#but like for the love of god when we say learn media literacy its not just to have nice nuanced discussions about art and what not

[loveaankilaq]

No offense, but a lot of people need to know how to actually identify fascism hidden in art instead of being like "all fascist art is ugly and bad" because you make yourself very vulnerable to fascist art that is for all intensive purposes, not ugly, which is the most dangerous form it manifests in. Fascists don't have a nuanced world perspective so that's why it's usually easy to sniff out when a piece of art is fascist. But there's def fascists who are on a technical level, talented. Paintings or sculptures or exhibits that on surface just seem pretty and what not, or stories that have a coherent plot and are generally enjoyable if not just a bit hollow feeling, and you'd never know such a horrible person made it. Talent and creativity are not blessings from God given to only the best and purest people deemed worthy of the ability, anyone on earth no matter who can dedicate their time to being a good artist and making something visually appealing. Fascists are capable of some very very beautiful renaissance style paintings because part of their ideology revolves around that art being the epitome of western civilization and so they WILL dedicate their time to learning that art. Sure on surface level oh what its a very technically marvelous painting of a blonde angel woman with a shield in the renaissance style on the surface you wouldn't be able to tell initially that the painter is a fascist unless you are able to analyze art and ask yourself "what is the artist saying with this" and then you'll be able to smell out the fascism even in an impressive piece. So no, you cannot always tell if art is fascist or not by its quality, a fascist can make very pretty art and if you only determine its ideology by surface appearance means you can't see when fascism is subtle and hidden within the work. Just as you cant tell if someone is a fascist based off their appearance which is something people on this website still really struggle with.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Recommendation engines and "lean-back" media

In William Gibson’s 1992 novel “Idoru,” a media executive describes her company’s core audience:

“Best visualized as a vicious, lazy, profoundly ignorant, perpetually hungry organism craving the warm god-flesh of the anointed. Personally I like to imagine something the size of a baby hippo, the color of a week-old boiled potato, that lives by itself, in the dark, in a double-wide on the outskirts of Topeka. It’s covered with eyes and it sweats constantly. The sweat runs into those eyes and makes them sting. It has no mouth…no genitals, and can only express its mute extremes of murderous rage and infantile desire by changing the channels on a universal remote. Or by voting in presidential elections.”

It’s an astonishingly great passage, not just for the image it evokes, but for how it captures the character of the speaker and her contempt for the people who made her fortune.

It’s also a beautiful distillation of the 1990s anxiety about TV’s role in a societal “dumbing down,” that had brewed for a long time, at least since the Nixon-JFK televised debates, whose outcome was widely attributed not to JFK’s ideas, but to Nixon’s terrible TV manner.

Neil Postman’s 1985 “Amusing Ourselves To Death” was a watershed here, comparing the soundbitey Reagan-Dukakis debates with the long, rhetorically complex Lincoln-Douglas debates of the previous century.

(Incidentally, when I finally experienced those debates for myself, courtesy of the 2009 BBC America audiobook, I was more surprised by Lincoln’s unequivocal, forceful repudiations of slavery abolition than by the rhetoric’s nuance)

https://memex.craphound.com/2009/01/20/lincoln-douglas-debate-audiobook-civics-history-and-rhetoric-lesson-in-16-hours/

“Media literacy” scholarship entered the spotlight, and its left flank — epitomized by Chomsky’s 1988 “Manufacturing Consent” — claimed that an increasingly oligarchic media industry was steering society, rather than reflecting it.

Thus, when the internet was demilitarized and the general public started trickling — and then rushing — to use it, there was a widespread hope that we might break free of the tyranny of concentrated, linear programming (in the sense of “what’s on,” and “what it does to you”).

Much of the excitement over Napster wasn’t about getting music for free — it was about the mix-tapification of all music, where your custom playlists would replace the linear album.

Likewise Tivo, whose ad-skipping was ultimately less important than the ability to watch the shows you liked, rather than the shows that were on.

Blogging, too: the promise was that a community of reader-writers could assemble a daily “newsfeed” that reflected their idiosyncratic interests across a variety of sources, surfacing ideas from other places and even other times.

The heady feeling of the time is hard to recall, honestly, but there was a thrill to getting up and reading the news that you chose, listening to a playlist you created, then watching a show you picked.

And while there were those who fretted about the “Daily Me” (what we later came to call the “filter bubble”) the truth was that this kind of active media creation/consumption ranged far more widely than the monopolistic media did.

The real “bubble” wasn’t choosing your own programming — it was everyone turning on their TV on Thursday nights to Friends, Seinfeld and The Simpsons.

The optimism of the era is best summarized in a taxonomy that grouped media into two categories: “lean back” (turn it on and passively consume it) and “lean forward” (steer your media consumption with a series of conscious decisions that explores a vast landscape).

Lean-forward media was intensely sociable: not just because of the distributed conversation that consisted of blog-reblog-reply, but also thanks to user reviews and fannish message-board analysis and recommendations.

I remember the thrill of being in a hotel room years after I’d left my hometown, using Napster to grab rare live recordings of a band I’d grown up seeing in clubs, and striking up a chat with the node’s proprietor that ranged fondly and widely over the shows we’d both seen.

But that sociability was markedly different from the “social” in social media. From the earliest days of Myspace and Facebook, it was clear that this was a sea-change, though it was hard to say exactly what was changing and how.

Around the time Rupert Murdoch bought Myspace, a close friend a blazing argument with a TV executive who insisted that the internet was just a passing fad: that the day would come when all these online kids grew up, got beaten down by work and just wanted to lean back.

To collapse on the sofa and consume media that someone else had programmed for them, anaesthetizing themselves with passive media that didn’t make them think too hard.

This guy was obviously wrong — the internet didn’t disappear — but he was also right about the resurgence of passive, linear media.

But this passive media wasn’t the “must-see TV” of the 80s and 90s.

Rather, it was the passivity of the recommendation algorithm, which created a per-user linear media feed, coupled with mechanisms like “endless scroll” and “autoplay,” that incinerated any trace of an active role for the “consumer” (a very apt term here).

It took me a long time to figure out exactly what I disliked about algorithmic recommendation/autoplay, but I knew I hated it. The reason my 2008 novel LITTLE BROTHER doesn’t have any social media? Wishful thinking. I was hoping it would all die in a fire.

Today, active media is viewed with suspicion, considered synonymous with Qanon-addled boomers who flee Facebook for Parler so they can stan their favorite insurrectionists in peace, freed from the tyranny of the dread shadowban.

But I’m still on team active media. I would rather people actively choose their media diets, in a truly sociable mode of consumption and production, than leaning back and getting fed whatever is served up by the feed.

Today on Wired, Duke public policy scholar Philip M Napoli writes about lean forward and lean back in the context of Trump’s catastrophic failure to launch an independent blog, “From the Desk of Donald J Trump.”

https://www.wired.com/story/opinion-trumps-failed-blog-proves-he-was-just-howling-into-the-void/

In a nutshell, Trump started a blog which he grandiosely characterized as a replacement for the social media monopolists who’d kicked him off their platforms. Within a month, he shut it down.

While Trump claimed the shut-down was all part of the plan, it’s painfully obvious that the real reason was that no one was visiting his website.

Now, there are many possible, non-exclusive explanations for this.

For starters, it was a very bad social media website. It lacked even rudimentary social tools. The Washington Post called it “a primitive one-way loudspeaker,” noting its lack of per-post comments, a decades old commonplace.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/05/21/trump-online-traffic-plunge/

Trump paid (or more likely, stiffed) a grifter crony to build the site for him, and it shows: the “Like” buttons didn’t do anything, the video-sharing buttons created links to nowhere, etc. From the Desk… was cursed at birth.

But Napoli’s argument is that even if Trump had built a good blog, it would have failed. Trump has a highly motivated cult of tens of millions of people — people who deliberately risked death to follow him, some even ingesting fish-tank cleaner and bleach at his urging.

The fact that these cult-members were willing to risk their lives, but not endure poor web design, says a lot about the nature of the Trump cult, and its relationship to passive media.

The Trump cult is a “push media” cult, simultaneously completely committed to Trump but unwilling to do much to follow him.

That’s the common thread between Fox News (and its successors like OANN) and MAGA Facebook.

And it echoes the despairing testimony of the children of Fox cultists, that their boomer parents consume endless linear TV, turning on Fox from the moment they arise and leaving it on until they fall asleep in front of it (also, reportedly, how Trump spent his presidency).

Napoli says that Trump’s success on monopoly social media platforms and his failure as a blogger reveals the role that algorithmically derived, per-user, endless scroll linear media played in the ascendancy of his views.

It makes me think of that TV exec and his prediction of the internet’s imminent disappearance (which, come to think of it, is not so far off from my own wishful thinking about social media’s disappearance in Little Brother).

He was absolutely right that this century has left so many of us exhausted, wanting nothing more than the numbness of lean-back, linear feeds.

But up against that is another phenomenon: the resurgence of active political movements.

After a 12-month period that saw widescale civil unrest, from last summer’s BLM uprising to the bizarre storming of the capital, you can’t really call this the golden age of passivity.

While Fox and OANN consumption might be the passive daily round of one of Idoru’s “vicious, lazy, profoundly ignorant, perpetually hungry organisms craving the warm god-flesh of the anointed,” that is in no way true of Qanon.

Qanon is an active pastime, a form of collaborative storytelling with all the mechanics of the Alternate Reality Games that the lean-forward media advocates who came out of the blogging era love so fiercely:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/06/no-vitiated-air/#other-hon

Meanwhile, the “clicktivism” that progressive cynics decried as useless performance a decade ago has become an active contact sport, welding together global movements from Occupy to BLM that use the digital to organize the highly physical.

That’s the paradox of lean-forward and lean-back: sometimes, the things you learn while leaning back make you lean forward — in fact, they might just get you off the couch altogether.

I think that Napoli is onto something. The fact that Trump’s cultists didn’t follow him to his crummy blog tells us that Trump was an effect, not a cause (something many of us suspected all along, as he’s clearly neither bright nor competent enough to inspire a movement).

But the fact that “cyberspace keeps everting” (to paraphrase “Spook Country,” another William Gibson novel) tells us that passive media consumption isn’t a guarantee of passivity in the rest of your life (and sometimes, it’s a guarantee of the opposite).

And it clarifies the role that social media plays in our discourse — not so much a “radicalizer” as a means to corral likeminded people together without them having to do much. Within those groups are those who are poised for action, or who can be moved to it.

The ease with which these people find one another doesn’t produce a deterministic outcome. Sometimes, the feed satisfies your urge for change (“clicktivism”). Sometimes, it fuels it (“radicalizing”).

Notwithstanding smug media execs, the digital realm equips us to “express our mute extremes of murderous rage and infantile desire” by doing much more than “changing the channels on a universal remote” — for better and for worse.

