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hiriajuu-suffering · 3 years

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Reasons I believe in Polyamory

I’ll preface this by saying I’m not attractive enough to be able to have more than a single partner at once, but there is a reason for that, and really, the thesis of this wall of text below: heteronormative relationship standards in every culture have always been, and will continue to always be, more about possession than love in a post-imperialistic world.

Personally, I’m a huge proponent of engendered sexuality variance to the tone of males have a constant slow drip of libido and a female’s sex drive hits them like a freight train once a month (in mammalian bioepigenetics, this makes sense). I’m inclined to infer, because I’m not idyllically normatively attractive, only a fraction of a percentage of women will be attracted to me 24-27 days of any given month. As a cisgendered man who is regrettably straight, having the least attractive genoethnic identity intersection (South Asian Muslim) in Western culture, I’m never actually presented with the choices to act on a poly mindset (in fact, I would be ridiculed for it because people think it aligns with some other gross tribal stereotype when it couldn’t be further from the truth). In retrospect, I have everything to gain from interpreting the main benefit of an intimate relationship as ownership like heteronormative culture generally does yet I still think disavowing poly as a legitimate personal choice is immoral.

I know saying monogamous relationships are more about possession than love will offend lots of people, so before you throw hate at me for your emotionally defensive skepticism, hear me out. An unflinching, unyielding love is seen as the highest parameter in any type of romance. So why is it cheating is so much of a bigger problem than a dry spell specifically? Is it because it’s legitimately a breach of trust, or is it more about “if I can’t have you, no one can”? More importantly, does it go a step further and say “if I don’t want you, no one should”? To me, any sort of dry spell (whether physically, emotionally, mentally) signifies a much larger breach of trust than simply having been shared because it shows said commitment in the relationship was not unflinching, not unyielding. The monogamous lens looks at others like: I want to have the best partner, not just so that I’m happy, but no one else can receive the specific happiness I get. Doesn’t that whole mindset come off as brutish? Just me? Well, maybe your pitchforks will start coming down when you realize monogamy is a function of toxic patriarchy on both feminine and masculine ends.

There are bioevolutionary reasons for toxic femininity to value the possession aspect of a relationship over its substantive “quality of life” components, the birth-giving gender in any animalistic specie always had to be beheld to a provider they reproduce with. Does it not then represent a sense of feminine fragility when a single mother immediately demands a long-term relationship and nothing else? If I’m to believe said woman is capable of genuine lust in her system, having a child shouldn’t evaporate all carnal desires completely and, therefore, should leave room for compromise. Said stance also indicates she made some sort of error in judgment of her chosen reproductive mate and feels entitled another man ought remedy her strife even though, evolutionarily speaking, he has nothing to gain from helping to rear offspring not of his kin. Harsh, to be sure, but it does show in the obnoxiousness of the connotation of becoming a stepdad being a positive one and becoming a stepmom assumes the motivation of some gain in status (wealth, fame, power, etc.) which I would argue is negative. Where does toxic masculinity come into play? Desire for possession on the part of a male promotes the viability and exclusivity of his own children with his most desirable partner. While that’s damn near nowhere as compelling, it has to be stated because there are always two benefactors to patriarchy. Patriarchy is not a zero sum game, patriarchy seeks to concentrate all familial social benefits in the monogamously-driven, heteronormative genus, away from those who deviate from the ideal picture of stereotypical gender roles. The ill effects of patriarchal standards exist in every human civilization, but the ontological root to the specific brand of patriarchy that oppresses all genders today was spread by a culture that uniquely preached monogamy.

Polygamy, in a historical sense, was a testament to the more status a person of the provider gender could achieve, the more their genetics would proliferate. Many cultures globally practiced this, the issue is, the ones that didn’t were the ones who, often violently, “conquered” the ones that did. Christian fundamentalism is in every fiber of international morality, whether the nation in question believes in Christianity or not is often irrelevant. Monogamy is enforced, anything outside of that is deemed as necessarily being deviant (whether choosing to be alone or choosing more connections than a monocule). Fetishization of the step relation is eluding to this deviance in a not-so-subtle way because it’s something where its allure is derived from its forbiddenness moreso than its convenience, every one of these scenarios has a subtext of implicit gain, not loss, in engagement. Meaning, the idea is planted because a hot person is there not because a person in general is there and can satiate an urge. Tl;dr - we believe polyamory is a morally negative act because the Holy Roman Empire did and every nation that spawned from it spread, imparted, and coerced that ideal on every culture it came into contact with. Before the Holy Roman Empire, no historical documents made distinctions to behest multiple lovers as desanctifying of life itself, not even the coalescing of nations that made up the Holy Roman Empire before its inception.

We are now in an era when women have access to full reproductive control, yet we still see men lust more than women, e.g. archetypal lesbian tendencies versus archetypal gay male tendencies. Do we not question why this is the case? All lifeforms are hardwired with a desire to survive and reproduce, so why does that drive not reach equity when risk does? There are two answers, and it could even be both: women are only socially conditioned to have sex via patriarchal pressures and don’t have as much inherent desire to reproduce OR sex is a means-to-an-end to exclusively possess a desired provider, whatever said person provides. If said person has a trait valuable enough to want to possess, is it not self-contrived to keep that quality to oneself, not share it with the world where it can provide more utility? Heteronormative relationships, in a sense, are anti-altruistic at their very core. As facetious as this sounds, either of these trains of thought are validated by men being more willing to engage in polyamory than women, not because men are somehow any less loyal than women. On its own, I feel this line of reasoning is enough to justify a vehement disgust of polyamory as immoral, but I want to conclude on the most pivotal facet to this conversation and not just heavily imply monogamy encroachment on moral turpitude is problematic at best.

As I mentioned a few times, I am likely to be a spoke on a polycule, not a member with multiple connections. Exclusive possession is something I probably stand more to gain from than any woman, logically and realistically, given the current social climate and general global beauty standards. My advocacy of polyamory stems from me accepting I may not be enough to be the full extent of happiness my romantic interest desires. That doesn’t even come from a place of insecurity, it comes from a place knowing I could never be perfect even if its pursuit is a righteous cause. I see real insecurity as a fear of loss when the rules of engagement you put into place were exclusivity: you don’t want your partner looking at anyone else because it’s disadvantageous to you, meaning you’re not fixated on their best interest and looking at relationships in said manner is deliberately selfish. To me, the best frame of reference to morality in interpersonal social connections is altruism. Yeah, self-love is important and knowing your own boundaries is beneficial but everyone else’s boundaries don’t have to match yours. I’m not anti-monogamist, really. I’m more anti-polyamorist discontent.

Not having thought this deeply isn’t an excuse, either.

#personal #polyamory #polyamourous #polyandry #polycule #polyam life #polyam relationship #polyamourus pride #polyam tag #polyamorous #polyamoury #polyamorus

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ouyangzizhensdad · 3 years

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unpopular opinion: most of the mxtx critical discourse happens becouse people cant let go of their prejudes against bl genre

Somewhat agree? I know you used “most” so you already acknowledged that there are other factors at play, but I do think it’s important to consider that reactions like these generally do not have a single, easy answer.

While people tend to conflate danmei and BL, we can’t ignore that there have been larger discussions about how women *should* or *should not* engage or produce m/m content, in and out of fandoms, in ways that even people who haven’t drunk the anti-fujo kool-aid are inherently suspicious of “straight women” writing m/m stories (the Love, Simon controversy is an example of that where the author was forced out of the closet for the crime of writing a m/m story as a presumed straight woman). But danmei/bl being non-western, non-white genres certainly accentuate many of these tensions. Racism funnily both play into the patronising/otherising takes regarding how ‘terrible’ danmei-bl is compared to other m/m content, but also in the criticisms of westerners who engage in danmei-bl: ‘so you guys just want to fetishise asian men/asian gay men’.

As well, there’s been so much discussions about what *should* or *should not* been written when it comes more broadly to romance and sex, about what is problématique or not, the conclusion of which seems to lean toward the idea that any content that is not a safe, sane and consensual PSA or entirely wholesome simply should not exist. And that’s not even mentioning the sort of “psychologisation” or “trauma-turn” of these discussions, where people assume the psychological states of people who write or engage with problématique content, or propose that only people who have the right list of traumas can produce or engage with these types of content. And that hangs heavy not only in the mind of people who produce content but the person who consume it. If the only reason you could possibly want to engage with anything problématique would be that you are, in a way, deviant or broken, then perhaps you will start consciously avoiding these types of works or people who produce them. And all these relate to large discussions about how “””fiction impacts reality””” and discussions about social justice and consent, etc. etc. Once more, we have overlapping discourses and so, so much intertextuality.

And the thing is that, generally, it’s not like these discourses are “rotten to the core,” ie that there is not important conversations to be had about these topics or that real issues did not spark these conversations in the first place. However, many people tend to want to collapse these complex discussions with complex and sometimes contradicting conclusions into a single, convenient answer by going to the extreme. And we have to recognise that there is something rewarding about feeling like you’re in the right, especially when these discourses become moralised. The trade-off between giving up entirely on something for the reward of taking the moral high ground seems very appealing! And it’s a lot less difficult than to navigate on a case-by-case basis works of fiction or fandom discussions, or to figure how to like something you might also disagree with or question regarding certain aspects.

However, not only is it a vain effort, it is also denies art its capacity for meaning. It is vain because, well, the sources of the issues are unlikely to disappear and will probably only move onto a newer manifestation, and because humans be problematic 🤷‍♂️ and we be living in a society 🤷‍♂️. It doesn’t mean we should not be critical and have debates and conversations and expect better--but it means that this belief that the internet will be a good place if only we can squash fandom group X is just..... a fantasy. A comforting one, perhaps, but one all the same. I wouldn’t mind it as much if there wasn’t harassment and aggression resulting from these beliefs, and if it didn’t stifle art and creativity, the latter relating to an underlying assumption that there is nothing of worth in exploring in fiction difficult or shocking themes, or relationship dynamics that are not perfect or healthy. And that is just..... fundamentally misunderstanding the point of art and fiction.

As well, somewhat in relation to these discussions, it’s important I think to accept that a lot of people who engage with MDZS in bad faith do so after they have been exposed by takes demonising the work that they took at face-value. It takes a lot more energy, good faith, critical thinking, and good reading comprehension to end up finding arguments against a perception of a work that you already accepted as true before you read it. Especially since social media has made it so much more dependent on other people’s opinions to decide what we engage with, and in which manner we will, I don’t think it can be understated. If you have already been served an opinion, it is easier than having to form your own, and easier than challenging it. Especially if people frame that opinion as morally right, and the people who disagree with it as degenerate sickos. Wouldn’t want to side with the freaks!!!

