make a circle shape, it is also an informational transfer, not knowledge. The knowledge, belongs only to the teacher, and was unlikely to be transferred to the pupil, for it was a very hard one.

 

3. Knowledge may be so hard to give and receive is that knowledge seems to require more and more by way of assimilation. Knowledge is something we digest than merely hold. Knowledge is something we eat and drink, not merely remember. Thus for a person to bear knowledge, it requires understanding and some degree of commitment. Says a researcher gather an experiment to measure out the relation between music and personality, he may publish the final result of his research as information for public uses, but the knowledge remains to him only, as the researcher, the one who conduct the experiment and commit himself to it. The public, who received information, and then commit to gather more sources about it, to some extent may digest this as knowledge too, but not in the same degree as the researcher does.

 

Jerome Bruner, a professor of Psychology in New York University, points out some clearer distinction between 'learning about' and 'learning to be'. Certainly, most of anyone's knowledge might best be described as knowledge "about." -- we may brag our rich collection of English Premiere League statistics, quantum physics, Darwinian evolution, indie rock music scene, and all, yet we are not soccer player like Rio Ferdinand, we're not physicist like Richard Feynman, we're not evolutionary palenteologist like Stephen Jay Gould, we're not musician like Ben Gibbard of Death Cab for Cutie. Something distinguish between us and them, and knowing something about Gibbard's personal life doesn't guarantee we can write music like him. Learning to be requires more than just information. It requires the ability to engage in practice in question.

 

--TO BE CONTINUED--

What We Possess and What We Don't

*Part of series of writings

Let's looking back our life, what life experience could we collect? For today's standard, life experience came mostly from watching movies, TV, reading books, looking at magazines and advertisement, and browsing the net. Social media is practically everywhere right now. Everything we see, everywhere we look, there are always some neatly designed commercial billboards, beautifully packaged products, head-turning posters, and more. Unconsciously, they shaped our culture. Yes, our culture wasn't anything passed from the earlier generations: ours is shaped by media and their viral publication.

Bombarded with images of 'white is beauty', today's women shaped themselves towards the ideal, screened with advertisement of 'fat is for loser, skinny is sexy', the youth start to dieting themselves for no apparent reason (apart from 'being skinny just for the sake of skinny'). Even the self-proclaimed 'vintage' people knew the vintage culture from magazine, not a historical culture that's passed by their earlier generation.
Everyday tons and tons of visual imagery supplied to our eyes, the things that seems cool, places that seem interesting, people who have jobs and opportunities, the dramatic story of successful person.

First, we dressed up with thick make ups and elegant outfits, then it continue and became a sort of habitual activities, the activities spread along a specific zeitgeist, forming a to-be-culture that's ready to unleashed themselves to greater institution like society. After the society had been successfully penetrated (by means of publications and socialization), the culture are established. Staying there for quite some time, before the media inject us again with another trend, another aesthetic value.

Everywhere we look: there's a new advertisement of the new Gucci products, new Apple releases, the success story of Facebook's founder Mark Zuckerberg, the miraculous-dramatic story of rehabilitated junkie out of Oprah's talkshow. We were told to be like them, we were told to dig some deeper meanings behind those fabricated publication. We are mocked when we dress in some loin cloth when we went public, everyone laughed when we can't say a thing about Twitter. Today's media publication and company marketing shape our culture, minimize the gap between what's real and what's dreamy.

We were told to tucked in our shirt so that we can look like Katie Holmes, we are forced to buy those Zara clothes so that we may look like the people who bought them. Workers work hard to gain money and ended up spending in some Armani shoes and the new BlackBerry Bolt. Children looked up on PS3 advertisement and begged their father to buy one, teenage looked up Katy Perry's dress and hunt them in shopping mall, adults fooled by the new time-saving application in iPhone so that they can access their emails everywhere, and ended up buying them. And what happened when we can't buy those products? What happened when we failed to lived up the ideal images of 'white is beauty' or 'thin is sexy'? What happened when we didn't participate in some global warming prevention campaign? You get alienated, people looked down on you, they reject you.

The gaps are enormous, between what's real and what's not. Yet, today's corporation and media had eliminate every bound possible. Oceans and mountains, miles of roads and ricefields are eliminated, so that we here in Jakarta can looks like the people in New York, so that we can also plug a big headphone to our iPod Nano like everyone in Tokyo did. Visual imagery in every social media, well, to be honest it was a clandestine arrangement to globalize everything, socialize everything, make everything familiar and 'touchable', they even make the intangible could be grasped easily.

Here's when the invisible ideology took us in, forced us to conform with them. Yet, we never realized it, we never--consciously--knew what kind of ideology and belief they were all injected to us. We knew about the physical products, yet can't grasped the concept behind it, a concept of globalization, an idea to gather everyone under one roof. Knew something that physical products don't guarantee instant literacy, we possess a Blackberry yet we can't maximized the functions (says like, email features or voice recognition call), that's when the gap happened.

--TO BE CONTINUED-- 

Facebook, and Evolution.