Image: Ian Burt (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/oddsock/267206444

CC BY: https://creativecommo

ns.org/licenses/by/2.0/

[nightcoremoon]

it's evident people haven't watched enough kids media to adequately understand just what constitutes a kids show as opposed to a show that kids can watch and be entertained by

when I was a kid I watched king of the hill and blues clues (among other things). king of the hill is NOT a kids show by any stretch of the imagination; it is an adult animation, replete with fairly heavy subject matter, sexual themes, political humor, cultural references that kids won't understand, discussion of religion in the modern day, depression and suicidal thoughts, adultery, puberty and sexual awakenings, body image, propane, propane accessories, and ultimately above all else what it means to be family. and blues clues is a show about a man who plays with a shovel & pail, talks to his condiments and mailbox, and sometimes he teleports into the felt dimension, all while playing Sherlock Holmes hercule poirot with his dog, and teaching kids how to count and draw and recognize colors and learn their ABCs. do you see the fucking difference? no? then I'll make it more clear.

dora the explorer & go diego go, mickey mouse clubhouse, handy manny, octonauts, bob the builder, super why, wild kratts, zoboomafoo, jojo's circus, wow wow wubbzy, stanley, doc mcstuffins, max & ruby, wonder pets, bubble guppies, ni hao khai lan, backyardigans, little einsteins, caillou (ugh) and p*w p*trol (double ugh), these are all undeniably kids shows. their audience is children (and the occasional adult by age with severe intellectual disabilities) and maybe the parents whose brains are too fried to care what's on the tv. these shows main purpose is to educate while entertaining on subjects one would encounter in preschool and kindergarten. counting 1-10, ABCs, basic color, basic language, basic intrapersonal skills, basic emotional literacy, problem solving, using your imagination, what sounds do animals make, breaking the fourth wall to ask the audience to answer what's 2+2 or tell them a lesson they learned today like I LEARNED TO NEVER JUDGE A BOOK BY ITS COVER or some simple message like that. it's always light, there's no edgelord grimdark "what if they were dead the whole time" bullshit. it's just good clean simple wholesome [except for paw patrol] programs for kids to be distracted for a little bit of time, while also letting them walk away having said they learned something. at least half of the time dedicated to every single one of these shows is devoted to the same shit over and over again. I'm the map I'm the map I'm the map I'm the map I'm the map I'm the map WE FUCKING GET IT YOURE THE MAP! backpack backpack I'm the backpack loaded up with things and knickknacks too, anything that you might need I've got inside for you. we did it we did it we did it HOORAY! come on vamanos everybody let's go, come on let's get to it, I know that we can do it,

WHERE ARE WE GOING

👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻

THESE SONGS ARE BURNED INTO MY BRAIN AND THEYLL BE STUCK IN MY HEAD UNTIL I DIE

say click take a pic, the hot dog dance, CAN HE FIX IT???, pizza! spaghetti!, THE DOC IS IN AND SHELL FIX YOU UP, max & ruby ruby & max max & ruby ruby & max MAX & RUBY RUBY & MAX MAX & RUBY RUBY & MAX, wonder pets wonder pets we're on our way to help the friend and save the day, we're not too big and we're not too tough but when we work together we've got the right stuff, goooOOO WONDER PETS YAAAAY~, yoooour backyard friends the backyardigans (weve got the whole wide world in our yard to explore, thATS WHY EVERY DAY WEEEEERE BACK FOR MOOOORE), were going on a trip in our little rocket ship SOARING THROOOOOUGH THE SKY!!! little einsteins!

I swear to god I've been forced to watch so much children's television in my life it's no wonder there's no room left for serotonin executive function or the ability to speak to morons

point is I know my way around kids shows. my sisters were born in 98, 02, 05, 06, 10, and 18, I think, I don't even know because they're all a blur, I'm literally closer in age to my parents than to my youngest sibling, I never stopped being exposed to kids shows. I know what is and is not a kids show.

adventure time? not a kids show even though kids watch it. it's a "for everyone" show. it's got a target audience of 100% of the planet. steven universe? not a kids show even though kids watch it. miraculous ladybug? not a kids show even though kids watch it. scooby doo? not a kids show even though kids watch it. I'm not discussing the history of adult acceptance of animation, adult animation, or anime, so don't ask. dexter's laboratory. the grim adventures of billy & mandy. codename kids next door. teen titans. fairly oddparents. kim possible. invader zim. AVATAR THE LAST AIRBENDER. totally spies. courage the cowardly dog. the proud family. SPONGEBOB F*ING SQUAREPANTS. powerpuff girls. foster's home for imaginary friends. oh yeah you know what's coming next. my little goddamn pony friendship is mother fucking magic is not. a. kids. show. even though kids can watch it. it is a cartoon. it is an everyone show. that's why it's disingenuous and fucking stupid to decry any fan over the age of 7 as a pedophile and a weirdo creep; it participates in the infantilization of femininity. why is it ok for 20somethings to keep watching aang and squidward and finn & jake and zim and "return the slab" and everyone's totally fine wth that but when it's twilight sparkle suddenly everyone's like whoa you're a huge fucking loser for watching this girly wussy baby show for girly wussy babies. oh some bronies are sex crazed perverts? I'm sorry have you seen just how much porn there is for spongebob? oh some bronies are cringe? I'm sorry have you met half the steven universe fandom? oh some bronies are fascist rick sanchez kinnies with fedoras and katanas? BREAKING BAD FANS, HELLO!?!?!?

this is such a stupid tiring boring argument. maybe magic talking horses being friends and turning their friendship into magic rainbow nuclear fucking arms and blasting the evil out of a demon and turning her into the coolest fucking half-unicorn biker lesbian in the world is something that brings me, and adult, pure wholesome joy, in between bojack horseman and dark souls and breaking bad and deftones and fallout new vegas and jojo and cannibal corpse and other bleak depressing edgy shit that also brings me comfort. and MAYBE me at 16 starting to watch MLP:FIM becoming finally comfortable with the outward public expression of "traditionally feminine" interests is the main reason why I realized I was a girl when I did, and MAYBE I just like how pretty the colorful ponies look, AND MAYBE I KIN WITH ONE OR TWO OR EIGHT CHARACTERS, WHAT OF IT?

AND MAYBE ITS LITERALLY THE BEST LONG RUNNING FANTASY TV SERIES ON THE MARKET RIGHT NOW* SINCE GAME OF THRONES FUCKING SUCKS

but whatever, kids watch it sometimes so it's illegal for anyone who's not a kid to enjoy it, but only if it's something girly because liking girly things is bad because girliness is inherently bad, and the only things that are good have predominantly male casts*. right? right??? wrong, fucker. g4mlp has so much more in common with adventure time & atla than with blues clues or dora the fucking explora...r.

but keep in mind I'm saying this while hugging a blues clues plushie my grandma gave me for valentine's day because it reminds her of when I was a baby because I may not watch blues clues but it still means a lot to me for nostalgia and is 50% of the reason why I love ray charles. kids media isn't necessarily bad. I still do enjoy watching it with my little sisters. all this is is me being anal about categorization because I'm autistic and I LIVE for categorizing everything.

*besides atla obviously

[dropintomanga]

Can Sports Manga Really Break Through in North America?

Here we are in the summer of 2020 and it’s usually San Diego Comic-Con time. And with it comes discussion of how manga is doing in 2020. There was a Manga Publishing Industry Roundtable discussion at Comic-Con with representatives from almost all of the U.S. manga publishers (which you can watch here) about what’s happening in the U.S. side of things. While manga sales have dropped due to the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, they have rebounded back in some ways. A great thing about this is that it’s not just mainstream titles that are selling; it’s also series that are from other genres like slice-of-life and horror.

Which now leads into the title of this post because at the end of the discussion, publishers were asked about what they would like to see in the future. Erik Ko, chief of operations at UDON Comics, said something that really piqued my interest. He said that he wants to see if sports manga can truly break out in North America (i.e. reach levels of sales and popularity a la My Hero Academia, Demon Slayer, etc.). Erik mentioned how his daughter loves Haikyu!! on Crunchyroll and watched all 3 seasons multiple times (It’s also mentioned that Haikyu!! sold well during the pandemic for its U.S. publisher Viz Media).

While the manga has officially ended as of this writing, Haikyu!! will last for a while as the anime will have a 4th season and possibly more. However, while Haikyu!! is loved by a lot of anime/manga fans, it’s not exactly a series that has gotten EVERY shonen fan or manga reader talking. With the many sports manga licenses that manga publishers have gotten over the past few years, it doesn’t sound like there’s significant traction.

This does beg the question of what will it take for sports manga to really catch the eyes of manga readers here in the United States.

For starters, I’ll discuss a bit about the history of sports anime here in the United States. It’s been noted that a lot of sports anime do not tend to sell well over here. There was an Answerman article on Anime News Network answering “Why Do Sports Anime Bomb in North America?” that really goes into this. While it’s noted in the article that Yuri!! on Ice and Free! are indeed sports anime and have sold well, almost all discussion about those series revolves around the relationships between the male characters. Sports play second fiddle to the relationships compared to series like Haikyu!!, Slam Dunk, and Captain Tsubasa (where the sports aspect is still preached a lot).

Speaking of Captain Tsubasa, if you don’t know about this series, this is the one sports anime/manga that generated a lot of love overseas in countries that worship football/soccer. In the Manga: The Citi Exhibition book, there was an article on the promotion of Captain Tsubasa in Baghdad, Iraq by the Japan Self-Defense Force. The series was promoted via pictures on water distribution tanks in Iraq in the mid-2000s’ as a way to make Iraqi children smile. During the U.S. occupation of Iraq, Japan would later work with Iraqi media channels to show programming that would help encourage the country. One of these shows happened to be Captain Tsubasa, which was dubbed in Arabic. The series’ fandom took off from there and more places in the Middle East (like Saudi Arabia) even got in on the action using hacked satellites to watch. 

I wonder if this is what Erik Ko wants to see - something like Captain Tsubasa that not only gets fans gushing about the story and characters, but also inspires kids to become professional athletes or at least become more physically active in their own lives.

A big problem that gets in the way of this happening in the U.S. is how sports culture is like over here. How do I explain this? I’ll use a quote from a 2016 article in the Milwaukee Independent about Anime Milwaukee.

“While the Anime Milwaukee convention does not collect statistical data about those who attend, walking around the convention provided empirical confirmation of how Anime speaks to multi-generational and multi-cultural people. 

Anime itself will not solve the very real problems faced by disadvantaged residents in Milwaukee. 

But unlike the adversarial escapism offered by sports teams and the nature of competitive games, the appeal of Anime is with its positive messages. Where as sports is an unrealistic role model for struggling youth, for the most part Anime offers socially beneficial and moral examples.”

Sports in the United States are very much “us versus them.” In Japan, sports focuses on healthy competition between players. At least, that’s what Japanese sports stories try to focus on. While healthy competition between players does happen over here, it either doesn’t get shown as much in U.S. sports media or that competition becomes toxic to the point it hurts innocent people. In the U.S., you’re supposed to win and get recognized in order to move ahead in your respective sport via whatever means necessary. A good example is college basketball over here and how competitive schools have been involved in recruiting scandals over the best high school players. Another example is the psychological trauma faced by the number of young female athletes who were sexually abused/harassed and forced to believe that it was all part of the process to get ahead in their respective sport. I want to note that sports programs in the U.S. are often heavily underfunded, which adds to the pressure that faces any youth going through sports programs.

There’s also this tendency to view athletes over here as all-knowing celebrity gods (i.e. athletes who say awful things with confidence on social media) or people that only know how to play their respective sport (ie. the “shut up and dribble” comment to outspoken basketball players on social issues). There’s no in-between where we get to see the complete humanity of the athlete.

This does tie into how sports fans and anime/manga fans may not get along. You usually learn more about the nuanced aspects of life from outside sports than within. Sports over here preach some questionable values that anime/manga fans sometimes don’t believe in. Add the fact that sports is shoved down Americans’ throats so much and you can see why not everyone over watches sports. I do want to note that there are U.S. pro athletes showcasing their love for anime. While this is nice to see, almost all the titles they grew up watching are mainstream shonen/shojo. I’m curious if athletes would watch series like Haikyu!!, Kuroko’s Basketball, Eyeshield 21, etc., but then I wonder if they would keep watching as they can only handle so much sports drama as it’s part of their everyday reality.

So what will it take for a sports manga to break through in a big way? Viz Media tried to promote Slam Dunk here using the NBA to promote literacy in 2008. I also found out that Tokyopop tried to do something with the NBA via its Cine-Manga initiative in the mid-2000s’ and it only lasted from 2004-2007. So to that extent, there probably has to some kind of manga that’s similar to the now-famous The Last Dance documentary, which chronicled Michael Jordan’s last championship run with the Chicago Bulls in the 1997-1998 NBA season. 

Though honestly, it’s gonna take a mangaka who’s really interested in all aspects of American sports culture to come up with that kind of story. What might be better is that the story heavily criticizes the culture in a compelling and sometimes humorous way. I think that’s what will really get all U.S. manga fans and comic fans interested, especially those who are sick of commercialized sports exposure wherever they go. I do think over time as anime/manga continue to be accepted in the geek ecosystem, we can see this kind of story take off. 

Until then, if you happen to be someone who likes both sports and anime/manga in a level-headed manner like me, you’re doing alright. It’s hard to occupy both spaces when you’re supposed to choose a side. Although I liked physical education during my school days, I can understand why anyone whose hobbies lie more towards the artistic and creative side disliked physical education possibly due to the structure in how it’s taught. I know sports anime lovers that dislike watching real sports in general and I get why.