Finally, MDZS is not a work of fiction that can be read on the surface, and is a work that likes to play with tropes in a manner than is not necessarily a complete and total subversion, things that make it easier for people to miss the point of many of its elements. It’s even harder considering the level of the available translation and the framing of said translation--and the fact that many of the readers are not part of the intended audience and lack many of the cultural or literary knowledge that would help them navigate the novel. And, let’s be honest, it’s easier to miss the mark at times when a writer decides to handle more complex and controversial topics. It’s not like I don’t think MXTX could have not done some things better.

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queernuck · 5 years

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an enormous degree of what i see bandied about on here and twitter alike is a fundamental misunderstanding of critical reception, processes of interpretation related to that, and an inability to separate discussion of a work from one’s own feelings of it, one’s own critique. a concept I keep coming back to is ironic-unto-earnest appreciation: a friend’s discussion of Korn as nu-metal but also as a band that is experimenting in the blending between electronic and metal on their own terms, along with the same approach I ascribe to Skrillex, does not always make conventionally “good” music, but recognizing this, recognizing that it does not make it so that our own interpretation of a work is worthless, our own interest cannot be justified, does not mean our own interpretations are worthless.

frequently, the idea that you would need to be inebriated to enjoy an artist’s output is used to justify an entirely negative response to it. however, the framework of experience in question involves all different sort of experiences, and saying that an artist best matches a certain experience, a certain range of experiences is itself rather common, and if those states are drug-induced, they are no lesser than any other phenomenal state, apparatus of experience. As discussions of drugs like Derrida’s make clear, the exact difference between a drugged state and a particularly characterized “sober” one are largely arbitrary as far as quantitative experience goes, that the horror surrounding drugs is a moralism of a sort that should be questioned, and in combination with a look at drugs that includes decriminalization and even legalization of marijuana along with the widespread legality of alcohol, the inebriation of the listener and the impact of the artist can be considered as fields of legitimate critical inquiry. The idea of Animal Collective shows as a prank on anyone not tripping at the moment is a great example: the band enjoys taking already-experimental but often-agreeable music and playing it live in a characteristically idiosyncratic fashion, one that might be difficult to enjoy sober but also might be challenging while tripping. Or, conversely, the popularity of trance (and specifically psychedelic and Goa derivatives of the genre) in places where drug prohibition is strict despite the apparent direct correspondence between the two: drugged states can be experienced and approached from sobriety, on equally engaged and earnest terms. Infected Mushroom is a rather good artist to pair with shrooms. The mixed approaches and Bud Light-soaked production of Post Malone is best enjoyed while mixing cocaine or pills with consumption of Bud Light.

Earnestness in intention and interpretation, a kind of post-taste, post-irony approach to enjoyment that reverses the irony characteristic of the 90s and early 2000s in various forms of criticism and artistic creation, is a rather interesting and itself genuinely enjoyable trend that has seen the creation of a lot of compelling media. The lack of fear induced by genuine attachment, of an affect of “uncoolness” which preempts even the possibility of appearing “uncool” allows for a new modality in criticism that means an ironic or “acceptable” justification for one’s tastes need not be found, that the most genuine and effective aspects of a work are highlighted and understood as that which most impacts one’s enjoyment of the work, can be appreciated in a way that even recognizes a lack of enjoyment of the wider body of work at hand. Enjoying 21 Pilots while tweaking too hard to think involves a kind of blurry and amorphous state closer to a Body-Without-Organs than sobriety, and an appreciation of their attempted aesthetics realized in a state where one can imagine the band’s being and becoming rather than one in which one is faced with their work as a more continuous whole is itself a valid way of naming and discussing the process of acquaintance that occurs through listening to their work.

if you dont want to be ironic, if you dont want to have taste, if you just want to have fun, that should be clear from one’s critical methodology, but it makes for an entirely valid, even avant-garde, critical perspective specifically because of how it allows for more incisive critiques of the metastructure of the work, the work as a cultural entity, works as produced by certain sorts of capitalist entities, one can discuss enjoyment of Disney films while recognizing the incredible antagonism toward artfulness shown by Disney’s business practices, one can look at “bad” fashion while loving the cultural norms that produce it, can look at series like Monogatari and Madoka and have a deep love for experiences alongside, through, with characters while discussing how one or the other affects a postmodern stance (at times successfully) but can look at Madoka as merely a deeply angst-affecting entry into the Magical Girl genre that fails at deconstruction so dramatically that it itself gives an entirely new field of inquiry into exactly how one can interpret both the series itself and the claims of it as a deconstruction, can look at Monogatari as a series that arguably problematizes the sexual flows of investment it invites in the audience and narrator alike while earnestly engaging in these very same sorts of violence, while being just as lecherous and detestable as the supposedly-critiqued perspectives, even contributing to them directly. Irony and earnestness are different ways of engaging with a work, and using this in turn to understand intention and execution of a work alongside its wider reception is necessary as part of understanding the hyperreal spaces in which media proliferates under neoliberal apparatuses of consumption and creation of identity.

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artigas · 6 years

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The more I think about it, the more I realize that part of my intense dislike of how people regard figures like Adam Driver, Amy Schumer, Azealia Banks, Bill Skarsgård etc etc really boils down to the demonization of ugliness and the hypocrisy of only being body positive for the sake of Woke Performance. For all its flaws, tumblr was the first space in which I saw people circulate the belief that it was okay to be ugly, that the first step towards positive self-regard is to rid yourself of the fear of ugliness as the inherently worse thing anyone could be. For the first time in my life, I was exposed to the belief that aspects of ourselves and others that we socially construe as unattractive and unseemly- acne scars, stretch marks, fat rolls, etc- are and should be allowed to simply be. That these estimations of x physical trait to x degree of beauty are arbitrary and, on an institutional scale, usually determined by histories of colonization, capitalism, misogyny and racism/xenophobia. That we ought to be critical of why it is we are told that crooked noses or big lips or blemished skin have been marketed and esteemed as ugly, undesirable, etc- that we ought to be critical about when we look at a feature typically associated to latinx or black people or jewish people and immediately think: ugly, laughable, fodder for mockery and malicious humor. These criticism of our social constructions of ugliness and this willingness to accept that human worth is not determined- neither lessened nor elevated- by physical beauty, that significantly helped me come to terms with my own body image.

So when I see people base their hatred of Reylo (however partly) on how ugly they find Adam Driver to be or criticize folks for finding Charlie Heaton attractive, it bums me out. When you take it upon yourself to criticize Lena Dunham, for example, for having thin lips or a double chin as opposed to limiting yourself to a criticism of the things that actually can be helped (i.e. her racism, her white feminism, her history of rape apologism, etc), you’re still perpetuating the forms of body policing and body shaming that so many of you claim to be against. You’re still perpetuating this idea that bodies ought to look a certain way and that if you’re enough of an asshole, it’s finally okay for audiences to tear your to pieces for not fulfilling their physical ideals.

The irony is the people who do this en masse are usually the very same people I see spouting empty praise for the body positive moment. and that’s no news, of course: tumblr has a very shallow, very performative relationship to disenfranchised identities and social politics. This isn’t to say that fucked up, problematic, and absolutely garbage people should be free of criticism- please drag Benedict Cumberbatch for his ableism. Never forget that Amy Shumer has routinely made vile, racist “jokes” at the expense of latinx on numerous occasions. Don’t dismiss that Azealia Banks has repeatedly used the f-slur and used racist, anti-black stereotypes to wish rape on people over petty twitter arguments. But we have to find better ways of engaging critically and expressing ourselves without resorting to physical ridicule. Otherwise all we do is perpetuate the idea that people- be it because they’ve got shitty political beliefs or because they’ve said problematic things or because the character they play is a piece of shit- deserve to be mocked for the physical attributes they cannot help.

Worst of all, while Admittedly Insufferable Ansel Egort won’t ever hear your verbal abuse, the people who do see your posts will. I promise you someone out there sees a shared feature between themselves and that ugly actor you love to shit on and might very well feel like shit because of it. Because what you’re demonstrating even to good, well-meaning, ethical people is that the features they share with these public figures will always make them less than.

tbh, all this really does for a lot of us is render all those fluffy, feel-good “don’t be afraid to be ugly!” “you’re more than your size!”, “reject the idea that (whatever ‘ugly’ trait) is undesirable!” posts as total bullshit. Who knows if online communities will ever get to a place where we understand that body policing, fat shaming, and other forms of physical ridicule are fundamentally, inexcusably, and without exemption wrong, that there is no space for them even in- perhaps especially in- our ethical discourses.

#estefania rambles #body image #self esteem #okay to reblog

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learningfrommiley · 3 years

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Lean and Robots: Dynamic Duo or Disruptive Disaster?

By Jill Jusko

Lean—be it lean manufacturing or the lean enterprise—has long been an oddly divisive topic of conversation, right down to its very definition.

The folks who coined the term in the late 1980s developed a set of lean characteristics, starting with keeping the end (value to the customer) in mind. Key principles included removing waste from value streams, developing continuous product flow and ultimately driving down manufacturing cycle times to more rapidly respond to customers' changing needs and wants. Moreover, the people who engage with the value stream are active participants in its continuous improvement.

Nevertheless, a solid percentage of manufacturers see lean primarily as a cost-reduction strategy. While reduced costs may be an outcome of lean improvements, cost reduction is not at its heart. Another misconception? That lean manufacturing applies only to high-volume, low-mix production. Follow the origins of lean back far enough (think Toyota) and you will discover that the need to produce small quantities of many product variations were a driver of what became the vaunted Toyota Production System.

Then there is lean and automation, including robots. For many, a conversation about lean manufacturing and automation frequently is reduced to man versus machine—with headcount reduction as the end game.

"There is one group of folks who feels like any sort of automation or robotics is evil and violates the principles of lean. There's also the other end of the spectrum that says robots are going to make lean irrelevant going forward," says Jim Morgan, a senior advisor, product and process development, at the Lean Enterprise Institute.

Of course, the reality is more nuanced.

"Both arguments, at least for me, don't work. The premise of it being antagonistic is problematic," says Morgan, who is co-author (with Jeffrey Liker) of The Toyota Product Development System, as well as the recently released Designing the Future. An engineer, Morgan spent 10 years at the Ford Motor Co., serving his last eight years there as director, Global Body Exterior and SBU Engineering.

"Lean principles and robots can enhance each other," Morgan says.