It's been 3 month since Facebook staff updated their layout to the latest incarnation--the one dubbed 'The Publisher'--the one we all used right now. The funny thing is, every time Mark Zuckerberg & co released new layout upon the site, there were always, ALWAYS, some groups of people voice their sound against it (don't mistake me, I've been in Facebook since 2007, almost 2 years now) I did a little search just some minutes later with the keyword 'new layout', and guess what I found:

 

There are many groups established to rally a support against Facebook's new layout (and I reckon many friends of mine joined in them, too...hehehe). According to my experience since 2007, Facebook had updated their layout, like, 3 times till now. And in each updates, those 'status quo' supporter always popped up again and again to scream their protests. "Bring Back The Old Facebook", "New Layout Sucks", "Against Facebook's New Layout", etc, etc. Of course people always had the right to indulge in their comfort zone and staying with the old. But what exactly is the pain of accepting change and new idea? To the close minded, the pain would be much and unbearable. To let go something that's been familiar with us--well, it required an effort, and open-mindedness. It urges us to form a new way of thinking, a new paradigm.

Notice something in those 'status-quo-lover' groups, they named themselves "2,000,000 People to Protest", "Millions to Hate New Facebook Layout" ...well, here's something I gotta tell you: communal protests, street revolutions, mass demonstrations, they ran out of place in this new century. Marxist revolutions won't work anymore. Today's power, it's not in the arms of many, it's in the arms of the minority. The dedicated, visionaries minority are the one who'll shape the world in future. Labor organization with 10,000 people could easily be smashed with one clever provocative person, right? See how Mark Zuckerberg ignore the protest and move on with those new layouts (not just once, but many times.)

 

‘The soft-minded man always fears change. He feels security in the status quo, and he has an almost morbid fear of the new. For him, the greatest pain is the pain of a new idea.’

— Martin Luther King Jr.

 

From the micro-sized topic of the Facebook layout thingy, let’s broaden our topic, because frankly, all I want to discuss here was about change. The only thing that's constant in our world. Except time and change, nothing lasts forever in this world. Remember Darwinian evolution that encouraged us not to stay with the status quo, not to accept the things as they were before and as they are right now, rather we have to accept things as they will become. The strongest is not the one who'll survive, nor the most intelligent, it's the most adaptable who'll seize the day. 2,000,000 people with their strong will and loud voice might make a change, but imagine how long does it take to convince and find another 1,999,999 people who shared the same idea with you? Quantity can be beaten by quality, David can beat Goliath. The least minority--the ones who react correctly to situation--they are the masters of war. They’re the one who can turn the tide on the battle, because they had what others don’t: correct tools and instrument. See how Mark Zuckerberg stay deaf eared to the protestor, because in the end, Mark is the one who possess the tool, the instrument to change the whole Facebook layout and Terms of Service. He’s just one guy with a small army of programmer backed him up, but he can  spread influence to 200 million Facebook users around the world. He successfully turn the tide of the battle, he won in the war of one against many.

The idea is, today’s world is totally different from yesterday. And how stupid it was for us to keep looking back to the past, without so much looking ahead. The past may served us some deep meanings for our next step, but that’s that: we had to move on. Status quo may gave us security, comfort and sense of belongings, but it is merely an illusion, a temporary state, because in the end, it'll change. There's no point in resisting change, there's no use in tackling new ideas. Accept them, and change with them. Be responsive and adaptable, and you may continue to live.

(now, look what happened to those protesting groups in Facebook right now:)

1,497 fewer members, huh? Well, time's a CHANGING, buddy! :-)

‘Life belongs to the living, and he who lives must be prepared for changes.’

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Global Message

 

Yup. Global citizen. And by global citizen, I don't think Chris (and the whole TED team) said anything about attitude and behavior changes. Globalization isn't about the change of lifestyle and the translations of imported physical commodities to our daily life. Globalization isn't about the cup of Starbucks you got per day, isn't about your Apple iPhone, isn't about your Nike shoes.

You can't say you are a global citizen when you wear Armani clothes, Levis' jeans and Converse shoes. That's not global citizen. If, you knew a thing about globalization based only from the physical products you possessed, the celebrities gossip you heard and the Hollywood movie you watched. Basically, you're just a caveman being exploited by capitalists.
But, you can say you're a global citizen when you knew about the news update on how Obama's new regulations can affect your daily life and the latest discovery of stem cell experimentation even though you're stuck in your room with kopi tubruk and a local cigarette.

Globalization is about open-mindedness. The willing to embrace others' opinion, arguments and ideas from around the world. It requires only the moral shift and adjustment--not lifestyle changes and westernized habit. Not about consumption of physical products, not about good fashion sense.
We won't be as advanced as Japan in the term of technology, we can't be as liberal as America in political climate, the best we can do is to cling to our already established cultures. We're Indonesians. You think you can equated yourself with an American just by dressed up like them? No. You can't. But you can be as advanced as any modern countries citizen, even though you're staying in your Batik clothes: by gaining more knowledge and information.

That's the answer. Today, the flows of information and communication had become more valuable than the flow of physical products. You are rich when you possessed more information than most people, even though you go by bus everyday. On the contrary, you are poor when you drive a Lexus yet do not knew about the current affairs in international world. The environment affects our behavior, yes I do understand, but it is not the automatic adaptation that'll bring the next societal evolution, that's not conformity without further thinking that made us develop, nor it is the close mindedness and foolishly hoping that we won't be touched by globalization. Why said bad things about Starbucks, why directly attacked McDonalds and KFC, why blaming Microsoft and Apple? They're just they are.
What power do you have to oppose them? What power do you have to resist them? You don't have any. The biggest roadblock to development is that we keep looking left and right for reassurance, rather than sticking to what we already have, and function it forward for leaping ground.

Globalization touched us already. And yes, it is unavoidable. This is no threat, nor it's something to frighten us. It's something to embrace and celebrate. The future is here. Today. Understand it and make a change.

Open your mind. Welcome to the new world.