Hearing Erik’s comments made me wonder about the beauty of sports manga. Now that I think hard about it, sports anime/manga are a intersection of both the “nerd” and “jock” in a way that helps everyone. To be honest, that intersection is what really bridges gaps that makes people better. It’s what truly completes a person. I’ll use this example - you can’t have mental health without physical health and vice versa. Some kind of exercise can help the mind while learning how your mind works can help you do better in physical activities that connect people together.

Maybe more importantly, what sports manga tends to preach is that winning shouldn’t be everything. Right now, everyone is encouraged to win at something just for a taste of meaningless status and we’re seeing how that mentality can ruin someone. Sports, with all of its benefits freed from corporate influence, are supposed to teach us (like all great manga stories do) that there’s no “us versus them,” there’s only “us” in the end.

And that kind of story deserves to hit a home run that rounds all the bases to reach a celebratory and meaningful win for the world.

[comic-watch]

In Case You Missed It: The Quest of Ewilan gets a gorgeous adaption! Image and Top Cow Present Aphrodite V! Shannon Wheeler reveals the MEMOIRS OF A VERY STABLE GENIUS! IDW’s Sonic the Hedgehog and Scout’s Stabbity Bunny Sell Out! WIN a Trip to San Diego Comic Con! and Lion Forge continues to make a difference! 

News from the World of Indie Comics you might have missed this week!

  IDW EuroComics Begins a new Quest

The Bestselling Pierre Bottero Novels THE QUEST OF EWILAN are being adapted to Gorgeous Graphic Novels, Providing First Visuals of the World of Gwendalavir Before Feature Film

IDW EuroComics proudly presents the English-language debut of The Quest of Ewilan, Vol. 1: From One World to Another, the first chapter in the sequential adaption of Pierre Bottero’s bestselling novel series and a whimsical adventure featuring strong female characters, in the tradition of Lewis’ Narnia and L’Engle’s Time Quartet. Scripted by Lylian and illustrated by Laurence Baldetti, The Quest of Ewilan, Vol. 1 will be available in stores in September.

  The Quest for Ewilan, Vol. 1: From One World to Another 8.5″ x 11″ | Hardcover | Full color | 64 pages | $14.99 | 978-1-68405-325-4

Image Comics and TopCow’s APHRODITE V—A NEW ENTRY IN THE APHRODITE MYTHOS—ARRIVES THIS JULY

Writer Bryan Hill (POSTAL, BONEHEAD) and artist Jeff Spokes will launch APHRODITE V this July from Image/Top Cow.

In the near future, Los Angeles is a city on the brink of evolution, struggling with a new wave of terror fueled by black-market technology. Enter Aphrodite V: a fugitive from her masters, seeking individuality and purpose. She is the bleeding edge of biomechanics and L.A.’s best hope against a new enemy—one that seeks to become a god among machines.

“This is a great way for people unfamiliar with this side of the Top Cow universe to jump into a story about the intersection of technology, humanity, and justice,” said Hill.

One machine wants to destroy the city. Another has come to save it. Only one will survive. APHRODITE V #1 hits comic book shops Wednesday, July 18th.

  Image Comics MEMOIRS OF A VERY STABLE GENIUS—an irreverent and entertaining new book from the creator of Sh*t My President Says

New Yorker cartoonist and multiple Eisner Award-winner Shannon Wheeler (Too Much Coffee Man, Sh*t My President Says, God is Disappointed in You) debuts MEMOIRS OF A VERY STABLE GENIUS this July from Image/Shadowline Comics.

MEMOIRS OF A VERY STABLE GENIUS is an irreverent book of personal short stories and gags featuring Shannon Wheeler’s critically acclaimed humor, pathos, and honesty—including a 40-page full-color section!

“Books are like children. It’s with pride I send this one out into the world to fend for itself, have its heart broken, take a job that will slowly erode all self-respect,” said Wheeler. “That said, this is the best book I’ve ever done.”

MEMOIRS OF A VERY STABLE GENIUS TP hits comic book stores Wednesday, July 11th and bookstores Tuesday, July 17th. The final order cutoff deadline for comics retailers is Monday, June 4th and it can be pre-ordered via Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Indiebound, Indigo, and Books-A-Million.

  SONIC THE HEDGEHOG COMIC BOOKS CONTINUE TO SELL OUT

IDW Publishing is proud to announce that the first three issues of the new Sonic the Hedgehog comic book series has sold out at the Distributor level and will receive further printings. In addition to the complete sell-out of issue #2 and #3, each within a week of their release, issue #1’s second printing sold out only six days after its announcement. To satisfy fans and retailers, IDW will make Sonic the Hedgehog #1 Third Printing and Sonic the Hedgehog #2 Second Printing available in stores on Wednesday, May 16th, with Sonic the Hedgehog #3 Second Printing slated for release on May 23rd.

The heat on Sonic the Hedgehog marks a huge success for IDW Publishing, who is launching their first-ever Sonic series with weekly releases throughout the month of April. Each of the first four issues of Sonic the Hedgehog — written by longtime Sonic scribe Ian Flynn and illustrated by rotating artists Tracy Yardley, Adam Bryce Thomas, Jennifer Hernandez, and Evan Stanley — focuses on a different guest star (Tails in issue #1, Amy Rose in #2, and Knuckles in #3, leading into the debut of the hotly anticipated new character Tangle in issue #4).

 STABBITY BUNNY #3 FROM SCOUT COMICS GOES BACK FOR SECOND PRINTING!

SCOUT COMICS AND ENTERTAINMENT announces that Scout’s break-out hit for 2018, STABBIY BUNNY by Richard Rivera and Dwayne Biddix, has continued its trend of selling out and issue #3 has gone back to a second printing.

STABBITY BUNNY could take place at the intersection of Sesame Street and Nightmare on Elm Street, where a 100-year-old plush bunny and seven-year-old Grace must combat evil in all its forms. Horror and mystery combine in this captivating series. Stabbity Bunny is published monthly by Scout Comics. Please visit us at  www.ScoutComics.com! 

Traveling Stories & IDW Present the Ultimate San Diego Comic-Con® Sweepstakes

Traveling Stories and IDW are proud to launch the annual San Diego Comic-Con® sweepstakes, a contest which will last through June 13th at 3:00pm PT.

Those who enter have a chance of winning the following ultimate experience package: ● Two 4-day passes to sold-out Comic-Con® ● Airfare for 2 within the continental U.S. ● Four nights stay at the Wyndham Bayside in San Diego Gaslamp district ● An exclusive tour of the San Diego Comic Art Gallery with Ted Adams, CEO of IDW ● Airport pickup and shuttle to the gallery, and then to the hotel

Anyone in the world can enter! $10 gives you 10 chances to win. Each additional $1 is another chance – the math is simple. Every dollar is a donation to Traveling Stories, a 501c3 nonprofit organization that empowers kid to outsmart poverty by helping them fall in love with reading by the 4th grade.

“I’ve always been an avid reader, even when I was little. I’m excited that through this sweepstakes we’re able to raise the funds needed to give kids in underprivileged areas the same literary experience I was lucky enough to have,” said Ted Adams, Founder & CEO of IDW Publishing.

How to snag entries in the sweepstakes is easy, fast, and secure via: bit.ly/comic-con-sweeps. Just follow the steps from there!

“Anyone who does not have tickets to San Diego Comic-Con® would be crazy to not enter this sweepstakes! It’s a full and complete package including a cool tour of the Comic Art Gallery with me,” said Emily Moberly, Founder, and CEO of Traveling Stories.

To learn more about Traveling Stories and its programs, please visit travelingstories.org.

 LION FORGE JOINS THE CBLDF AS A CORPORATE MEMBER

Lion Forge is proud to join the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund as the organization’s newest Corporate Member! Lion Forge is a trans-media studio with a focus on comics publishing across all age groups. A company committed to “Comics for Everyone,” Lion Forge strives to publish titles that reflect the diversity of our world in the characters, the creators, and the Lion Forge team, creating content that is just as original.

Lion Forge founder and CEO, David Steward II says, “We truly believe we are bringing the brightest and most diverse talent in the industry into the conversation, while creating the most awesome new comics and graphic novels that we — as fans — want to see in the world.”

CBLDF provides legal and educational resources to protect the freedom to read comics. The organization is a partner in Banned Books Week, the Kids’ Right to Read Project, Free Comic Book Day, and other national institutions that support intellectual freedom and literacy. CBLDF’s work extends from courtrooms to classrooms to conventions, where CBLDF defends the freedom to read by providing legal aid, letters of support in book challenges, challenges to unconstitutional legislation, and a robust schedule of programs about current and historical censorship to audiences all over the world.

Lion Forge stands beside Abrams, Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab, BOOM! Studios, comiXology, Dark Horse Comics, DC Entertainment, DCBS, Diamond Comic Distributors, Fakku!, IDW Publishing, Image Comics, Lion Forge, Oni Press, Neverwear, Penguin Random House, Rebellion, ReedPOP, Scholastic, SPX, TFAW.com, Valiant, Viz Media, and the Will and Ann Eisner Family Foundation as a corporate member supporting CBLDF’s important work.

Until the next installment of ICYMI,  WE’LL BE WATCHING!

Ross Hutchinson was a contributing editor to ICYMI this week. Thanks, Ross! 

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ICYMI: INDIE NEWS ROUNDUP for the WEEK ENDING 4-22-2018 #comicwatch #iamawatcher #ICYMI In Case You Missed It: The Quest of Ewilan gets a gorgeous adaption! Image and Top Cow Present…

[untoadoption]

Global Celebration (Multicultural Children's Book Day 2020)

New Post has been published on https://untoadoption.org/global-celebration-multicultural-childrens-book-day-2020/

Global Celebration (Multicultural Children's Book Day 2020)

I’m pleased as punch to participate in Multicultural Children’s Book Day again this year.

Little Man was tickled when our friendly mailman delivered this vibrant picture book– and just in time for Chinese New Year! (We received it as a complimentary gift in exchange for our honest review.) An inclusive, celebratory tome highlighting a cornucopia of global customs…

https://www.amazon.com/Lets-Celebrate-Special-Around-World/dp/1782858342/ref=sr_1_1?crid=R9C2I5LG5SZC&keywords=let%27s+celebrate+special+days+around+the+world&qid=1580089232&sprefix=celebrate+special+da%2Caps%2C316&sr=8-1

Kate DePalma’s Let’s Celebrate! is a journey of “special days around the world.” From Passover and Dia de los Muertos in North America to Eid al-Fitr in Egypt and Carnaval in Brazil, one of the best ways to learn about and appreciate another culture is to dive in and share something special: a meal, a holiday, a custom. In celebrating our uniqueness we conversely recognize our commonalities; and in appreciating different people groups we appreciate a different facet of God’s likeness, since all peoples were created in His image. The author says it best, “We can all come together, no matter the day.”

… we especially enjoyed the page about China’s Spring Festival [Lunar New Year].

https://www.amazon.com/Lets-Celebrate-Special-Around-World/dp/1782858342/ref=sr_1_1?crid=R9C2I5LG5SZC&keywords=let%27s+celebrate+special+days+around+the+world&qid=1580089232&sprefix=celebrate+special+da%2Caps%2C316&sr=8-1

I can’t wait to incorporate some of the new “special days” the author featured into our homeschool year; encouraging such celebration, she even includes a handy year-at-a-glance calendar mapping out a sampling of observances that readers can adopt into their existing festivities.

Celebrating holidays and learning about people & places around the world are two of my very favorite endeavors; this book puts those two hands together, and seems a providential pick for our home library. Just last week we hosted a big “Around the World” multicultural party with our homeschool co-op, our own wee League of Nations, wherein we learned about and celebrated different cultures around the globe. Then over the weekend we rang in the Chinese New Year alongside other multicultural families.

north america table, featuring canadian maple cookies, mini tacos, & all american apple hand-pies, plus pretend passports for our global travellers

wrapping mummies on the continent of Africa

spaghetti toss in Europe

sampling vegemite (yuck!) and dried kiwi in Oceania

cuddling guinea pigs in South America

Chinese New Year with this gaggle of kiddos

Multicultural Children’s Book Day 2020 (1/31/20) is in its 7th year! This non-profit children’s literacy initiative was founded by Valarie Budayr and Mia Wenjen; two diverse book-loving moms who saw a need to shine the spotlight on all of the multicultural books and authors on the market while also working to get those book into the hands of young readers and educators.  

Seven years in, MCBD’s mission is to raise awareness of the ongoing need to include kids’ books that celebrate diversity in homes and school bookshelves continues.