It's about balance, he suggests. "Lean is very people-centric. It's about 'How can we make the environment better for the people who are doing the work—and robots and automation in general are absolutely a way to do that."

Morgan cites Toyota, whose lean credentials are unassailable, as one example.

"Some of the Toyota plants that I've toured, they make really excellent work of cobots… especially as the workforce ages," he notes. "They can create a much better working environment for those folks. But lean is still at the heart of the system, and the robots are just another tool that we can utilize to create a better environment."

Toyota recently showed off that very premise at its Huntsville, Alabama, engine plant, which has the capacity to produce 670,000 engines per year. The facility introduced its first collaborative robot in 2017 and currently has eight in action. It hopes to boost that number to 15 by year's end. The cobots' focus is on jobs that require repetitive, monotonous motions.

"We want [cobots] to do the moving, handling, pushing work so our team members… can focus on the critical thinking aspects of the project," explained Toyota engineering manager Jason Abney to ABC TV affiliate WAAY in early May.

"The robots are intended for collaboration, not replacement," Abney said. "We never reduce the amount of team members we have at the facility. We will reduce the effort to that area. We will take that team member to another needed area in the facility."

Indeed, replacing workers is precisely the opposite of what Toyota has planned in Huntsville. In March, the automaker announced plans to add two engine lines as part of a $288 million expansion project that is also expected to add some 450 jobs. The expansion will boost engine capacity to 900,000 by the end of 2021, the company said.

Lean: No Less a Requirement Than Safety Glasses and Ear Protection

While perhaps the most visible example of a company blending the strengths of lean manufacturing and robotics, Toyota is hardly alone in that regard.

AGCO, for instance, has embraced lean manufacturing and continuous improvement.

"It is a global fundamental requirement at all of our plants," says Peggy Gulick, director of digital transformation at the agricultural equipment maker, which produces brands such as Challenger and Massey-Ferguson. And while not every AGCO facility is at the same level of lean implementation, "it's no less of a requirement than safety glasses and ear protection and steel-toed shoes."

Technology is also paramount. Technology, she says, "is just another step in the whole continuous improvement journey. You're never going to reach perfection; you just get better every day at what you do—and technology has given us even more options to introduce to our plant to do that."

AGCO's Jackson, Minnesota, plant—a 2017 IndustryWeek Best Plants winner—is an illustration of lean and technology acting in concert. Indeed, IW described the facility as the "junction of advanced manufacturing technology and lean culture" in an article heralding the plant's accomplishments last year. Google Glass, for example, is prevalent on the shop floor, where several hundred workers wear the eyepieces to quickly access work instructions and other information. The technology provided a productivity return twice what leaders had originally expected, while a lean culture of employee problem-solving and policy deployment bolsters the effectiveness of such technologies.

Robots are installed across ACGO's global footprint of manufacturing facilities, in component manufacturing areas, for welding and paint, and elsewhere. Gulick says the company is immersed in gaining knowledge about collaborative robots and their potential value to the business. She says the most successful cobot installation within AGCO is likely the one in Brazil, where the technology is laying adhesive on iron housings that become part of finished goods.

At AGCO, implementing technology—robots or otherwise—is not done simply for the sake of new technology. That type of reasoning is never going to drive much value back into the enterprise, Gulick suggests.

AGCO's lean approach is this: "AGCO solves problems. If we have a problem and there is some grand new technology like a robot or cobot that's out there, we will try it. We will bring it in; we will fail if that's what's going to happen, and we will learn from our mistakes and then grow our solutions to include that new knowledge," Gulick says.

In Brazil, for example, the company brought in the cobot to address excess material costs that arise when too much adhesive gets applied. A facility in Germany, on the other hand, is working with cobots to reduce monotonous work currently done by the human workforce. That effort remains a work in process.

"We'd rather have the humans where they're making decisions," Gulick says.

AGCO is among lean enterprises that perform lean audits every year, or every other year for smaller locations. Interestingly, but perhaps not surprisingly, facilities that score the highest on those lean audits are the locations most likely to be supportive of and progressive with bringing in process or technology innovations.

Gulick says it's not hard to understand why. "They're ready," she says. "They have the [lean] foundation; they've built in policy deployment, they've built in problem-solving."

These are the plants ready to add advanced tools to their solution box "and bring it in any time that they can use it," she says.

We Do Not Want People Being Robots

People are at the heart of a lean system, says LEI's Morgan. "We want their intelligence, we want their passion, we want to engage all of our team members."

While Viking Plastics doesn't state its lean leanings in exactly those words, its approach shares similar sentiments.

"We believe the secret sauce of lean is growing people, educating people and putting our creative minds to work to help make work better," says Viking's Shawn Gross, engineering manager. Corry, Pennsylvania-based Viking Plastics is a privately held injection molder that produces sealing solutions and custom molded components. It has multiple U.S. locations and several outside of the United States.

"Our philosophy is that we want to grow all of our employees into 'process engineers.' We want them to see the value in what they do, and we want them to see the waste in what they do. We train people to see waste and then require and request that they be part of the solution through '2 Second Lean.'"

"2 Second Lean" was developed by Paul Akers, founder of woodworking products company FastCap, and author of a book by the same name. The model keeps lean simple and focused on small daily improvements, which Gross says has helped Viking sustain its lean efforts since 2011.

The company sees no conflict between lean and automation. "We fully embrace technology, innovation and automation to help improve productivity and quality, and we do this while growing people to adapt to our changing manufacturing environment," Gross explains. "We don't see lean as an austerity program. It is not intended to be a slash-and-burn, get-rid-of-people process."

Viking's Corry location has significant amounts of automation, including robots above the molding machines that remove parts, as well as box and sort them. The company also has a robotic arm. It has a 3D printer, error-proofing and high-speed inspection systems, just to cite a few of its advanced technologies.

The use of robots, Gross says, allow people to do more value-added processes that engage their minds. "We do not want people being robots, doing repetitive, mindless tasks."

Moreover, because Viking emphasizes the workforce's value to the company, it is not uncommon for anyone—not just a member of the automation team—to ask why a piece of equipment hasn't been introduced in a certain area to eliminate the need for a human to perform a routine, mindless task. Or to make small, daily improvements that lead to a two-person operation being reduced to a one-person operation.

Such employees—and automation—aren't in danger of improving Viking associates out of a job at the company, Gross notes. On the contrary, those employees move to positions within the company that provide greater value both to the manufacturing company and the employee. A position in the quality lab is one such example.

Moreover, the collaboration between lean and automation is driving impressively low external quality defect rates, with some product lines shipping tens of millions of parts a year with zero defects, Gross says.

Ultimately, whether lean and robots are a dynamic duo or disruptive disaster depends on the human beings making the decisions about how such technologies are implemented. Are robots optimizing processes at the local level at the expense of the larger system? That's not lean. Are they helping improve quality in manufacturing? Is lean still at the heart of the system?

"The same lean principles apply whether it's robots or people," says Morgan.

#quality in manufacturing

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mild-lunacy · 7 years

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My fannish feelings (let me show you them)

Man, fandom really alienates me in 28846851 ways, as I often say. And it's funny 'cause I really admire it. I admire the transformative nature of fandom... from afar. But comparing Johnlock to transformative ships like Harry/Draco or Sherlock/anyone else (hah!) or saying we're 'free to engage however we wish' misses the point. Personally, I know I'm free, but then I always felt free. Canon always feels like home, not a prison, no matter what happens. I just don't want to 'break free', unlike Moriarty. Like, I understand that people write these things because others or they themselves are really upset and/or looking for something to cling to or believe in in a cold, hard universe or what have you. You gotta find your comfort where you can. But that's why I said fandom frequently alienates me-- conspiracies, fake-out episode theories and even fanfiction in general has never been even close to 'enough'. It just... doesn't help. It doesn't work at all, haha. I understand why people react the way they do, but sometimes I think I have an innately different idea of what fanfiction is for.

It's true that Series 4 didn't fulfill all my hopes and wishes, and obviously I was wrong about the direction of the Authorial Intent, and I still think that's a crying shame even though I understand the limitations of thinking about that in the context of textual interpretation. But like I said in that meta yesterday, issues of intent have to do with the social aspects of fandom, not fanfiction (obviously). But of course, turning to fanworks to fix or somehow escape canon (whether it's speculative meta or fanfic) is part of the fundamental nature of fandom. I just... don't do that. At all. And I've never particularly enjoyed fanworks that willfully refused to follow canon in any obvious way instead of integrating (because that tends to read as OOC to me). Just for example, I may not be crazy excited about something like Sherlock/Mycroft, which is clearly acanonical, but normally it genuinely doesn't bother me. But if I see a ship like that combined with Johnlock so that it replaces it, where Sherlock chooses Mycroft over John, then I get pissed. And it's not because I'm a shipper (or not just) but because it's so blatantly not only OOC but transformative in a way that's anti-canon. Like, you really cannot sell that after the scene in TFP where Sherlock seriously considered shooting Mycroft, and in fact, it's clear that this writer didn't want to consider it. They were disregarding canon reality and substituting their own, and that sort of thing drives me batty with fic. You can always tell when the fic is going out of its way to misread the characters and/or rebelling against canon, and it never once worked for me in all my years of reading oodles of fanfic. I was never even tempted by 'Epilogue What Epilogue' fics in HP (needless to say, breaking up Harry's marriage held even less appeal). So yeah, I definitely can't look forward to years of doing that post-S4, haha. Not that... I think I'd have to, 'cause the door to Johnlock is wide open after TFP (and unfortunately, so is the door to other ships.... And hell yeah, that's pretty unfortunate, seeing as the very existence of straight!Sherlock seems like an abomination to me, honestly).

My reasoning for why explicitly canon Johnlock was definitely important and necessary goes like this: 1) it's the natural conclusion to Sherlock's arc and the emotional resolution to unresolved developments in Series 3, beginning in TRF; 2) representation and avoiding queerbaiting. But there's definitely also 3) cutting off straight-washing of Sherlock and John in the fandom and vindicating/establishing our understanding of his characterization as canon. I don't apologize for that. I still firmly stand for that. Straight or bisexual Sherlock is not something I calmly accept in the context of his BBC incarnation, not least because it's ridiculous and OOC, and you have to do some serious mental gymnastics to justify it canonically. But I also honestly simply find it harmful in the context of fandom as well as being queerbaiting in canon.