MCBD 2020  is honored to have the following Medallion Sponsors on board

Super Platinum

Make A Way Media/ Deirdre “DeeDee” Cummings,

Platinum

Language Lizard, Pack-N-Go Girls,

Gold

Audrey Press, Lerner Publishing Group, KidLit TV, ABDO BOOKS : A Family of Educational Publishers, PragmaticMom & Sumo Jo, Candlewick Press,

Silver

 Author Charlotte Riggle, Capstone Publishing, Guba Publishing, Melissa Munro Boyd & B is for Breathe,

Bronze

Author Carole P. Roman, Snowflake Stories/Jill Barletti, Vivian Kirkfield & Making Their Voices Heard. Barnes Brothers Books,  TimTimTom, Wisdom Tales Press, Lee & Low Books,  Charlesbridge Publishing, Barefoot Books Talegari Tales

Author Sponsor Link Cloud

Jerry Craft, A.R. Bey and Adventures in Boogieland, Eugina Chu & Brandon goes to Beijing, Kenneth Braswell & Fathers Incorporated, Maritza M. Mejia & Luz del mes_Mejia, Kathleen Burkinshaw & The Last Cherry Blossom, SISSY GOES TINY by Rebecca Flansburg and B.A. Norrgard, Josh Funk and HOW TO CODE A ROLLERCOASTER, Maya/Neel Adventures with Culture Groove,  Lauren Ranalli, The Little Green Monster: Cancer Magic! By Dr. Sharon Chappell, Phe Lang and Me On The Page, Afsaneh Moradian and Jamie is Jamie, Valerie Williams-Sanchez and Valorena Publishing, TUMBLE CREEK PRESS, Nancy Tupper Ling, Author Gwen Jackson, Angeliki Pedersen & The Secrets Hidden Beneath the Palm Tree, Author Kimberly Gordon Biddle, BEST #OWNVOICES CHILDREN’S BOOKS: My Favorite Diversity Books for Kids Ages 1-12 by Mia Wenjen, Susan Schaefer Bernardo & Illustrator Courtenay Fletcher (Founders of Inner Flower Child Books), Ann Morris & Do It Again!/¡Otra Vez!, Janet Balletta and Mermaids on a Mission to Save the Ocean, Evelyn Sanchez-Toledo & Bruna Bailando por el Mundo\ Dancing Around the World, Shoumi Sen & From The Toddler Diaries, Sarah Jamila Stevenson, Tonya Duncan and the Sophie Washington Book Series, Teresa Robeson  & The Queen of Physics, Nadishka Aloysius and Roo The Little Red TukTuk, Girlfriends Book Club Baltimore & Stories by the Girlfriends Book Club, Finding My Way Books, Diana Huang & Intrepids, Five Enchanted Mermaids, Elizabeth Godley and Ribbon’s Traveling Castle, Anna Olswanger and Greenhorn, Danielle Wallace & My Big Brother Troy, Jocelyn Francisco and Little Yellow Jeepney, Mariana Llanos & Kutu, the Tiny Inca Princess/La Ñusta Diminuta, Sara Arnold & The Big Buna Bash, Roddie Simmons & Race 2 Rio, DuEwa Frazier & Alice’s Musical Debut, Veronica Appleton & the Journey to Appleville book series  Green Kids Club, Inc.

We’d like to also give a shout-out to MCBD’s impressive CoHost Team who not only hosts the book review link-up on celebration day, but who also works tirelessly to spread the word of this event. View our CoHosts HERE.

Co-Hosts and Global Co-Hosts

A Crafty Arab, Afsaneh Moradian, Agatha Rodi Books, All Done Monkey, Barefoot Mommy, Bethany Edward & Biracial Bookworms, Michelle Goetzl & Books My Kids Read, Crafty Moms Share, Colours of Us, Discovering the World Through My Son’s Eyes, Educators Spin on it, Shauna Hibbitts-creator of eNannylink, Growing Book by Book, Here Wee Read, Joel Leonidas & Descendant of Poseidon Reads Philippines, Imagination Soup, Kid World Citizen, Kristi’s Book Nook, The Logonauts, Mama Smiles, Miss Panda Chinese, Multicultural Kid Blogs, Serge Smagarinsky Australia, Shoumi Sen, Jennifer Brunk & Spanish Playground, Katie Meadows and Youth Lit Reviews

FREE RESOURCES from Multicultural Children’s Book Day

Free Multicultural Books for Teachers

Our New FREE Teacher Classroom Physical and Developmental Challenges Kit http://ow.ly/kcbZ30p3QWz

Free Empathy Classroom Kit for Homeschoolers, Organizations, Librarians, and Educators

Free Understanding Developmental & Physical Challenges Classroom Kit

TWITTER PARTY! Register here!

Hashtag: Don’t forget to connect with us on social media and be sure and look for/use our official hashtag #ReadYourWorld.

Related posts:

https://untoadoption.org/scandinavian-for-a-day/

https://untoadoption.org/olympic-inspired-geography-fair/

https://untoadoption.org/chinese-new-year-2018-year-of-the-dog/

https://untoadoption.org/best-in-the-west-my-fave-pdx-restaurant/

https://untoadoption.org/mock-united-nations/

[pets-beaty]

via How Webs

Learn About Symbol Meaning

symbol meaning: a symbol, like everything else, has a dual aspect. We must therefore distinguish between the 'meaning' and the 'meaning' of the symbol. A symbol is a brand, sign or word that indicates, means or is understood to represent an idea, object or relation. It is a sign or shape which used to represent something such as an organization, e.g. a red cross or a Jewish star. Symbols or sign take the form of words, sounds, ideas or visual, gestures, images and are used to convey other ideas and beliefs. For example, a red octagon can be a symbol for "STOP". On a map, a blue line can represent a river.

symbol meaning

any thing that can represents or represents something else in one sign, especially a material object that represents something abstract. Symbols enable people to go beyond what is known or seen by making connections between otherwise very different concepts and experiences. Symbol meaning all type of communication (and data processing) is easily achieved through the use of symbols. Numbers are symbols for numbers. Alphabetical letters can be symbols of sounds. Personal names are symbols that represent individuals. A red rose can symbolize love and compassion. The variable 'x', in a mathematical equation, can symbolize the position of a particle in space.

A symbol (pronounced SIM bull) is an image or thing that stands for something else. It can be as simple as a letter, which is a symbol for a certain sound (or a series of sounds). Likewise, each word is a symbol of the idea that it represents. Flags are symbols for nations. And of course we have all kinds of visual symbols that we use every day: $ @ & =. In addition to using symbols in their writing, authors can also criticize symbols that already exist in their culture (or someone else's). For example, monkeys in Western culture symbolize stereotypically the natural origins of humanity and the primitive qualities that we normally ascribe to animals.

Symbols can help support:

communication - symbol communication books and devices can help people make choices and express themselves.

independence and participation - symbols help understanding, which can increase engagement, choice and trust.

literacy and learning - symbol software encourages users to "write" through selection symbols from a predetermined set in a grid.

creativity and self-expression - writing letters and stories and expressing one's own opinions.

access to information - we all need accessible information and it must be presented so that the reader can understand and use it.

Symbols, icons and images

Symbols and pictograms are all around us, from instructions on a device to signs in foreign airports. They immediately provide us with information that is otherwise too difficult or time-consuming to access. For example, a road sign in text would be useless for someone who could not read the language and too time consuming to be safe for someone who could.

Symbols are similar to pictograms, but can convey a much wider and more varied level of meaning. Icons are a visual key that is used to access and isolate one piece of information. They can have a design that can convey a layered meaning, for example a traffic sign within a red triangle is a warning and a red circle with a line through a prohibition, but they cannot be used to convey anything more than basic information.

See also about at sign (@)

Mathematical symbols can be confusing and can form a real barrier to learning and understanding basic math skills. A mathematical concept is independent of the chosen symbol to represent it. There are many of the symbols below, the symbol is usually synonymous with the corresponding concept (ultimately a random choice made due to the cumulative history of mathematics), but in some situations a different convention can be used. For example, depending on the context, the triple bar "≡" can represent congruence or a definition. Symbol meaning in mathematical logic, however, numerical equality is sometimes represented by "≡" instead of "=", the latter representing well-formed formulas. In short, the convention determines the meaning.

However, symbols do not have to be the kind of thing that you will only find on keyboards. A tree can symbolize nature. Einstein symbolizes genius in our culture. Everything can be a symbol, if we make one. In the literature, symbols are often characters, settings, images or other motives that stand up for larger ideas. Authors often use symbols (or 'symbolism') to give their work more meaning and to make a story more than the events it describes. This is one of the most basic and common literary techniques. Authors usually don't give us a route map to their symbolism, so it can take a long time to figure out what the symbols in a literature stand for - to interpret them.

Concepts and words are symbols, just like visions, rituals and images; this also applies to the manners and habits of daily life. All this reflects a transcendent reality. (especially in semiotics) a word, sentence, image or the like with a complex of associated meanings and perceived as an inherent value that can be separated from that which is symbolized, as part of that which is symbolized, and as its normal function for performing or displaying that which is symbolized: usually understood as primarily deriving the meaning from the structure in which it occurs, and generally distinguished from a sign.

More about symbol meaning

Symbols are images used to support text, making the meaning clearer and easier to understand. They offer a visual representation of a concept. Symbol sets are extensive collections of images that offer more support than illustrations or icons. Symbol sets often follow a schematic structure, or a set of 'design rules', which helps the reader to grow his own vocabulary independently.

There are so many metaphors that reflect and imply something that, although expressed so differently, is unspeakable, though made so multifaceted, remains inscrutable. Symbols hold the mind to the truth, but are not the truth itself, so it is misleading to borrow them. Every civilization, every age, must produce its own life. Symbols or sign add layers of meaning to a complete story, poem or other creative work. They enable an author to bring an idea or message into a story, a message on multiple levels. symbol meaning For example, an author can convey a message about God by writing a story about a large family, in which one or both parents are symbols for God, while the children are symbols for humanity (and perhaps there are pets or a garden to represent the natural world) The story could go at the same time about family dynamics and religion, in other words, symbols add depth.

If a person acts roughly, stupidly or violently, we might call him an "ape" or a "gorilla" who expresses a negative outlook on wild nature and human nature in our culture. But in the movies of Planet of the Apes, this symbol is reversed - the apes are often more sympathetic, sophisticated and intelligent than humans, so they symbolize some of the best qualities of humanity and the worst. This makes the film a criticism of popular ideas about humanity and nature: "human nature is not all bad and the badness in people is not necessarily natural." At the same time, people normally symbolize civilization and humanitarian values, but the cruelty of some people in movies makes humanity the symbol of cruelty rather than the apes.

It seems clear to anyone that all major and minor symbolic systems from the past functioned simultaneously on diferent three levels: the physical of the waking consciousness, the spiritual of the dream ineffable of the unknowable. The term "meaning" can only refer to the first two, but these are nowadays in the hands of science - that is the province as we have said, not of symbols but of signs. symbol meaning the unspeakable, the absolutely unknowable, can only be perceived. It is the province of art that is not an 'expression', pure or even primary, but a search for and formulation of experiences that evoke energy-generating images: imparting what Sir Herbert Read aptly called a 'sensory awareness of being'.

12 characters and symbols that you must know

= There are grammatically correct answer and mean the same thing, both are the natural ways of saying it. Use either one. "11 + 5 = 14" can be read as "eleven plus five is sixteen" or "eleven plus five is sixteen"

& (Ampersand) The ampersand can be used to indicate that the 'and' in an item in the list is part of the item's name and not a separator (for example, 'Pop, rock, rhythm and blues and hip hop') . The and sign can still be used as an abbreviation for "and" in informal writing, regardless of how "and" is used.

* (Asterisk) When you use the asterisk as a footnote symbol, this indicates that you intend to comment on something at the bottom of the page. You have made a promise, so you can keep it better. The first rule for using asterisks is that if you use one, the reference starts at the bottom of the same page. The asterisk is the asterisk above the "8" key on your keyboard.

@ (At sign) The at sign, @ is normally read aloud as "at"; it is also often referred to as the at symbol or commercial at. It is always used as an accounting and making invoice abbreviation, meaning "at a rate of" (example, 7 widgets @ £ 2 per widget = £ 14), but it is now used most frequently in email addresses and "handles" on social media.

¢ (Cent) An American cent equal to one cent. The definition of a cent is a monetary unit that is equal to 1/100 of a dollar in the United States. An example of a cent is one cent.

° (degree sign) Hold down the ALT key and type the number 0176 to create a degree sign. Example of use of degree symbol: the weather is now 60 ° Fahrenheit. Use unicode degree symbols in an html document or copy and paste the character.

” The sign of mark is a symbol (") which means the all same as above or earlier. An example of ditto is what you would say in reply if someone says "I love cake", if you also like cake.

$ (Dollar sign) A dollar sign ($) is the symbol on the same key as the number four on the US QWERTY keyboard. It is used to represent a US currency, for example, $ 10.00 for ten dollars. As shown in the image on the right, the dollar sign looks like the letter "S" with a vertical line running through the center.

# (Number or hash or Hash) In the United States, the number plate on a telephone keypad is called the "hash", but outside of North America it is called the (hash & hash) clearly refers to the British symbol for its currency, the English pound.

% (Percent) Always make a note of the number and the word percentage at the beginning of a sentence (for example, "Ten percent ..."). The noun percentage requires an adjective to describe the size (for example, "a large percentage") when it does not refer to specific numbers in the sentence.

~ (Tilde) A tilde is a character on a keyboard that looks like a wavy line (~). ... The tilde also has other applications. It is a diacritical sign in other languages, such as Portuguese, but it is also used in logic and mathematics. For example, when you place a tilde before a number, you say that the number is approximate.

/ (Slash, Solidus, Stroke or Virgule) The slash (/) - sometimes called an impact, a solidus, a stroke or a virgule - is a common symbol in the English language. ... Compare this with "virgule", which was introduced in English in the 1830s from the French word for "comma". In medieval manuscripts, a virgule or slash was often used instead of today's comma.

_ (Underscore or Understrike) Underscore. The symbol “_”  is a character that appeared on the keyboard typewriter and was used primarily to underline words. ... Nowadays the sign is used to create visual spacing in a series of words in which whitespace is not allowed.

Thanks for reading about symbol meaning. Please share it to others for spreading information and knowledge about writing.

https://ift.tt/2yxAPfS August 02, 2019 at 12:43PM https://ift.tt/2IPp48y https://ift.tt/2ZsAkzB

[myareopagitica-blog]

Rape in India: A HUMANISTIC APPROACH

[Disclaimer: This essay may hurt religious sentiments. Read and share at your own risk. Hurting religious sentiments is unlawful and an offense in India cause no matter how many people get murdered or raped, you can’t talk against religion as someone’s feelings might get hurt; even if you’re looking to start a discussion about a solution to uplift our misguided youth and prevent the rape of India’s daughter, mother and sometimes grandmother.]

 The Bengaluru Mass molestation shocked India, the Nirbhaya case shocked us and rapes against women and minors shocking us since, our Ministers shocking us with their comments, the shocks that we’ve endured as Donald Trump becoming President-Elect (never gets old) and 470 people shockingly dying of shock that their Chief Minister Jayalalithaa had died absolutely un-shockingly after staying in the hospital for 75 days. As a young Indian I can’t help but notice the degrading state of our states that begs a change of state of mind.

I’m a feminist, I‘m a humanist! I’m a 24 year old educated male who is blown away every day by the deeds of my country’s citizens. Citizens who meaninglessly ranted the pledge that all Indians are their brothers and sisters throughout their schooling but grow up and do not even show them the courtesy of living things.And according to me…Our religion, tradition and culture are the biggest reasons why females are treated differently. This may come as a shock to you but bear with me, I have some logical inferences.

During ancient times, most jobs were manual labour related and depended on physical strength rather than the current demand for intelligence. In retrospect, our ancestors were right when they preferred men over women for these jobs cause let’s not deny the fact that men naturally have more muscles than women. This was the origin of the “preference of boy over girl” culture. The male creators and authors of religions were embedded in this culture and spawned a story that reeks of sexism.

Let’s start with Hinduism, the religion that brought us Sati and untouchability, most of the Gods are males. Brahma the creator, Vishnu the protector, Shiva the destroyer; all the jobs are completed by men. Why do we need women? Krishna is famous for his infidelity yet he’s worshipped. Do you imagine the same happening if Krishna was a female. In Ramayana, Sita gives the agni-pariksha while Ram just stood there trying to get the concept of him, a man, giving agni-pariksha. In Christianity, Jesus again is a male. His mother Mary was a virgin. No mention of his father Joseph’s virginity, it’s not important at all. He may have had premarital sex but what’s important is that the mother had to be pure.Somehow using one of our body parts to fulfill that part’s only function makes us (mostly women) impure. In fact throughout the bible most of the prophets and saints are males if not all. In Islamic communities and the Koran, the subjugation of women is so obvious that no one needs to be reminded. But let me remind you anyway. Mohammed married a six year old girl, the Imams and Maulvis are all men, men can marry thrice and divorce the wife by saying “Talaaq” thrice, burkas and hijabs, the sharia law that a woman needs three male witnesses to prove that she was raped and so on. If I share all the religious references I know that support my point, I can write a book bigger than the Song of Ice and Fire.

Our highly held Indian traditions have flaws too. Our girl child needs to learn cooking, needs to be a virgin till marriage, need not study much, need not be as healthy and nourished as a son, needs to prove to everyone that she’s not a prostitute by not wearing western outfits or by not smoking or by not drinking or by not walking the streets after 9pm.When a society has developed through the centuries symbiotically with the morally malnourished ancient religions and traditions, there are bound to be repercussions.

Now after reading this you guys maybe wondering that if religion and tradition are the reasons for crimes against women then why are they not so rampant in western countries where religion and tradition are also widespread. That’s some good wondering because thinking never hurt anyone. Developed countries have a higher literacy rate among females and overall, poverty and population under control and lesser dependence on orthodox traditions to run your life. Now I’m not saying that all Indian traditions are flawed or that we should abandon our culture. If you’re a woman and want to spend the rest of your life wearing a sari covering your head and face and cooking in the kitchen, it’s perfectly fine. I don’t have a problem with that. I’ll have a problem with you if you force your girl child to do the same. You may have given birth to her but you do not own her.

Education and awareness has done a great deal of good for India. The Independence movement, democracy in India, abolishment of untouchability owe greatly to the educated leaders and aware citizens. Stating the obvious, only literacy can turn a closed minded burka/ghunghat laden woman into a space suited astronaut or black coat/gown wearing judge.  

Overpopulation and poverty go hand in hand and is a factory of criminals and low lives where civility, if any, is kept hidden as bad rep, gang strength and physical might is the way of the world. A quick internet search will show you that rape is done by people who want to feel powerful. What gives you more justification to use power on the victim than your own upbringing? Women can’t walk on the street without being stared at and objectified. Political leaders stating that these things happen. Elders believing that somehow it’s the female’s fault for getting raped.

A concoction of male dominated religions, traditions, culture, poor education, overpopulation and poverty has made India to harbor the insensitive specie of Homo sapiens. How do you expect to rise up intellectually and morally as a species if you’re too busy hurting a person who doesn’t share your kind of genitalia? If you don’t treat your kids equally? If you differentiate based on caste? Just try and imagine the social stigma a woman goes through when she elopes with the love of her life, when she’s a divorcee or returns to her parents’ house, when she’s raped or molested. None of these are crimes committed by the woman. This just proves my point of how sick our society’s state of mind is!

For believers, if you honestly believe that God made this world and all its inhabitants then why destroy his creation. Why insert things in the anal cavity of his children. Don’t you wanna go to heaven? Or Do you want to be born as a dung-beetle in your next life?

For non-believers! You are a non-believer for a reason. Maybe because you’re logical and reasonable or maybe because you don’t care about religion, in any way you’re governed by the golden rule of morality “Treat others as you would wish to be treated”. So are the religious but they needed to be told in their language.

And now for the lesser evolved insensitive specie of Indians, with the advent of technology, internet, social media, education and western culture, your time will soon come to an end. You’ll be a lost tribe and not even like the ones who practiced woodoo which got covered in the history books; just surgically removed from the civilized society like a malignant tumor of a kind and no one even cared. Of course some of you would always exist because even though nature and the process of evolution were fabulously designed by time, it hasn’t got rid of the viruses i.e. the likes of serial rapists and sexual predators.

The biggest obstacle in this change of mentality is that we are stuck to the thinking that is prevalent in our current society. In India, we tend to look at the positive side of any religion, religious communities and groups and we tend to ignore the negative damaging side because we find it impolite. We need to see the two-faced monster in the eye. Maybe our parents, grandparents and forefathers did not have the ability to look at things with a critical viewpoint but with the advances in science and technology, we just can't turn a blind eye to this topic.

The simpletons who have somehow managed to reach this paragraph without getting distracted by NaMo’s tweets or getting swept away and swayed by his childish pompous speeches, let me make the solution simple to you. If you love your country and want it to progress, empowerment of women is the only way to go. We shall have twice as many educated people who have control over their lives, bringing wealth to their families and smartly calculating the number of babies they can afford. It will bring down population, poverty, rapes and increase India’s GDP per capita, India’s contribution to the world’s knowledge pool and our respect for fellow citizens.

This essay is my opinion on things and if you feel that it is illogical, has even a fraction of lies, a small shred of misinformation, a political or personal propaganda, you may not share it. If you feel it’s just a desperate attempt at understanding the current situation of intolerance and crimes against women and doesn’t deserve credit, you may not share. But if you agree with every word that I’ve said then there is no excuse to not only sharing the essay but also changing your lives. Don’t just feel sorry about the incidents; shock your patriarchal society and exercise your rights as an independent equal citizen. Take part in repair, improvement and development of the psyche of the Indian culture and society.

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Best Job Quotes

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• Acting in particular is a fun job when you have a good script. I don’t know about acting when you don’t have a great script. I’m gonna say that’s not a great job, it’s kind of a dumb job. But when you have a good part in a good script, it’s the best job, in a way. – Bob Odenkirk • Acting is the best job in the world. Look at the way they treat you when you turn up for work. They give you breakfast and a cup of tea and ask, ‘Are you all right’ They tart up your face, you say somebody else’s words, then pick up your check and go home. And you get days off. I tell you, it really is the way to live. – Bob Hoskins • Actually, acting turned out to be the perfect job for me, because I had a lot of different interests. I thought about being a priest at one point. I thought about being a teacher. I thought about being a lawyer. But I think acting is probably the best job for me. – John C. Reilly • Amidst all the clutter, beyond all the obstacles, aside from all the static, are the goals set. Put your head down, do the best job possible, let the flak pass, and work towards those goals. – Donald Rumsfeld • Anyone who says they don’t enjoy the Army is mad – you can spend a week hating it and the next week it could be the best thing in the world and the best job you could ever, ever wish for. It has got so much to offer. – Prince Harry • As an actor, you want to do the best job possible, and you want the best scripts possible because it makes life more interesting. – Mark Strickson • At the end of the day, the TV show is the best job in the world. I get to go anywhere I want, eat and drink whatever I want. As long as I just babble at the camera, other people will pay for it. It’s a gift. – Anthony Bourdain