Obviously, I mean, fandom has but a fraction of the social power and cultural resonance that the hugely popular media property of BBC Sherlock does. But heteronormativity is always problematic and it's not more present in the media than in fandom in the sense that it's present everywhere equally, by its very nature. Obviously, we fight against it more here, so there's clearly less of it here in one sense, but heteronormativity always remains something to push back against with the intent to eradicate. And in the context of the canon characterization of BBC Sherlock, even reading Sherlock as bisexual (as in, displaying actual or potential attraction to women) is quite blatantly, extremely heteronormative, and so it's pretty distasteful to me. I do think it's that obvious that he's gay, yes. And so... a future of endless fanworks at this point is definitely a very mixed blessing.

No. Nope. Uh-uh. I didn't think that, and I didn't ignore or avoid willfully. I side-stepped and tried to build on canon while trying to integrate every bit of characterization possible. And further, I only started new Harry/Draco fanfic before Harry got together with Ginny permanently. He was together with Ginny at first in some of my fics, but I made up the characterization so it would fit; when I saw that he genuinely wanted her, I just wanted him to be happy (and I guess when I did take him away from her, it wasn't a happy story). Even before, I never wrote him as gay or tried to ignore his interest in Ginny (I just kind of wrote speculative Ginny characterization sometimes that took her down alternative paths... but I didn't think it was OOC at the time). The fact that people ignored or avoided canon and embraced OOCness to write an admittedly transformative slash ship used to drive me insane with constant, neverending frustration back when I was in HP fandom. It's also something that bothers me about the way people write Kavinsky in The Raven Cycle, too. People mess with characterization and the entirety of apparent canonical intent to write the stuff canon left unexplored on purpose, which is understandable... but not necessary.

I used to write lots of meta back in the day about how, you know, you can build on canon and do anything-- certainly, you can write redemption arcs and stuff-- if you're careful about starting where the characters really are. It's not like I was ever obsessed with JKR's intent regarding Draco Malfoy, but then neither did I ignore it, see. She said stuff to the effect of him being a 'little cockroach', as Hermione might say, and she warned about young women denying or ignoring that, but I didn't deny or ignore it! I thought that was important. He was a little prick in my fics, and I tried to work with that. I did my absolute best not to romanticize him and I constantly wrote metas imploring others not to, more or less; I wanted to let him grow up and develop, not deny he needs the development. This was not because JKR told me not to, of course. At the same time, I genuinely believe that if you read the text closely enough, you'll come pretty close to the perspective of the author anyway, given it's a good author and given you're not the sort of reader that has an agenda. And as for myself... I don't have an agenda, man.

I guess that could be hard to believe, if you thought of me only as a TJLCer (not that I'm aware of anyone doing that). I mean, people have certainly had a tendency of accusing us of projecting onto the text, though the aphorism about stones and glass houses definitely applies. But anyway, obviously I've never seen canon Johnlock as wish-fulfillment, and I get pretty incensed when I think people misunderstood that, not that it wasn't a wish to be fulfilled. Not only did I wish, I still fully and firmly believe it should have happened explicitly, even if I'm starting to understand where the misconceptions we had about Mofftiss were. Anyway, it's not that I don't see myself in the story or identify with characters. I just... don't really project. That's the source of my alienation, I think. I don't see a show or read a book I like, that's remotely internally consistent, and think, 'I know these characters better and I and/or fandom could have done better', the way so many people in fandom have done after Series 4 of Sherlock or the last book in The Raven Cycle. I mean, I get disappointed, but it's really been weird seeing people's issues with The Raven King. It's more understandable with Series 4 'cause they did drop an apparent arc, in the sense that they didn't actually fulfill it except by implication. That's not really what happened in TRK; all the arcs were completed, but many people complained about the stuff that was left out or not focused on that they wished would have been. That's really weird and unnatural to me, possibly 'cause I just really believe in the importance of reigning in self-indulgence.

Basically, the whole problem with TFP was essentially self-indulgence! Calling for more of it, or even critiquing Series 4 for essentially not having more of the right kind (and even accusing TJLCers of only wanting that and nothing else!) is hard for me to relate to. Alas, as usual.

#pointless rambles #me myself and i #sherlock feels #johnlock feels #oh fandom #fandom meta #hp feels #queerlock #tjlc

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neptunecreek · 4 years

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Two Different Proposals to Amend Section 230 Share A Similar Goal: Damage Online Users’ Speech

Whether we know it or not, all Internet users rely on multiple online services to connect, engage, and express themselves online. That means we also rely on 47 U.S.C. § 230 (“Section 230”), which provides important legal protections when platforms offer their services to the public and when they moderate the content that relies on those services, from the proverbial cat video to an incendiary blog post.

Section 230 is an essential legal pillar for online speech. And when powerful people don’t like that speech, or the platforms that host it, the provision becomes a scapegoat for just about every tech-related problem. Over the past few years, those attacks have accelerated; on Wednesday, we saw two of the most dangerous proposals yet, one from the Department of Justice, and the other from Sen. Josh Hawley

The proposals take different approaches, but they both seek to create new legal regimes that will allow public officials or private individuals to bury platforms in litigation simply because they do not like how those platforms offer their services. Basic activities like offering encryption, or editing, removing, or otherwise moderating users’ content could lead to years of legal costs and liability risk. That’s bad for platforms—and for the rest of us.

DOJ’s Proposal Attacks Encryption and Would Make Everyone’s Internet Experience Less Secure

The Department of Justice’s Section 230 proposal harms Internet users and gives the Attorney General more weapons to retaliate against online services he dislikes. It proposes four categories of reform to Section 230.

First, it claims that platforms need greater incentive to remove illegal user-generated content and proposes that Section 230 should not apply to what it calls “Bad Samaritans.” Platforms that knowingly host illegal material or content that a court has ruled is illegal would lose protections from civil liability, including for hosting material depicting terrorism or cyber-stalking. The proposal also mirrors the EARN IT Act by attacking encryption: it conditions 230 immunity on whether the service maintains “the ability to assist government authorities to obtain content (i.e., evidence) in a comprehensible, readable, and usable format pursuant to court authorization (or any other lawful basis).”

Second, it would allow it and other federal agencies to initiate civil enforcement actions against online services that they believed were hosting illegal content.

Third, the proposal seeks to “clarify that federal antitrust claims are not covered by Section 230 immunity.”

Finally, the proposal eliminates key language from Section 230 that gives online services the discretion to remove content they deem to be objectionable and defines the statute’s “good faith” standard to require platforms to explain all of their decisions to moderate users’ content.

The DOJ’s proposal would eviscerate Section 230’s protections and, much like the EARN IT Act introduced earlier this year, is a direct attack on encryption. Like EARN IT, the DOJ’s proposal does not use the word encryption anywhere. But in practice the proposal ensures that any platform providing secure end-to-end encryption would face a torrent of litigation—surely no accident given the Attorney General’s repeated efforts to outlaw encryption.

Other aspects of the DOJ’s “Bad Samaritan” proposals are problematic, too. Although the proposal claims that bad actors would be limited to platforms that knowingly host illegal material online, the proposal targets other content that may be offensive but is nonetheless protected by the Constitution.

Additionally, requiring platforms to take down content deemed illegal via a court order will result in a significant increase in frivolous litigation about content that people simply don’t like. Many individuals already seek to use default court judgments and other mechanisms as a means to remove things from the Internet. The DOJ proposal requires platforms to honor even the most trollish court-ordered takedown.

Oddly, the DOJ also proposes punishing platforms for removing content from their services that is not illegal. Under current law, Section 230 gives platforms the discretion to remove harmful material such as spam, malware, or other offensive content, even if it isn’t illegal. We have many concerns about those moderation decisions, but removing that discretion altogether could make everyone’s experiences online much worse and potentially less safe.

It’s also unconstitutional: Section 230 notwithstanding, the First Amendment gives platforms the discretion to decide for themselves the type of content they want to host and in what form.

The proposal would also empower federal agencies, including the DOJ, to bring civil enforcement actions against platforms. Like last month’s Executive Order targeting online services, this would give the government new powers to target platforms that government officials or the President do not like. It also ignores that the DOJ already has plenty of power. Because Section 230 exempts federal criminal law, it has never hindered the DOJ’s ability to criminally prosecute online services engaging in illegal activity.

The DOJ would also impose onerous obligations that would make it incredibly difficult for any new platform to compete with the handful of dominant platforms that exist today. For example, the proposal requires all services to provide “a reasonable explanation” to every single user whose content is edited, deleted, or otherwise moderated. Even if services could reasonably predict what qualifies as a “reasonable explanation,” many content moderation decisions are not controversial and do not require any explanation, such as when services filter spam.

Sen. Hawley’s Proposed Legislation Turns Section 230’s Legal Shield Into An Invitation to Litigate Every Platform’s Moderation Decisions

Sen. Hawley’s proposed legislation, for its part, takes aim at online speech by fundamentally reversing the role Section 230 plays in how online platforms operate. As written, Section 230 generally protects platforms from lawsuits based either on their users’ content or actions taken by the platforms to remove or edit users’ content.

Hawley’s bill eviscerates those legal protections for large online platforms (platforms that average more than 30 million monthly users or have more than $1.5 billion in global revenue annually), by replacing Section 230’s simple standard with a series of detailed requirements. Platforms that meet those thresholds would have to publish clear policies describing when and under what circumstances they moderate users’ content. They must then enforce those policies in good faith, which the bill defines as acting “with an honest belief and purpose,” observing “fair dealing standards,” and “acting without fraudulent intent.” A platform fails to meet the good faith requirement if it engages in “intentionally selective enforcement” of its policies or by failing to honor public or private promises it makes to users.

Some of this sounds OK on paper—who doesn’t want platforms to be honest? In practice, however, it will be a legal minefield that will inevitably lead to over-censorship. The bill allows individual users to sue platforms they believe did not act in good faith and creates statutory damages of up to $5,000 for violations. It would also permit users’ attorneys to collect their fees and costs in bringing the lawsuits.

In other words, every user who believes a platform's actions were unfair, fraudulent, or otherwise not done in good faith would have a legal claim against a platform. And there would be years of litigation before courts would decide standards for what constitutes good faith under Hawley’s bill.

Given the harsh reality that it is impossible to moderate user-generated content at scale perfectly, or even well, this bill means full employment for lawyers, but little benefit to users. As we’ve said repeatedly, moderating content on a platform with a large volume of users inevitably results in inconsistencies and mistakes, and it disproportionately harms marginalized groups and voices. Further, efforts to automate content moderation create additional problems because machines are terrible at understanding the nuance and context of human speech.

This puts platforms in an impossible position: moderate as best you can, and get sued anyway—or drastically reduce the content you host in the hopes of avoiding litigation. Many platforms will choose the latter course, and avoid hosting any speech that might be controversial.