jQuery(document).ready(function($) var data = action: 'polyxgo_products_search', type: 'Product', keywords: 'Job', orderby: 'rand', order: 'DESC', template: '1', limit: '68', columns: '4', viewall:'Shop All', ; jQuery.post(spyr_params.ajaxurl,data, function(response) var obj = jQuery.parseJSON(response); jQuery('#thelovesof_job').html(obj); jQuery('#thelovesof_job img.swiper-lazy:not(.swiper-lazy-loaded)' ).each(function () var img = jQuery(this); img.attr("src",img.data('src')); img.addClass( 'swiper-lazy-loaded' ); img.removeAttr('data-src'); ); ); ); • Being a chef is the best job in the world. – Gordon Ramsay • Being a showrunner is tough, but it is incredibly rewarding and it is, without a doubt, the best job I’ve ever had. – Graham Yost • Big money, big Liberal Party politics and big media are trying to get rid of us, of course, by letting Packer take over Fairfax – a media-only company. But we’re hanging in there and doing the best job we can for our readers while we can. – Margo Kingston • Boxing is the best job in the world to let off steam, and people are in trouble when Tyson wants to let off steam – Michael Spinks • But [Sunday] as you saw, it was obviously [the media] took some more than initiative to try to get me to kind of go down the wrong path. I know the last two teams that I’ve been on, I felt like I left those teams prematurely due to media interviews that I’ve done and things kind of taken out of context and they created sort of a media whirlwind in the locker room and things kind of went downhill from there. I’m just trying to do the best job I can do as far as answering the questions and trying to be a better teammate and not try to throw people under the bus. – Terrell Owens • Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.- Confucius • David Ortiz is an icon. He is one of a kind. But we’ll do our best job to replace the offensive aspect, however we can. – Dave Dombrowski • Directing is a nice job. It’s the best job for me. If I had to pay money to do it, I would do it… Directing is playing. Acting. – William Friedkin • Directing is a nice job. It’s the best job for me. If i had to pay money to do it, I would do itIt’s problematical. It’s disapointing often. It’s very challenging. It’s frustrating as hell. It’s extremely demanding and totally satisfying work. And if I wasn’t doing this, I would have to do legitimate work for a living. There are guys out there really working for a living, cleaning streets or coal mining, teaching. Directing is playing. Acting. – William Friedkin • Directing is probably the best job, but acting is really, really great. It’s like a fun vacation that you get paid for. – Bob Odenkirk • Every little kid that steps on the court or the field has aspirations to go pro. I think being a pro basketball player is the best job. The thing I had to realize was that I can’t do every dream that I have. – Brian McKnight • Every mother I’ve ever met, pretty much without exception, is doing the best job she can ever do. – Jennifer Weiner • Everything I do is unfabulous. Im the most normal person. I love walking everywhere, and going to hole-in-the-wall places, like nail shops, because they do the best job. And I go to vintage stores rather than high-end boutiques, because I like to dress different from other people. – Ashley Benson • For somebody who loves foreign policy, being Secretary is the best job in the world – but it doesn’t happen twice. – Madeleine Albright • I am already experiencing something better than being a pop star and that’s being a father. It’s the best job in the world. A lot of work, but a lot of fun. – A. J. McLean • I am happy with what I do. I’d love to be the manager of the Atlanta Braves, but they hired somebody this week. So I’ll just have to be inordinately happy with one of the best jobs on the planet. – Robert Gibbs • I am positive – determined to move forward with my life, bring up my babies, and do the best job I can as a mother, entertainer, and person. – Jennifer Lopez • I call ‘Community’ the best day job in the world, because between takes, I get to write music. I get to write sketches. I get to write movies. It’s the best job ever. – Donald Glover • I enjoyed the crew. The best part about ‘The X-Files’ has been the crew. This crew is an exceptional family and to go to work with a bunch of people that you really like is great. They’re all the best of the best and they really try to do the best job they can. I’ll miss that – Robert Patrick • I feel like I have to do the best job I can to basically say, “OK, I understand – you have every right to be angry, but anger is not a plan. Here’s what I want to do, and that’s why I hope you will support me, because I think it will actually improve the lives of Americans.” – Hillary Clinton • I felt like I had kind of played it out, and I wanted to see what was next, and then came Mythbusters. You know, it’s the best job I’ve ever had, on its worst day it’s better than anything else, but it’s a huge amount of responsibility, and there are days when just going into work and building something from someone else’s drawing sounds like going back to heaven. – Adam Savage • I grew up thinking the best job in the world would be a Jedi and being a psychologist is the closest thing I could get, so I wanted to be a Jedi and I don’t want to be a Sith, so that is what keeps me on the straight and narrow. – John Amaechi • I had fun pretending to be a sportscaster. People always think that was a down thing for me. I had the best job in sports broadcasting for two years. – Dennis Miller • I have everything that I could possibly want in life, from a gorgeous granddaughter and a wonderful wife, brilliant students, the best job anyone could hope for, and about half of my hair. Not the half I would have kept, but no one consulted me. – Daniel Gilbert • I have talent at playing myself. I don’t have a very broad range, but at playing myself I am a wizard. It’s more than fun; it’s the best job on Earth. – Ben Stein • I have the best job in the entire history of broadcasting. – Willard Scott • I have the best job in the world with the best fans in the world – Jeremy Davis • I have the best job in the world. – Anthony Bourdain • I have the best job in the world. I’m able to express myself, and people attach themselves to it if they identify with it. Music certainly is a driving force in my life. There’s not a moment where I’m not in it. – James Hetfield • I have the best job in the world. There’s not really a lot to moan or whine about. I’ve got the privilege of going out and doing something I absolutely love. – Boy George • I have the world’s best job. I get paid to hang out in my imagination all day. – Stephen King • I hope to focus on what I’m passionate about because I think I’d do them best job on them – education, urban education, women and children’s issues and literacy. – Jenna Bush • I just feel that God gave me a certain gift, and that was to go out, do storytelling and be an actor. And my responsibility with that gift is to do the best job possible and to re-create real life. – Eric Close • I just try to do the best job I possibly can – put the blinders on, go to work and be the best you can possibly be. Once you have done everything that you possibly can – you’ve put forth your greatest effort – then I can live with whatever’s next. – Bill Parcells • I just try to do the best job that I can, as an actor. Hopefully, that carries through. That’s all I can do. – Luke Mitchell • I know that I am my worst critic. I know that if I can walk away from the set at the end of the day and feel that I did the best job I could and feel proud, that’s what will satisfy me. – Emmy Rossum • I learned that when you do the best job that you can do, some people will idolize you, others won’t care, and some will vilify you. – Mike Love • I learned that when you do the best job that you can do, some people will idolize you, others won’t care, and some will vilify you. I believe it is important to remain humble and thankful for the blessings in our lives, for the tremendous opportunities that are a result of our musical success. – Mike Love • I love acting. I think that’s the best job in the world, but I don’t really enjoy the career of it so much. You don’t have as much control over your life or the material as you do, well, certainly when you’re a director or a producer, so while I love acting, I prefer to make my living as a filmmaker, but my rule on acting is if somebody asks me to do a part, I’ll do it. – David Hayter • I love being a mom. That’s the best job I’ve ever had. All the other stuff I love the same, but being a mom trumps all of it. – Tamera Mowry • I mean, I hate when actors talk about how hard their job is. It’s ridiculous, because we have the best job in the world. – Jon Bernthal • I really like writing in English, and it’s the best job I’ve ever had. – Nell Zink • I tell you, ‘Firefly’? Best job I ever had. Heartbroken when it was canceled, but had it not been canceled, I never would have gotten ‘Serenity’. I think ‘Serenity’ is the most incredible thing I’ve ever been able to actually get my hands on and do. I can’t even tell you how much love I have for that project. – Nathan Fillion • I think Ayn Rand did the best job of anybody to build a moral case of capitalism, and that morality of capitalism is under assault. – Paul Ryan • I think I have the best job in the world. Seventy-one percent of the planet is covered by water, we’ve explored less than five percent of the ocean, and there are so many fabulous discoveries that have yet to be made. – Edith Widder • I think it’s a tough road if you’re a stay-at-home mom, a working mom, if you have a partner, if you don’t. It’s the best job in the world, and the toughest job in the world all at the same time. – Angela Kinsey • I think I’ve got the best job around. – Ron Wyden • I wanna do the very best job I can to fulfill the trust and faith that people have in me. – Hillary Clinton • I want to do the best job I can. – Lucas Till • I was shocked by the reaction I got for Bleak House. It was very intensive but one of the best jobs of my life. It was a chance to play a character that grows and develops and I was very enmeshed in it. But I didn’t realise how stylish it was and how much people would love it. – Anna Maxwell Martin • I would never really analyse what I do. I leave that to other people – I’m not a critic. I just want to get on with whatever I have in hand, you know? Just try to make the best job of the available material. – Dylan Moran • I’d love to do situation comedy – it’s the best job in show business. – Patti LuPone • I’m not concentrated or concerned with any other factors rather than just being able to do the best job that I can. – Benigno Aquino III • I’m not saying you need to become a spokesperson for every cause your character goes through, but it’s important to absolutely do the best job we can in portraying a disease, and all the crap that goes with it. – Monica Potter • I’m not trying to put on airs for anybody. I’m only trying to impress myself by doing the best job I can do. – Matthew McConaughey • In 1971, after seven years in college, with that magic piece of paper clutched triumphantly in my fist, the best job I was able to get was night watchman on a sewer project in Babylon, N.Y. guarding a hole in the ground to prevent anyone from stealing it. God bless the American educational system! – Spider Robinson • In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries you have these great nation states hurling their young men at one another. The victory was really going to rest on who could do the best job of bringing up their kids to become efficient and effective soldiers. That’s pretty grandiose, I guess, but I do think that, and thank God it’s been the armies of democracy that have emerged from this as the triumphant armies. – Stephen Ambrose • In the theater we’re like blue-collar workers: It’s a physical job, you don’t make a lot of money, and you’re on the road all the time. It’s worth it in that it’s the best job in the world, but you have to negotiate living in cities that don’t always accommodate you. – Randy Harrison • Inner peace is not found in things like baseball and world championships. As long as I feel I’ve done the best job I possibly could, I’m satisfied. – Sparky Anderson • It’s a form of bullying, in my opinion, to make sure that your kid gets the best grades, the best jobs and all that sort of stuff. I just want my child to be happy. I want him to do his best and trust God in the rest, but I’m not going to bully him. – Nick Vujicic • It’s basically the best job in the world. If you’re fortunate enough – and I consider myself fortunate – you get to work with your friends and you get to work on projects that interest you. – James Franco • It’s just really making sure I am doing the best job I can do as a dad. I do think that is my No. 1 job. – Tony Dungy • I’ve already felt that I want to direct. Being an executive producer is like the best job in the world because you make all these executive decisions and then you leave the money to other people. You don’t have to be on set and counting beans. – Robbie Coltraine • I’ve always thought that, as a romance writer, I had the best job in the world. I sit around all day making up emotion-drenched, conflict-laden stories that push my heroes and heroines to the edge of sanity. Then I give them a happy ending. – Ruth Glick • I’ve got the best job in the world being a senator from the United States, a senator from South Carolina in the United States Senate, representing South Carolina in the United States Senate is a dream job for me, but the world is literally falling apart. And we can’t get anything done here at home. So that drives my thinking more than anything else. – Lindsey Graham • I’ve got the best job in the world, and i meet some of the most amazing human beings on the planet. I’m one lucky guy. – Ty Pennington • Keep your head down. Mind your business and do the best job you can. – Bill Raftery • Keeping your head down and doing the best job you can in the beginning gives you the opportunity to be evaluated on the basis of the contributions you are making. [Then], when you feel strongly about your work or about a position, you’ll be given more attention [than] if you hadn’t done that constantly. – Hillary Clinton • Loving you is a full-time job. It’s a great job, don’t get me wrong. It’s the best job in the universe. But it’s not easy. – Carrie Jones • My goal was to do the best job I could in governing the state of Wisconsin, in some cases making very tough decisions to have to bring our spending in line with the resources we had at the state level. – Scott McCallum • My kids complained about Secret Service as they became teenagers, and Secret Service has done the very best job they could accommodating them, so it hasn’t restricted any of their activities. – Barack Obama • My left brain is doing the best job it can with the information it has to work with. I need to remember, however, that there are enormous gaps between what I know and what I think I know. – Jill Bolte Taylor • My slogan is I’m the least qualified guy for the job, but I’d probably do the best job. – Gary Coleman • People ask me, “How’s Teen Wolf?,” and I tell them it’s literally the best job I’ve ever had. – Shelley Hennig • People tell me I have the best job in the world, which is true, but I also work with some of the best people in the world. – Michael Silverblatt • Perform your job better than anyone else can. That’s the best job security I know. – H. Jackson Brown, Jr. • Random acts of kindness and the desire to do the best job possible lead to trust. – Jeffrey Gitomer • So to the best we can, what we do is focus on creating value for others, and how do we do that? We do it by trying to produce products and services that our customers will value more than their alternatives, and not just their alternatives today, but what the alternatives will be in the future. We try to more efficiently use resources than our competitors, and constantly improve in that, and we try to do the best job we can in creating a safe environment, and environmental excellence, and constantly improve at that. – Charles Koch • Society as a whole is better off when information is available to the public. Whether you are talking about how to prevent disease, or about who does the best job of treating disease, it is useful to provide as much information to the public as possible. – Dave Obey • Sometimes I think I have the best job in the world. – Louis Susman • The best job goes to the person who can get it done without passing the buck or coming back with excuses. – G. M. Trevelyan • The best job that was ever offered to me was to become a landlord in a brothel. In my opinion it’s the perfect milieu for an artist to work in. – William Faulkner • The best verse hasn’t been rhymed yet, The best house hasn’t been planned, The highest peak hasn’t been climbed yet, The mightiest rivers aren’t spanned; Don’t worry and fret, faint-hearted, The chances have just begun For the best jobs haven’t been started, The best work hasn’t been done. – Berton Braley • The companies that do the best job on managing a user’s privacy will be the companies that ultimately are the most successful. – Fred Wilson • The crew, the actors and the writers all work the same way. We always want to do the best job. – Robert Knepper • The last thing I think I am is perfect. I’m just trying to do the best job I can. I’m trying to be the best father I can to my kids. I’m trying to do the best job I can running my business. – James Packer • The man with the best job in the country is the vice-president. All he has to do is get up every morning and say, ‘How is the president?’ – Will Rogers • The only reason to be in politics is public service. There’s no other reason. Frankly, if that’s the best job you can get in terms of money, that’s too bad, you know. Because frankly, it’s not well paid, everyone knows that. So for most people it’s a big sacrifice. – Malcolm Turnbull • The Patriot Post not only does the best job of putting important news, policy and opinion in proper context, but also of cutting down to size the pompous praters and propagandists on the left. – Lyn Nofziger • The thing that I have done throughout my life is to do the best job that I can and to be me. – Mae Jemison • The things you don’t have control over, you don’t worry about. I have control over my attitude, my perception, how I do things, and you do the very best job you can. Other people have control over other things and you let them do their jobs. – Mike Sherman • The voters reward good performance. So, I’m going to go out and focus, if I become the governor, to do the very best job I can as governor. The rest of it will take care of itself. – Dave Heineman • The worst men have the best jobs the best men have the worst jobs or are unemployed or locked in madhouses. – Charles Bukowski • There’s nothing more fun than being out on stage and getting the vibe from the crowd. There’s nothing like being on a set where you are there to make other people happy and to make them laugh. That’s the best job in the world. – Miley Cyrus • There’s such a wide variation in tax systems around the world, it’s difficult to imagine a harmonized CO2 tax that every country agrees to. That’s not in the cards in the near term. But the countries that are doing the best job, like Sweden, are already doing both of these. I think that eventually we’ll use both of them but we need to get started right away and the cap-and-trade is a proven and effective tool. – Al Gore • These days she simply did the best job she could, accepting the good with the bad. – Nicholas Sparks • To get a job where the only thing you have to do in your career is to make people laugh-well, its the best job in the world. – Ronnie Barker • Trump claims he’d be the “best jobs president that God ever created.” But isn’t his claim to fame firing people? – Michael R. Burch • Twin Peaks’ was the best job I ever had as an actor. – Richard Beymer • We started off with a set of objectives for what we needed to communicate with the company’s identity, created several proposals intended to meet those objectives, and picked the one that did the best job. – Gabe Newell • What you realize is that a lot of actors want to be directed. They’re there to do the best job they can for the director. They have a lot of questions, and your job is to have answers. – Jon Turteltaub • Whatever it is, I just loved it and felt at my absolute happiest when I was performing for people. And if that’s what you want from a job, then this is the best job you could ever do. – James Corden • When it is going well, it is the best job [writing] in the world. For those few hours, you are god, in control of everything. However, for me, the great joy of writing is that it has allowed me to travel the world in search of stories. – Michael Scott • When you do something well, this is the best job in the world. – David Thewlis • Women are always being tested … but ultimately, each of us has to define who we are individually and then do the very best job we can to grow into it. – Hillary Clinton • Writing is hard work; its also the best job Ive ever had. – Raymond E. Feist • Writing studio movies is the best job in the world… it’s awesome. – Thomas Lennon • You can’t please everybody. All you can do is really just try to work from the heart and do the best job that you can and hope for the best. – Jackie Earle Haley • You concentrate on what you are doing, to do the best job you can, to stay out of a serious situation. That’s the way the X-1 was. – Chuck Yeager • You do the best job you can. You take it step by step. It’s hard enough to make a movie. If it works, that’s great. If it means something beyond the moment to somebody, they can take it and it lasts through the years, we’ll see. – Oliver Stone • You just go in and try to do the best job you can everyday. – Nick Cassavetes • You just try to get the best jobs that you can get. Sometimes I produce my own movies, so that’s your own sort of vision. That helps things. I don’t know what it is. Probably just circumstance. I’ve definitely been aware of the fact that I want to do different things. – John Cusack • You try to get yourself into a situation where you only have to answer to yourself, where you can ask advice of people and work with your peers and mentors and things to try to do the best job that you can possibly do. – George Lucas

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[equitiesstocks]

Best Job Quotes

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• Acting in particular is a fun job when you have a good script. I don’t know about acting when you don’t have a great script. I’m gonna say that’s not a great job, it’s kind of a dumb job. But when you have a good part in a good script, it’s the best job, in a way. – Bob Odenkirk • Acting is the best job in the world. Look at the way they treat you when you turn up for work. They give you breakfast and a cup of tea and ask, ‘Are you all right’ They tart up your face, you say somebody else’s words, then pick up your check and go home. And you get days off. I tell you, it really is the way to live. – Bob Hoskins • Actually, acting turned out to be the perfect job for me, because I had a lot of different interests. I thought about being a priest at one point. I thought about being a teacher. I thought about being a lawyer. But I think acting is probably the best job for me. – John C. Reilly • Amidst all the clutter, beyond all the obstacles, aside from all the static, are the goals set. Put your head down, do the best job possible, let the flak pass, and work towards those goals. – Donald Rumsfeld • Anyone who says they don’t enjoy the Army is mad – you can spend a week hating it and the next week it could be the best thing in the world and the best job you could ever, ever wish for. It has got so much to offer. – Prince Harry • As an actor, you want to do the best job possible, and you want the best scripts possible because it makes life more interesting. – Mark Strickson • At the end of the day, the TV show is the best job in the world. I get to go anywhere I want, eat and drink whatever I want. As long as I just babble at the camera, other people will pay for it. It’s a gift. – Anthony Bourdain