Like the DOJ’s proposal, the bill also violates the First Amendment. Here, it does so by making distinctions between particular speakers. That distinction would trigger strict scrutiny under the First Amendment, a legal test that requires the government to show that (1) the law furthers a compelling government interest and (2) the law is narrowly tailored to achieve that interest. Sen. Hawley’s bill fails both prongs: although there are legitimate concerns about the dominance of a handful of online platforms and their power to limit Internet users’ speech, there is no evidence that requiring private online platforms to practice good-faith content moderation represents a compelling government interest. Even assuming there is a compelling interest, the bill is not narrowly tailored. Instead, it broadly interferes with platforms’ editorial discretion by subjecting them to endless lawsuits from any individual claiming they were wronged, no matter how frivolous.

As EFF told Congress back in 2019, the creation of Section 230 has ushered in a new era of community and connection on the Internet. People can find friends old and new over the Internet, learn, share ideas, organize, and speak out. Those connections can happen organically, often with no involvement on the part of the platforms where they take place. Consider that some of the most vital modern activist movements—#MeToo, #WomensMarch, #BlackLivesMatter—are universally identified by hashtags. Forcing platforms to over-censor their users, or worse, giving the DOJ more avenues to target platforms it does not like, is never the right decision. We urge Congress to reject both proposals.

from Deeplinks https://ift.tt/2YbchHg

#Deeplinks

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tomwolfgangascott · 5 years

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Social Media and Social Problems: A Complex Link

This post originally appeared on RUSI.org on 14 November 2018

Social media is often seen as having a negative impact on politics and society. However, the evidence shows that many individuals are sceptical about the information they consume online.

That much is certain: you are not yourself when you are online. Whether you browse the web or explore cyberspace_ in other ways, _however you get square eyed, while you are doing it, you are somebody else. However, the impact of social media on our politics and our democracy remains a controversial subject. Abstractly, the belief that social media is damaging our politics is now accepted as almost axiomatic, although studies suggest the answer may be more complex.

It is worth recalling that early in the digital revolution there was quite a debate on the supposed damage the practice of staring at phones might inflict on young people. That debate continues as 0–8-year olds are now spending almost an hour a day on their phones, although much evidence for one side or another in the argument remains scant. Still, digital addiction is being seen as a more serious issue: political extremism; radicalisation; recourse to violence; and the broader trend of political polarisation are all thought to be linked to our digital environment.

The usual argument is that social media has helped move the so-called Overton Window, the range of ideas now tolerated in public discourse by fundamentally moving the goalposts and by changing what is acceptable to say in public. As more extreme content and ideas are shared on social media, what is considered normal and moderate shrinks, pushing users to the extremes. But is this truly the case?

An instinct shared by both those who are and are not addicted to social media is to blame the user, to claim that it is ultimately a lack of self-control that leads people to spend on average almost two and half hours a day on social media.

Of course, those who produce content also believe in this concept even though they understand that the reasons are more complex. Advertisers, for instance, have always sought to make media addictive and more manipulative of the user. In the 1950s Vance Packard studied the effect of subliminal stimulation, which is ‘the presentation of short messages that tell us what to do but that are flashed so briefly we aren’t aware we have seen them’. Subliminal stimulation did not work, and its measurable effects were negligible, but it started a pattern of seeking new ways to exert influence on users that continues to this day. Media companies want to have as much influence on their users as possible, and if possible, without their users even realising what effect is being had on them.

And today’s social media companies have specialised teams, using increasingly personal data, to keep users hooked. The design of the sites we use is targeted at creating habits and addictions which in turn they profit from. There is now a ‘zero sum race for finite attention’, using design tricks ranging from red notification bubbles designed to grab your attention, swiping down to refresh, which mimics the action of a slot machine, or infinite scrolling, which without pages to give the user a chance to opt out and stop using an app keeps users locked in a digital cycle.

There is little doubt that these refining tactics are open to manipulation by bad actors. Giving people what they want in order to keep their attention is a problem, because what people want are highly emotive stories, which often turn out to be false. These false stories have an enormous impact on both the inter-social lives of people and on the way that they relate to state apparatus.

Social media’s impact on elections goes deeper, with ‘39 % of adults using social media solely to discuss politics’, and darker, false stories travel further and quicker than the truth. Still, the conclusions drawn from this narrative of social media having a polarising effect may turn out to be empirically wrong.

Levi Boxell, Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse M Shapiro, US-based economists working with the US’s National Bureau of Economic Research, argue in their recently published paper that, while political polarisation among US adults is on the rise, it is rising in demographic groups that use the internet and social media the least. It is not the youth who are becoming radicalised by social media; it is the elderly. And those aged over 75 are the one age group most polarised by their online experience.

Younger, more technology savvy audiences are exposed to more digital content from younger ages, and as result do not take what they see and read online at face value. Older users may be more susceptible to fake news as they are more likely to hold a belief that what is online is generally true. For them the internet has replaced newspapers but in a way that retains their integrity.

So young people, who otherwise may be deemed vulnerable to radicalisation and indoctrination into violent ideologies online, simply by being on social media, may not be affected as much as we fear, and the background chatter is not polarising their beliefs, although admittedly young people may be singled out for indoctrination and recruitment by violent organisations.

This counterintuitive conclusion reached by the National Bureau of Economic Research paper is not an isolated case: Michael Beam from Kent State University in the US arrives at a similar place. He found that ‘Facebook news use was related to a modest over-time spiral of depolarization’. ‘Depolarization’ is the effect of users moving towards more politically moderate views. What Beam seems to be arguing is that, despite the persistent argument that social media creates ‘echo chambers’ where beliefs a user has are repeated and amplified, the truth appears to be that Facebook does provide counter-attitudinal news feeds which have a depolarising effect.

And that conclusion may be entirely sustainable. For it is easy to think that Facebook creates ‘opinion silos—deep but narrow, socially homogenous echo chambers, held together by shared political assumptions’ but 2.23 billion people are on Facebook, and only a minority of them are becoming polarised. A majority can use the platform as it was intended, and by seeing more of the world and the lives of others their worldview is broadened.

In this debate, there is also confusion about how these social sites work, especially since the algorithms that decide what one does or does not see on their timelines are secret. Knowing what you can get posted is also difficult. To be safe many companies will produce exhaustive terms and conditions, leading to many that are too long for users to read.

In the 2016 US presidential election, the advertisements that Donald Trump’s campaign ran were more controversial and resulted in a higher engagement rate. This higher engagement (measured in clicks, comments, and ‘likes’ and ‘dislikes’) resulted in adverts costing less to post compared with the less inflammatory adverts posted by the opposing Hillary Clinton campaign. So, the Trump campaign may have had an edge by just being more controversial, rather than by resorting to any other underhand practices.

Still, this lack of understanding about how these sites can be used is amplified as they can appear to be out of bounds to many legal jurisdictions. Facebook has its own rulebook on what content is and is not acceptable, but as the site becomes more ingrained in all aspects of its users’ lives, the problems become more intractable. How it finds unacceptable content is itself problematic.

And, while algorithms that can identify images are being developed, it is left to human moderators to review at all the content that is flagged, and many are suffering from PTSDfrom all the extreme content they are being exposed to. Facebook is not looking to national laws to help solve this issue either, with Mark Zuckerberg, its boss, instead hinting that will need its own ‘Supreme Court’ to decide what is and is not allowed.

A reason that social media takes the brunt of the blame for all manner of current social ills could simply be that journalists spend a disproportionate amount of time there, and the time they spend there is not pleasant. Not only do people swear at each other at least twice as much online as in reality, but journalists get the brunt of that as it is ‘in vogue to attack the messenger for the message’. It should be unsurprising then that, when pushed to find answers to current political trends, both journalists and politicians see persistent problems online.

It is not that these journalists are wrong; social media certainly has some part to play in the process of radicalisation. But at a time when real wages are stagnating, life expectancy is dropping, homelessness is growing, and the richest 1,000 families have more than doubled their wealth since 2009, it is perhaps reductive to point the finger at just, say, Twitter.

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martinllewellyn · 5 years

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House of the Missing - Interview

Why did you decide to write House of the Missing? What was the inspiration behind this novel?

I wanted to write a longer piece of fiction than I had done previously in order to more fully explore themes that I engaged with in earlier writing (desire/love, loss, cruelty, landscape/the natural world & animals) as well as investigate new ones, principally, amnesia/memory, identity and language. These themes, which are broad and universal, tend to feature in fairy tales, and interest in me insofar as a universal mode of storytelling can be reworked and modified, particularly in terms of how acts, categorised as good or evil, can be clearly defined and how traditional moral frameworks conflict with human behaviour. These themes usefully illuminate such questions as what it is to be (perceived as) evil, whether redemption is possible, and where behavioural extremes such as love and cruelty stem from. Also, to consider the relationship between identity, memory and dreams and whether they are different, obscure aspects of one another.

How long did it take you to write the book?

About five years. It was written in a fairly piecemeal way initially but, once the thesis was completed, I was able to fully devote my time to it. The majority of the novel was written alongside the thesis and it provided a kind of release because it was a very different way of writing to the academic mode. The novel deals with some of the problems that I was looking at in my studies.

You hold a PhD in French literature. Could you tell us a little bit about your interest in French literature? Did your passion for French literature influence your decision about fiction writing?

The topic for my thesis was the poetry and poetics of Georges Bataille. He was writing from the 1920s to 1960s and was involved in the literary and artistic scenes in France during that time. He associated with other intellectual figures, among them André Breton. Bataille is often referred to as a ‘dissident Surrealist’, meaning he shared the group’s aesthetic practices but not their ideological outlook; Bataille was considered to be a materialist rather than an idealist. His writings on sexuality, sacrifice/violence and morality/evil and problems in regard to linguistic communication form an enquiry into the innate guilt, desire and will to violence that are, according to Bataille, fundamental to human experience. His writings examine how such a problematic psychological condition manifests itself in behaviour and society, and a consideration of some of these problems are found in the novel. The outlook and writing praxis of Surrealism, in general, influence the writing in House of the Missing, creating a mood of uncertainty and anxiety and, specifically, foregrounding expressions of metamorphosis, dream and reality, memory and forgetting, identity and mis/recognition and desire and repression.

What was the most challenging aspect of writing the novel? And which parts of the book did you enjoy writing the most?

Deciding how to represent the fact that the protagonist speaks a different language to the other characters. Additionally, it was difficult to gauge how much information to reveal – and at which points – in regard to her memory loss. The characters of Kasper, Sylvester and Teresa as well as the group of figures who appear later on were the most enjoyable to write. The later stages of the novel were the most rewarding – mainly because there is an end in sight – but also because, as a writer, you feel a greater sense of confidence because of what you’ve already accomplished and you feel carried along by a momentum. You, therefore, have a greater confidence in your own ability to control the material.

What was the inspiration behind the little girl, the main character?

She was initially considered as a trope from fairy tales: the figure of the child abandoned in the woods, common in the stories collected by the Grimms, for example. I wanted to work within that framework and stay faithful to it through the use of fantastic elements, but also to subvert it by exploring it realistically, in the magic realist tradition. The question of how much gender influences, or does not influence, her own perception of herself and the perceptions of those whom she encounters, is important in considering how and to what extent gender predetermines identity. The uncertainty produced by her amnesia permeates her perception of everything around her, creating a dissonance between dream and reality, represented in symbolic acts and events. Her lack of an identity and isolation in the forest, means she is responsive to the natural world – the forest and animals around her – in a way most of the other characters are not. As the novel progresses she undergoes a kind of ‘dynamic’ linguistic metamorphosis, in opposition to the ‘static’ physical, metamorphic condition of Sylvester.

Language and the possibility and challenges of communicating between people are at the heart of the book. Was it something you consciously chose to discuss in the book or did the ideas develop with the characters you were writing about?

The limitations of language – and inherent difficulties of communication – are key ideas in Bataille’s philosophy; therefore, they were very much in mind. The theme of language and communication did develop as the writing progressed: first, as a practicality in regard to the protagonist’s situation in speaking a different language to everyone else; and, second, to substantiate the theme of language in regard to identity. Considerations of how much language, and therefore nationality and belonging, configure identity and selfhood are central to the novel. The identity of characters, both in terms of ethnicity and in the territorial sense of belonging to a place, further complicate and obfuscate the possibility of communication and mutual understanding. I try to consider the question of ‘belonging’ in the novel in terms of what creates a sense of belonging to a place – or a group of people – and how this sense, or lack thereof, again, feeds into identity.

Which authors or works of fiction inspire you?

Apart from the Surrealists and fairy tales already mentioned, other works that have found their way to this novel are: the poetry of Ovid, Baudelaire and Rimbaud; Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain; Little House in the Big Woods by Laura Ingalls Wilder and the short stories of Angela Carter. More generally: Dostoevsky, Patrick Hamilton, Jean Rhys, JG Ballard, AS Byatt, Michel Houellebecq and AL Kennedy. Music, film, art, conversations, as well as specific editorial input, all fed into the writing process, giving the novel its final tone and shape.

You recently moved to Canada. How do you find living there and has it affected your writing life?

I enjoy being in Canada although there are many things I miss about England and Europe, not least family and friends. I am in Halifax, on the east coast, which has, in some ways, become a model for the city in the book I am currently working on.

What do you do when you are not writing?

Travel, when possible; listen to music and read.

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londonwebdesignagency · 6 years

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Why Good Website Design is so Important For Your Business

Web design has become a fundamental part of leading a successful business. If your company does not have a properly built website, it may become problematic. Almost every company has its own website because that way consumers will always have an access to the information, as long as they have the internet connection. The modern market requires companies to have some kind of information about themselves, which can always be accessible to the customers. Everyone is browsing through the net, we don’t live in the age of TV commercials anymore. A majority of people spend their time on their smartphones and computers. It is logical. It is more comfortable and customizable. That is why a professional web design has become crucial to having a successful business.

Web design allows you to make your company known to people. It allows your business to reach a bigger audience more quickly. That is what’s important for the consumer. They want to get the information as quickly as possible. So you should know how to create content on your website. It needs to deliver all the important aspects of your company. If it is too long, it may become boring for the visitors and leave the website. That can be devastating. Websites need to have traffic so that your message can be conveyed effectively. You have to make consumers stay on the website as long as possible so that traffic can increase and more customers will visit your website. This is done with the help of web design.

It is important to note some details while building a website.

One of the most crucial parts of web design is navigation. A lot of sites have many pages and if it is uncomfortable to navigate through them, consumers may leave your website, because it is a hassle to explore it. It needs to be simple. So simple that everyone will be able to navigate through that space.

Paying attention to visual appeal is also important. The colours should complement each other, the design should be created so that it suits the written content. With this you make the visitors pay attention to certain parts of your website. It can be considered as a way to lure your visitors to read your content.

The content you write on your website needs to be creative and engaging. If it is boring the result will show that a lot of visitors will leave because of that. It needs to be short and all the necessary information should be conveyed.

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rosejardine-blog · 6 years

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Blog Remit

This part of a formal assessed BCU module in Technical Methods. The Instructions given for the blog are specific.

They Methods, Workshop Practice and Learning - ART7884

They are:Technical Methods, Workshop Practice and Learning - ART7884 Further guidelines for module Assessment outcomes • Blog (online regular reflective log: guidance is that this should be a concise edited critical reflection of no longer that 500 words a week over the 10 week module period). (A link to this must be included within the written technical report and it must be accessible to external examiners and second markers: i.e not password restricted I recommend Tumblr) • Presentation of portfolio of evidence (outcomes/ finding/ learning of module in the form of a visual and spoken presentation to peers and tutors this can be an opportunity to present your blog along with some of the outcomes you wish to show in person. The presentation should be 10 minutes long). Monday 8th January 2018 2-5pm • 1500 word technical report (this should cite your research, contextualise and frame your work in relationship to the module: it should be critically reflective and demonstrate your learning and underpin the work produced for the portfolio/ presentation: this report is in the form of a written assignment). Upload to Moodle on Tuesday 9th January by 12noon (if possible please bring a printed copy to the presentations on the evening of Monday 8th January). • Your Personal Development Plan personal critical evaluation form Upload to Moodle by 12noon on Tuesday 9th January 2018

Below are a few notes and passages that I have collated from my research

Please note this is not my own work, it from other authors. I have just identified and collated it

Exegesis meaning, definition, what is exegesis: an explanation of a text, especially from the Bible, after its careful study. Learn more.

Not about deliberate transgression or deconstruction? Approached with humility?

However, we can not consciously seek the new, since by definition the new cannot be known in advance. Hockney did not set out to find the new, but the new arrived to confront him. The “shock of the new” is thus a particular understanding that is realised through our dealings

Learn the old welcome the new?? Seeing touching thinking? Eastside projects not simply to fabricate

Berger too as well as Heidegger

Not searching for originality?

In Being and Time (1966) Martin Heidegger sets out to examine the particular form of knowledge that arises from our handling of materials and processes. Heidegger argues that we do not come to “know” the world theoretically through contemplative knowledge in the first instance. Rather, we come to know the world theoretically only after we have come to understand it through handling. Thus the new can be seen to emerge in the involvement with materials, methods, tools, and ideas of practice. It is not just the representation of an already formed idea nor is it achieved through conscious attempts to be original. Despite the best efforts of the postmodern critique of originality, concepts such as “the new” and “originality” still remain the driving force behind contemporary art practice and creative arts research. In contemporary practice, this pre-occupation has tended to take the form of conscious attempts on the part of the artist, to create

Thus practitioner-based research is concerned with processes for theorizing practice, using appropriation, pastiche and collaboration as basic tenants. In moving creatively into our practice we are fundamentally concerned to develop new knowledge, to challenge old beliefs and to speculate on the ‘what ifs’ of our concepts and processes. For the arts practitioner, this new knowledge is made in the context of and challenge to the history, theory and practices of the relevant field. The research function for developing and extending knowledge is judged on the outcome of the research, which synthesises, extends or analyses the problematics of the discipline. It is important to realise that this creative work resembles pure and applied research in any field. As Richard Dunn says; “a work of art or design is embedded in or deforms the theory and practice of the discipline” (1994:8).I'm

Praxis is the process by which a theory, lesson, or skill is enacted, embodied, or realized. "Praxis" may also refer to the act of engaging, applying, exercising, realizing, or practising ideas. This has been a ... Origins Marxism Hannah Arendt Education Spirituality

To explore how we might move from writing “art criticism” to generating a discourse of practice -led enquiry that involves viewing the artist as a researcher, and the artist/critic as a scholar who comments on the value of the artistic process as the production of knowledge.

Within the context of this metaphor, the artistic product is viewed as a vehicle for the externalisation of ideas or knowledge. The need to focus on process as well as product in studio-based research is again emphasised.

(Not representation)

My research was what vehicle (technique method process material) articulated Expanded my language Research the possibilities and voice of materials in my hands Let the materials dictate What are the materials telling me

I still want rust and bitumen and metal and concrete First work to immerse myself in theory

Heidegger on haptic. check it out My research question was researched through practice As the practical investigations progress they informed my research question findings and methodologies

What is your research question? What did you set out to achieve (and why; how did you clearly frame and map out your investigation?) How is your questions researched through practice? (how have the practical investigations informed your question, findings, methodologies?)

Research by practice Heidegger praxical knowledge

search. Praxical knowledge implies that ideas and theory are ultimately the result of practice rather than vice versa. Drawing on Heidegger, Don Ihde extends this idea through his elaboration of “technics”, which he refers to as: ‘human actions or embodied relations involving the manipulation of artefacts to produce effects within the environment (Ihde 1990: 3). These “effects” broadly understood as “knowledge” emerge through material processes. Because such proc- esses are (at least in part) predicated on the tacit and alternative logic of practice in time, their precise operations cannot be predetermined.

Tacit tacit ˈtasɪt/Submit adjective understood or implied without being stated. "your silence may be taken to mean tacit agreement" synonyms: implicit, understood, implied, inferred, hinted, suggested, insinuated; More

Haptic haptic ˈhaptɪk/Submit adjective technical adjective: haptic relating to the sense of touch, in particular relating to the perception and manipulation of objects using the senses of touch and proprioception. "haptic feedback devices create the illusion of substance and force within the virtual world" Bolt Bordeiue

What I would like to stress here, is that: just as the material basis of artistic research results in approaches that are necessarily emergent, the subjective and personally situated aspect of artistic research— its relationality or what Carter refers to as its capacity to reinvent social relations (Carter 2004:10)—results in research that is ultimately interdisciplinary. Within the context of knowledge-production, social relations are after all, implicated in almost every disciplinary field. How to fully realise and exploit, rather than apologise for this ineluctable interdisciplinary dimension of creative arts research, is a question that needs to be repeatedly fore-grounded in practice as re- search discourse and training. Roland Barthes’ view that interdisciplinary study or enquiry creates a new object that belongs to no one (Newell 1988) provides a ration- ale for acknowledging the innovative potential of the fluid location and application of creative arts research approaches and outcomes. The juxtaposing of disparate objects and ideas has, after all, often been viewed as an intrinsic aspect of creativity. The interplay of ideas from disparate areas of knowledge in creative arts research creates conditions for the emergence of new analogies, metaphors and models for understanding objects of enquiry. Hence the capacity of artistic research for illumi- nating subject matter of both the artistic domain as well as that belonging to other domains and disciplines

A lexicon, word-hoard, or word-stock is the vocabulary of a person, language, or branch of knowledge (such as nautical or medical). In linguistics, a lexicon is a language's inventory of lexemes. The word "lexicon" derives from the Greek λεξικόν (lexicon), neuter of λεξικός (lexikos) meaning "of or for words."[1]

Linguistic theories generally regard human languages as consisting of two parts: a lexicon, essentially a catalogue of a language's words (its wordstock); and a grammar, a system of rules which allow for the combination of those words into meaningful sentences. The lexicon is also thought to include bound morphemes, which cannot stand alone as words (such as most affixes).[2] In some analyses, compound words and certain classes of idiomatic expressions and other collocations are also considered to be part of the lexicon. Dictionaries represent attempts at listing, in alphabetical order, the lexicon of a given language; usually, however, bound morphemes are not included.

Contents Size and organization

result of this reflexive process, methodologies in artistic research are necessarily emergent and subject to repeated adjustment, rather than re- maining fixed throughout the process of enquiry. We can now argue that because of its inbuilt reflexivity, the emergent aspect of artistic research methodology may be viewed as a positive feature to be to be factored into the design of research projects rather than as a flaw to be understated or avoided.

The juxtaposing of disparate objects and ideas has, after all, often been viewed as an intrinsic aspect of creativity. The interplay of ideas from disparate areas of knowledge in creative arts research creates conditions for the emergence of new analogies, metaphors and models for understanding objects of enquiry. Hence the capacity of artistic research for illumi- nating subject matter of both the artistic domain as well as that belonging to other domains and disciplines of knowledg Use juxtaposition examples in your presentation

We also need to be more articulate in elaborating how creative arts practice engages with, and can extend theoretical and philosophical paradigms. In summary, the task for sMttt

Her application of Martin Heidegger’s notion of handlability demonstrates that practice or experience (sense activity), rather than theory is the basis for research and discovery. Drawing initially on David Hockney’s investigation into the use of optical aids by artists such as Ingres, and then on her own painting practice, Bolt demonstrates how the “new” is not a quest to be pursued or a self conscious at- tempt at transgression, but rather, it is the particular understandings that are realised through our dealings with the tools and materials of production and in the handling of ideas.

GoA feature of studio-based enquiry is that the method unfolds through practice— practice is itself, productive of knowledge and engenders further practice demon- strating the emergent nature of the process. Perry’s observations and experience raise questions about “common sense” distinctions made between objectivity and subjectivity, fiction and truth. The real transformation experienced by the writer, suggests broader applications of creative practice for dealing with grief and trauma in the community.

process of discovery elaborated by the artist suggests that that theory is always secondary to intuitive response, and is ultimately sacrificed to the material and temporal demands of making the work and finding a means of expressing previ- ously inexpressible psychological states. Practice-based research methods are again

Goddard shows us that the relationship between practice and reflective writing in artistic research, is not one of equivalence, but of correspondence. In this mutually reflexive process the modelling of another model of consciousness is irreducible and contains a remain- der or excess. This excess. Be is a core aspect of the studio-based enquiry. It relates to an alternative logic of practice and to the knowledge-producing capacity of practice as research. having to write about their own work in the research exegesis or report. In Chapter Ten, I suggest that this difficulty can be overcome by shifting the critical focus away from the notion of the work as product, to an understanding of both studio enquiry and evaluation of its outcomes as a philosophical process that moves between es- tablished theory and the situated knowledge that emerges through practice.

Correspondence reflection

ratives’, Robyn Stewart explores the complex interrelationship that exists between artistic research and other research and scholarly paradigms. Mapping is again used as a metaphor to extend understandings of practice-based research methodologies and narrative methods that are appropriate for situating and articulating the process and its outcomes. Acknowledging the emergent and subjective dimension of artistic research, Stewart describes this method as a process of continuous discovery, correspondence, contradictions, intuition, surprise, serendipity and discipline. Draw- ing on her extensive experience in artistic research and studio-based research train- ing, she applies the notion of “bricolage” in her explication of approaches in practice as research. These approaches draw on multiple fields and piece together multiple practices in order to provide solutions to concrete and conceptual problems.

Alternative modes of knowledge representation

double movement occurs, of decontextualisation in which the found elements are rendered strange, and of recontextualisation, in which new families of association and structures of meaning are established. This double movement characterises any concep- tual advance. In philosophy, it is the Socratic method. The distinction of practice- based research is to mediate this process materially, allowing the unpredictable and differential situation to influence what is found. Technique is necessary, but in the transformation it falls away. In our co

up vote 20 down vote accepted What is 'hermeneutics'?

Hermeneutics is the field of study concerned with the philosophy and science of interpretation -- especially the interpretation of communication.

"Biblical hermeneutics" is specifically concerned with the philosophy and science of interpreting the Biblical text. So Biblical hermeneutics would cover all of the following sorts of inquiries and more:

(Theory:) What role does Divine illumination play in the interpretation of Scripture? (cf.) (Methods:) What process can we follow to determine whether an apparent chiasm was intentional by the author? (cf.) (Principles:) What are the limits of the Christocentric Principle? (cf.) What is 'exegesis'?

Exegesis, as indicated by its etymology, is the act of critically interpreting a text in an attempt to "draw the meaning out" of the text. (This is in contrast to what has come to be know as eisegesis, where one reads his own meaning into the text.)

"Biblical exegesis" is the act of drawing the meaning out of a Biblical text. So Biblical exegesis would cover all of the following sorts of inquiries and more:

(Grammar:) Who is it that “wills” in 1 Corinthians 12:11? (Terminology:) What does “Under the Sun” mean in Ecclesiastes? (Referent Identification:) Who is the author of Hebrews quoting in Hebrews 10:38? (Literary Criticism:) What significance does John perceive in the piercing of Christ's side and the flow of blood and water? The relationship between hermeneutics and exegesis

Basically the distinction boils down to this (as it pertains to the Bible*): Hermeneutics is the field of study concerned with how we interpret the Bible. Exegesis is the actual interpretation of the Bible by drawing the meaning out of the Biblical text.

The distinction is not quite as simple as "theory vs. application," though, since hermeneutics is not just concerned with the philosophy of exegesis, and exegesis is not merely the application of hermeneutical theory -- even if we restrict our comparison to Biblical hermeneutics and Biblical exegesis. Here are a couple of examples to illustrate this:

Hermeneutics also studies the role of eisegesis in interpretation, which is by definition not part of exegesis. Hermeneutics considers the role of church doctrine and theology in interpretation -- both of which are (often) irrelevant to exegesis. (Ray explained the challenges with seeing exegesis as "applied hermeneutics" in this meta post.) So we are sort of comparing apples to... ontology here. In a sense there is no overlap; The focus of exegesis is the text. The focus of hermeneutics is stuff like exegesis... why do we do it? how do we do it? how should we do it? As far as sequence, I suppose it could be argued that since exegesis is "critical" in nature, it implies some scientific method, which implies some prior hermeneutic. That is as far as I think we could go in relating the two sequentially, though.**

**Given the scope of this site, I am assuming the question is specifically about the distinction between Biblical hermeneutics and Biblical exegesis.*

***Gordon Fee and Dougless Stewart, in How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth) say that exegesis is Step 1 and hermeneutics is Step 2 to emphasize that what we think about the text should be based on what the text actually says. (But they essentially had to redefined their terms in order to make this point.)*

shareimprove this answer edited Apr 13 at 12:47

Community♦ 1 answered Jul 5 '13 at 4:52

Jas 3.1 7,79914595 - Jas 3.1 (A.) It is incorrect to state that "Eisegesis is not a part of Exegesis": we rely on Eisegesis, and bring in cultural factors to understand: Judges 12, and "Shibboleth"; Solomon relying on the "probable" behavior of a legitimate mother; etc. (B.) Traditions and Doctrine ARE very important to Exegesis, otherwise passages have little depth: Jesus condemning observance of tradition, over commandment: Matt. 15:9, "Corban", in Mark 7:11-13; Circumcision, John 7:22-23, etc. (C.) Corrected this comment because of my misunderstanding of something you wrote, apologies! – elika kohen May 14 '15 at 6:28 "Hermeneutics considers the role of church doctrine and theology in interpretation -- both of which are (often) irrelevant to exegesis." This is a very subjective statement that presumes a hermeneutic system that employs church doctrine and theology is inherently inferior to one that does not. That may be your personal opinion, but it is not a proven fact. The question asked for clear definitions of hermeneutics and exegesis and not for opinions on which hermeneutic principles are superior to others. – user15733 Oct 24 '16 at 16:39 add a comment

Solipsism (/ˈsɒlɪpsɪzəm/ (About this sound listen); from Latin solus, meaning "alone", and ipse, meaning "self")[1] is the philosophical idea that only one's own mind is sure to exist. As an epistemological position, solipsism holds that knowledge of anything outside one's own mind is unsure; the external world and other minds cannot be known and might not exist outside the mind. As a metaphysical position, solipsism goes further to the conclusion that the world and other minds do not exist.

Contents Varieties Edit

There are varying degrees of solipsism that parallel the varying degrees of skepticism:

Metaphysical solipsism Edit Main article: Metaphysical solipsism Metaphysical solipsism is a variety of solipsism. Based on a philosophy of subjective idealism, metaphysical solipsists maintain that the self is the only existing reality and that all other realities, including the external world and other persons, are representations of that self, and have no independent existence.[citation needed] There are several versions of metaphysical solipsisms, such as Caspar Hare's egocentric presentism (or perspectival realism), in which other people are conscious but their experiences are simply not present.[citation needed]

Epistemological solipsism Edit

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morto-tats-blog · 6 years

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Give up yer auld life story

I was wondering recently why those Patek Philippe ads for the act of fathers passing on their watches to their sons make me feel that particular type of guttural illness reserved for the most vile, syrupy rot that offends the very core of my being.

Leaving aside any psychoanalytic deep dive you reckon my reaction justifies, I find the ads in question vom-inducing not just for their commodification of the father-son relationship, but also for the existential feeling of illness (akin to that described in Sartre’s La Nausée) they provoke. The kind of feeling brought on when confronted with something that is metaphysically foreign to you and challenges your very being in the world.

Consistently aghast everytime I open Monocle, the Economist or a similarly complacent zine of the centre right, I have never been able to completely put my finger on why this Swiss intergenerational exchange of wealth inspires ontological dread alongside the weltschmerz that is par for the course when confronted with the financialisation of human relationships.

The ontological aspect to my reaction has recently been explained by my realisation that I don’t possess the central characteristic of the human condition that the ad appeals to: narrativity - having a life story, a narrative; the idea that each of us constructs and lives a narrative and this narrative, or life story is us, it is who we are. It is that conception of a person being shoved in my face that makes me feel nauseous, because it is completely foreign to me and, according to Galen Strawson, I’m not alone.

‘He who has a why to live can bear almost any how’

A celebrated agitator of the traditional view of self, Strawson distinguishes between two kinds of people: Narratives and Episodics. Narratives want to make something of their lives. Episodics do not. For Narratives, giving their life a pattern that reflects what they care about, their values, is making something of their life. For Narratives a coherent narrative that adds up to who they are is the thread holding their life together. It is their life.

But not everyone gives their life a pattern. For episodics there is not this kind overarching coherence to things. Experiences come and go, events happen, but they are not replenishing a well of ‘me’ and telling an overall story of a life. There is a certain blindness to the past, or what life experiences have meant to them as a person.

As an episodic I am completely uninterested in the answer to the question of what I have made of my life. I am just alive and this whole accompanying idea of creating a narrative, and a way of describing it to myself and others, has no part of it. What I care about, in so far as I care about this ‘my life’ construct, is how I am now.

Enjoyment culture

Despite Strawson’s useful distinction, the Narrative approach - the idea that there is a story to your life that you are adding to everyday - does seem to be the default view. The advertising industry, and social media in particular (‘enjoyment culture’), has fully grasped this in recent years, and has exploited it with incredible success.

Enjoyment culture has set up a kind of ubermensch within the Narrative framework: a person who enjoys themselves all the time. The corollary being that if your narrative does not resemble this you are failing in life.

To be clear,narrativity in itself is not bad. Indeed Narratives are in good company: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Plato, Keroauc all saw the process of Narrative creation as the fundamental human project. But this coherence, pattern seeking tendency has been made problematic by the annexation of narrativity by modern enjoyment culture as espoused by advertising and social media. Specifically, this move has made disentangling your personal narrative vocabulary from that provided by enjoyment culture, to engage in a true process of self-creation, problematic

Social media and advertisement hark back to the Freudian therapist who operates from a position of knowledge or authority to the patient: it sees us only in relation to a single theory of the human condition, and doesn't ask questions in a genuinely curious, meaningful way, instead only eliciting in what relation our lives stand to a wider theory.

Enjoyment culture makes us into a character in its own version of events, and does not allow us to have different values apart from enjoyment. Its interventions are designed to help us understand ourselves just as the Freudian: as agents that stand in some relation to a preconceived body of theory, or in this case the master signifier of our time: Enjoyment.

For Narratives the antidote to the aggressive seizure of narrativity by enjoyment culture may involve a Socratic approach, similar to what has occurred in the evolution of psychotherapy: an approach which asks questions in order to facilitate a self-generated idiosyncratic narrative, rather than assuming we all want to be enjoying ourselves all the time. I don’t know what this looks like in terms of social media and advertising, but there is a view that these media can deliver us from political psychosis, so why not Narrative psychosis?

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circlesfitness-blog · 6 years

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Data, Surveillence and Social Media

The 21st century slavery

Jill Scott, an American soul singer and song writer highlights the concept of surveillance in one of her songs titled ‘Watching me’. She expresses how she feels watched all the time in her everyday life. Indeed data and surveillance has become part of our everyday life and information has now become the new currency. The age of information technology allows for total strangers to get access to peoples personal information for their own again, moreover the state and the social media corporations. It is the use of that information that is worrisome and problematic. In this post I will be reflecting on the content of the course discussing my opinions about responses to and experiences of digital media as it relates to the political life. I will be looking specifically at ‘Data, Surveillance and Social Media Corporations’ and I will substantiate my discussion with reference to examples from my own knowledge as well as from the course material. My blog will include links, memes, gifs, images and other digital content, as well as citations from academic books and articles to further support my point.

The English Oxford Dictionary defines surveillance as “close observation, especially of a suspected spy or criminal”. This definition mostly refers to surveillance as a tool mainly used by the state to watch citizen criminal behaviour, for instance CCTV cameras in the streets were introduced to curb crime activities, in a sense that criminals will not act in criminal activities knowing that there are cameras watching them. No doubt that has had a huge impact in lessening crime activities in our streets. In comparison with surveillance online though, it seems to be suggesting a different game altogether. Because if we were to go with the initial definition, it would mean that everyone who is online is a criminal and that is not true. It means something else and does more. According to Lyon (2013) surveillance has spilled out of its old fashion-state containers to become a feature of everyday life, at work, at home, at play, on the move. So far from the single all Seeing Eye of Big Brother, myriad agencies now trace and track mundane activities for a plethora of purposes. Making us visible is fundamentally about keeping us in check for multiple reasons, in addition to that it also serves as a business machine for the state and social media corporations. Of course it may not necessarily be a bad thing as this can also help with counting the world’s population or helping our economy for example.

Online data and surveillance is done through technological algorithms and feeds into the business of information turned commodity exchange between multi corporations such as advertising and marketing, banking, insurance and more “codes, usually processed by computers, sort out transactions, interactions, visits, calls, and other activities; they are the invisible doors that permit access to or exclude from participation in a multitude of events, experiences, and processes” (Lyon, 2013:13). Social media algorithms curate our lives. They control us and what we do and can dictate what we consume. According to a Forbes (2017) article Facebook for example “wants you to keep coming back. To keep you engaged, they need to offer you interesting content to read. This content has to come largely from a pool of posts, photos, etc. created by your friends and pages you like.

Lyon (2013) further explains that the resulting classifications are designed to influence and to manage populations and persons thus directly and indirectly affecting the choices and chances of data subjects. The gates and barriers that contain channel, and sort populations and persons have become virtual. It seems the population is easily controlled and seem powerlessly submissive to these tactics and devices. Our personal information is used by Social Media Corporations to sell to other companies and make more money every day, furthermore the state is keeping a close watch on the population like a hawk in order to exercise control over them. Nevertheless people keep coming back online and spending their days working online by proving information freely. In fact it has become more like a drug addiction and studies also show that more people are increasingly spending more time online “the mass appeal of social networks on the Internet could potentially be a cause for concern, particularly when attending to the gradually increasing amounts of time people spend online” (Kuss & Griffiths, 2011: 3528-3552). Kuss & Griffiths (2011) further argue that on the Internet, people engage in a variety of activities some of which may be potentially to be addictive. Rather than becoming addicted to the medium per se, some users may develop an addiction to specific activities they carry out online. Furthermore in their research Web Africa reported that in South Africa alone in the last year Facebook increased by 8%, from 12-million to 13-million users, Twitter by 12%, from 6,6-million to 7,4-million users, YouTube by 15%, from 7,2-million to 8,28-million users, and Instagram, with a staggering 133%, from 1,1-million to 2,68-million users. The numbers are growing ridiculously.

In his article Marx (2008) talks about contemporary surveillance methods and popular culture both as distinctive kinds of soul training and plays off of Michele Foucault’s (1977) study of modern means of training the person to be compliant. This explains the willingness of people in engaging with internet so addictively without question. Like an alcoholic, they know that alcohol is not good for them but they take it any away. There must be a sense of power dimension at play.

Power has many faces, in some instances even faceless. In this case I would like to use the Panopticon as a metaphor of power relations. The Panopticon is a theory developed by Jeremy Bentham, the idea of a perfect prison “Panopticism, the social trajectory represented by the figure of the Panopticon, the drive to self-monitoring through the belief that one is under constant scrutiny, thus becomes both a driving force and a key symbol of the modernist project” (Wood, 2003:234-239). What it does is that it exercises power over the society without any physical force. The society willingly give themselves to the might of these online power dimensions “for Foucault the Panopticon represented a key spatial figure in the modern project and also a key dispositive in the creation of modern subjectivity, in other words in the remaking of people (and society) in the image of modernity” (Wood, 2003:234-239). According to Wood (2003) the Panopticon must not be understood as a dream building: it is the diagram of a mechanism of power reduced to its ideal. Its power is willed and applied without using any form of physical force. Similarly the internet must not be understood as a dream utopian innovation for all, it is a mechanism of power through many of its use such as surveillance and data selling.

We live in an era of capitalism were everything is driven by money and riches. In the digital age I see the online addiction as slavery in the 21st century with slight differences as compared to the past “slavery was a brutal exercise of exploitation by the individual and state of the bondsman and bondswoman, and was extremely profitable” (Stevenson, 2015). Furthermore, in comparison to the 21st century slavery Stevenson (2015) says slavery fundamentally meant a loss of control over the vital aspects of ones’s life and the lives of one’s loved ones. It often meant physical and psychological abuse. By today’s standards, the average slave was not treated humanely, or even humanly, by their owners or governmental power. The only difference is that digital labour or the 21st century slavery is not physical.

References

Forbes. 2017. Your Social Media News Feed And The Algorithms That Drive It. https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2017/05/15/your-social-media-news-feed-and- the-algorithms-that-drive-it/#42e9108e4eb8

Kuss, D. J. & Griffiths, M. D. 2011. Online Social Networking and Addiction—A Review of the Psychological Literature. International Gaming Research Unit, Psychology Division, Nottingham Trent University. 8(9), 3528-3552; doi:10.3390/ijerph8093528

Lyon, D. 2003. Computer codes and mobile. In Lyon (ed), Surveillance as Social Sorting: Privacy, Risk, and Digital Discrimination. Routledge.

Marx, G. T. 1996. Soul Train: The New Surveillance and Popular Music, In E. Leichtman, forthcoming (eds). This article expands on the musical section in G. Marx, Electric Eye in the Sky: Some Reflections on the New Surveillance and Popular Culture, in D. Lyon and E. Zureik (eds.), Computers, Surveillance & Privacy.

Stevenson, B. E. 2015. What is Slavery?. Polity Press.

Web Africa. Social Media-The latest South African Stats. www.webafrica.co.za/blog/social- media-2/social-media-latest-south-african-stats/

Wood, D. 2003. Surveillance & Society. Editorial. Foucault and Panopticism Revisited. University of Newcastle upon Tyne, UK 1(3): 234-239

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