jQuery(document).ready(function($) var data = action: 'polyxgo_products_search', type: 'Product', keywords: 'Job', orderby: 'rand', order: 'DESC', template: '1', limit: '68', columns: '4', viewall:'Shop All', ; jQuery.post(spyr_params.ajaxurl,data, function(response) var obj = jQuery.parseJSON(response); jQuery('#thelovesof_job').html(obj); jQuery('#thelovesof_job img.swiper-lazy:not(.swiper-lazy-loaded)' ).each(function () var img = jQuery(this); img.attr("src",img.data('src')); img.addClass( 'swiper-lazy-loaded' ); img.removeAttr('data-src'); ); ); ); • Being a chef is the best job in the world. – Gordon Ramsay • Being a showrunner is tough, but it is incredibly rewarding and it is, without a doubt, the best job I’ve ever had. – Graham Yost • Big money, big Liberal Party politics and big media are trying to get rid of us, of course, by letting Packer take over Fairfax – a media-only company. But we’re hanging in there and doing the best job we can for our readers while we can. – Margo Kingston • Boxing is the best job in the world to let off steam, and people are in trouble when Tyson wants to let off steam – Michael Spinks • But [Sunday] as you saw, it was obviously [the media] took some more than initiative to try to get me to kind of go down the wrong path. I know the last two teams that I’ve been on, I felt like I left those teams prematurely due to media interviews that I’ve done and things kind of taken out of context and they created sort of a media whirlwind in the locker room and things kind of went downhill from there. I’m just trying to do the best job I can do as far as answering the questions and trying to be a better teammate and not try to throw people under the bus. – Terrell Owens • Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.- Confucius • David Ortiz is an icon. He is one of a kind. But we’ll do our best job to replace the offensive aspect, however we can. – Dave Dombrowski • Directing is a nice job. It’s the best job for me. If I had to pay money to do it, I would do it… Directing is playing. Acting. – William Friedkin • Directing is a nice job. It’s the best job for me. If i had to pay money to do it, I would do itIt’s problematical. It’s disapointing often. It’s very challenging. It’s frustrating as hell. It’s extremely demanding and totally satisfying work. And if I wasn’t doing this, I would have to do legitimate work for a living. There are guys out there really working for a living, cleaning streets or coal mining, teaching. Directing is playing. Acting. – William Friedkin • Directing is probably the best job, but acting is really, really great. It’s like a fun vacation that you get paid for. – Bob Odenkirk • Every little kid that steps on the court or the field has aspirations to go pro. I think being a pro basketball player is the best job. The thing I had to realize was that I can’t do every dream that I have. – Brian McKnight • Every mother I’ve ever met, pretty much without exception, is doing the best job she can ever do. – Jennifer Weiner • Everything I do is unfabulous. Im the most normal person. I love walking everywhere, and going to hole-in-the-wall places, like nail shops, because they do the best job. And I go to vintage stores rather than high-end boutiques, because I like to dress different from other people. – Ashley Benson • For somebody who loves foreign policy, being Secretary is the best job in the world – but it doesn’t happen twice. – Madeleine Albright • I am already experiencing something better than being a pop star and that’s being a father. It’s the best job in the world. A lot of work, but a lot of fun. – A. J. McLean • I am happy with what I do. I’d love to be the manager of the Atlanta Braves, but they hired somebody this week. So I’ll just have to be inordinately happy with one of the best jobs on the planet. – Robert Gibbs • I am positive – determined to move forward with my life, bring up my babies, and do the best job I can as a mother, entertainer, and person. – Jennifer Lopez • I call ‘Community’ the best day job in the world, because between takes, I get to write music. I get to write sketches. I get to write movies. It’s the best job ever. – Donald Glover • I enjoyed the crew. The best part about ‘The X-Files’ has been the crew. This crew is an exceptional family and to go to work with a bunch of people that you really like is great. They’re all the best of the best and they really try to do the best job they can. I’ll miss that – Robert Patrick • I feel like I have to do the best job I can to basically say, “OK, I understand – you have every right to be angry, but anger is not a plan. Here’s what I want to do, and that’s why I hope you will support me, because I think it will actually improve the lives of Americans.” – Hillary Clinton • I felt like I had kind of played it out, and I wanted to see what was next, and then came Mythbusters. You know, it’s the best job I’ve ever had, on its worst day it’s better than anything else, but it’s a huge amount of responsibility, and there are days when just going into work and building something from someone else’s drawing sounds like going back to heaven. – Adam Savage • I grew up thinking the best job in the world would be a Jedi and being a psychologist is the closest thing I could get, so I wanted to be a Jedi and I don’t want to be a Sith, so that is what keeps me on the straight and narrow. – John Amaechi • I had fun pretending to be a sportscaster. People always think that was a down thing for me. I had the best job in sports broadcasting for two years. – Dennis Miller • I have everything that I could possibly want in life, from a gorgeous granddaughter and a wonderful wife, brilliant students, the best job anyone could hope for, and about half of my hair. Not the half I would have kept, but no one consulted me. – Daniel Gilbert • I have talent at playing myself. I don’t have a very broad range, but at playing myself I am a wizard. It’s more than fun; it’s the best job on Earth. – Ben Stein • I have the best job in the entire history of broadcasting. – Willard Scott • I have the best job in the world with the best fans in the world – Jeremy Davis • I have the best job in the world. – Anthony Bourdain • I have the best job in the world. I’m able to express myself, and people attach themselves to it if they identify with it. Music certainly is a driving force in my life. There’s not a moment where I’m not in it. – James Hetfield • I have the best job in the world. There’s not really a lot to moan or whine about. I’ve got the privilege of going out and doing something I absolutely love. – Boy George • I have the world’s best job. I get paid to hang out in my imagination all day. – Stephen King • I hope to focus on what I’m passionate about because I think I’d do them best job on them – education, urban education, women and children’s issues and literacy. – Jenna Bush • I just feel that God gave me a certain gift, and that was to go out, do storytelling and be an actor. And my responsibility with that gift is to do the best job possible and to re-create real life. – Eric Close • I just try to do the best job I possibly can – put the blinders on, go to work and be the best you can possibly be. Once you have done everything that you possibly can – you’ve put forth your greatest effort – then I can live with whatever’s next. – Bill Parcells • I just try to do the best job that I can, as an actor. Hopefully, that carries through. That’s all I can do. – Luke Mitchell • I know that I am my worst critic. I know that if I can walk away from the set at the end of the day and feel that I did the best job I could and feel proud, that’s what will satisfy me. – Emmy Rossum • I learned that when you do the best job that you can do, some people will idolize you, others won’t care, and some will vilify you. – Mike Love • I learned that when you do the best job that you can do, some people will idolize you, others won’t care, and some will vilify you. I believe it is important to remain humble and thankful for the blessings in our lives, for the tremendous opportunities that are a result of our musical success. – Mike Love • I love acting. I think that’s the best job in the world, but I don’t really enjoy the career of it so much. You don’t have as much control over your life or the material as you do, well, certainly when you’re a director or a producer, so while I love acting, I prefer to make my living as a filmmaker, but my rule on acting is if somebody asks me to do a part, I’ll do it. – David Hayter • I love being a mom. That’s the best job I’ve ever had. All the other stuff I love the same, but being a mom trumps all of it. – Tamera Mowry • I mean, I hate when actors talk about how hard their job is. It’s ridiculous, because we have the best job in the world. – Jon Bernthal • I really like writing in English, and it’s the best job I’ve ever had. – Nell Zink • I tell you, ‘Firefly’? Best job I ever had. Heartbroken when it was canceled, but had it not been canceled, I never would have gotten ‘Serenity’. I think ‘Serenity’ is the most incredible thing I’ve ever been able to actually get my hands on and do. I can’t even tell you how much love I have for that project. – Nathan Fillion • I think Ayn Rand did the best job of anybody to build a moral case of capitalism, and that morality of capitalism is under assault. – Paul Ryan • I think I have the best job in the world. Seventy-one percent of the planet is covered by water, we’ve explored less than five percent of the ocean, and there are so many fabulous discoveries that have yet to be made. – Edith Widder • I think it’s a tough road if you’re a stay-at-home mom, a working mom, if you have a partner, if you don’t. It’s the best job in the world, and the toughest job in the world all at the same time. – Angela Kinsey • I think I’ve got the best job around. – Ron Wyden • I wanna do the very best job I can to fulfill the trust and faith that people have in me. – Hillary Clinton • I want to do the best job I can. – Lucas Till • I was shocked by the reaction I got for Bleak House. It was very intensive but one of the best jobs of my life. It was a chance to play a character that grows and develops and I was very enmeshed in it. But I didn’t realise how stylish it was and how much people would love it. – Anna Maxwell Martin • I would never really analyse what I do. I leave that to other people – I’m not a critic. I just want to get on with whatever I have in hand, you know? Just try to make the best job of the available material. – Dylan Moran • I’d love to do situation comedy – it’s the best job in show business. – Patti LuPone • I’m not concentrated or concerned with any other factors rather than just being able to do the best job that I can. – Benigno Aquino III • I’m not saying you need to become a spokesperson for every cause your character goes through, but it’s important to absolutely do the best job we can in portraying a disease, and all the crap that goes with it. – Monica Potter • I’m not trying to put on airs for anybody. I’m only trying to impress myself by doing the best job I can do. – Matthew McConaughey • In 1971, after seven years in college, with that magic piece of paper clutched triumphantly in my fist, the best job I was able to get was night watchman on a sewer project in Babylon, N.Y. guarding a hole in the ground to prevent anyone from stealing it. God bless the American educational system! – Spider Robinson • In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries you have these great nation states hurling their young men at one another. The victory was really going to rest on who could do the best job of bringing up their kids to become efficient and effective soldiers. That’s pretty grandiose, I guess, but I do think that, and thank God it’s been the armies of democracy that have emerged from this as the triumphant armies. – Stephen Ambrose • In the theater we’re like blue-collar workers: It’s a physical job, you don’t make a lot of money, and you’re on the road all the time. It’s worth it in that it’s the best job in the world, but you have to negotiate living in cities that don’t always accommodate you. – Randy Harrison • Inner peace is not found in things like baseball and world championships. As long as I feel I’ve done the best job I possibly could, I’m satisfied. – Sparky Anderson • It’s a form of bullying, in my opinion, to make sure that your kid gets the best grades, the best jobs and all that sort of stuff. I just want my child to be happy. I want him to do his best and trust God in the rest, but I’m not going to bully him. – Nick Vujicic • It’s basically the best job in the world. If you’re fortunate enough – and I consider myself fortunate – you get to work with your friends and you get to work on projects that interest you. – James Franco • It’s just really making sure I am doing the best job I can do as a dad. I do think that is my No. 1 job. – Tony Dungy • I’ve already felt that I want to direct. Being an executive producer is like the best job in the world because you make all these executive decisions and then you leave the money to other people. You don’t have to be on set and counting beans. – Robbie Coltraine • I’ve always thought that, as a romance writer, I had the best job in the world. I sit around all day making up emotion-drenched, conflict-laden stories that push my heroes and heroines to the edge of sanity. Then I give them a happy ending. – Ruth Glick • I’ve got the best job in the world being a senator from the United States, a senator from South Carolina in the United States Senate, representing South Carolina in the United States Senate is a dream job for me, but the world is literally falling apart. And we can’t get anything done here at home. So that drives my thinking more than anything else. – Lindsey Graham • I’ve got the best job in the world, and i meet some of the most amazing human beings on the planet. I’m one lucky guy. – Ty Pennington • Keep your head down. Mind your business and do the best job you can. – Bill Raftery • Keeping your head down and doing the best job you can in the beginning gives you the opportunity to be evaluated on the basis of the contributions you are making. [Then], when you feel strongly about your work or about a position, you’ll be given more attention [than] if you hadn’t done that constantly. – Hillary Clinton • Loving you is a full-time job. It’s a great job, don’t get me wrong. It’s the best job in the universe. But it’s not easy. – Carrie Jones • My goal was to do the best job I could in governing the state of Wisconsin, in some cases making very tough decisions to have to bring our spending in line with the resources we had at the state level. – Scott McCallum • My kids complained about Secret Service as they became teenagers, and Secret Service has done the very best job they could accommodating them, so it hasn’t restricted any of their activities. – Barack Obama • My left brain is doing the best job it can with the information it has to work with. I need to remember, however, that there are enormous gaps between what I know and what I think I know. – Jill Bolte Taylor • My slogan is I’m the least qualified guy for the job, but I’d probably do the best job. – Gary Coleman • People ask me, “How’s Teen Wolf?,” and I tell them it’s literally the best job I’ve ever had. – Shelley Hennig • People tell me I have the best job in the world, which is true, but I also work with some of the best people in the world. – Michael Silverblatt • Perform your job better than anyone else can. That’s the best job security I know. – H. Jackson Brown, Jr. • Random acts of kindness and the desire to do the best job possible lead to trust. – Jeffrey Gitomer • So to the best we can, what we do is focus on creating value for others, and how do we do that? We do it by trying to produce products and services that our customers will value more than their alternatives, and not just their alternatives today, but what the alternatives will be in the future. We try to more efficiently use resources than our competitors, and constantly improve in that, and we try to do the best job we can in creating a safe environment, and environmental excellence, and constantly improve at that. – Charles Koch • Society as a whole is better off when information is available to the public. Whether you are talking about how to prevent disease, or about who does the best job of treating disease, it is useful to provide as much information to the public as possible. – Dave Obey • Sometimes I think I have the best job in the world. – Louis Susman • The best job goes to the person who can get it done without passing the buck or coming back with excuses. – G. M. Trevelyan • The best job that was ever offered to me was to become a landlord in a brothel. In my opinion it’s the perfect milieu for an artist to work in. – William Faulkner • The best verse hasn’t been rhymed yet, The best house hasn’t been planned, The highest peak hasn’t been climbed yet, The mightiest rivers aren’t spanned; Don’t worry and fret, faint-hearted, The chances have just begun For the best jobs haven’t been started, The best work hasn’t been done. – Berton Braley • The companies that do the best job on managing a user’s privacy will be the companies that ultimately are the most successful. – Fred Wilson • The crew, the actors and the writers all work the same way. We always want to do the best job. – Robert Knepper • The last thing I think I am is perfect. I’m just trying to do the best job I can. I’m trying to be the best father I can to my kids. I’m trying to do the best job I can running my business. – James Packer • The man with the best job in the country is the vice-president. All he has to do is get up every morning and say, ‘How is the president?’ – Will Rogers • The only reason to be in politics is public service. There’s no other reason. Frankly, if that’s the best job you can get in terms of money, that’s too bad, you know. Because frankly, it’s not well paid, everyone knows that. So for most people it’s a big sacrifice. – Malcolm Turnbull • The Patriot Post not only does the best job of putting important news, policy and opinion in proper context, but also of cutting down to size the pompous praters and propagandists on the left. – Lyn Nofziger • The thing that I have done throughout my life is to do the best job that I can and to be me. – Mae Jemison • The things you don’t have control over, you don’t worry about. I have control over my attitude, my perception, how I do things, and you do the very best job you can. Other people have control over other things and you let them do their jobs. – Mike Sherman • The voters reward good performance. So, I’m going to go out and focus, if I become the governor, to do the very best job I can as governor. The rest of it will take care of itself. – Dave Heineman • The worst men have the best jobs the best men have the worst jobs or are unemployed or locked in madhouses. – Charles Bukowski • There’s nothing more fun than being out on stage and getting the vibe from the crowd. There’s nothing like being on a set where you are there to make other people happy and to make them laugh. That’s the best job in the world. – Miley Cyrus • There’s such a wide variation in tax systems around the world, it’s difficult to imagine a harmonized CO2 tax that every country agrees to. That’s not in the cards in the near term. But the countries that are doing the best job, like Sweden, are already doing both of these. I think that eventually we’ll use both of them but we need to get started right away and the cap-and-trade is a proven and effective tool. – Al Gore • These days she simply did the best job she could, accepting the good with the bad. – Nicholas Sparks • To get a job where the only thing you have to do in your career is to make people laugh-well, its the best job in the world. – Ronnie Barker • Trump claims he’d be the “best jobs president that God ever created.” But isn’t his claim to fame firing people? – Michael R. Burch • Twin Peaks’ was the best job I ever had as an actor. – Richard Beymer • We started off with a set of objectives for what we needed to communicate with the company’s identity, created several proposals intended to meet those objectives, and picked the one that did the best job. – Gabe Newell • What you realize is that a lot of actors want to be directed. They’re there to do the best job they can for the director. They have a lot of questions, and your job is to have answers. – Jon Turteltaub • Whatever it is, I just loved it and felt at my absolute happiest when I was performing for people. And if that’s what you want from a job, then this is the best job you could ever do. – James Corden • When it is going well, it is the best job [writing] in the world. For those few hours, you are god, in control of everything. However, for me, the great joy of writing is that it has allowed me to travel the world in search of stories. – Michael Scott • When you do something well, this is the best job in the world. – David Thewlis • Women are always being tested … but ultimately, each of us has to define who we are individually and then do the very best job we can to grow into it. – Hillary Clinton • Writing is hard work; its also the best job Ive ever had. – Raymond E. Feist • Writing studio movies is the best job in the world… it’s awesome. – Thomas Lennon • You can’t please everybody. All you can do is really just try to work from the heart and do the best job that you can and hope for the best. – Jackie Earle Haley • You concentrate on what you are doing, to do the best job you can, to stay out of a serious situation. That’s the way the X-1 was. – Chuck Yeager • You do the best job you can. You take it step by step. It’s hard enough to make a movie. If it works, that’s great. If it means something beyond the moment to somebody, they can take it and it lasts through the years, we’ll see. – Oliver Stone • You just go in and try to do the best job you can everyday. – Nick Cassavetes • You just try to get the best jobs that you can get. Sometimes I produce my own movies, so that’s your own sort of vision. That helps things. I don’t know what it is. Probably just circumstance. I’ve definitely been aware of the fact that I want to do different things. – John Cusack • You try to get yourself into a situation where you only have to answer to yourself, where you can ask advice of people and work with your peers and mentors and things to try to do the best job that you can possibly do. – George Lucas

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[shawnjacksonsbs]

Don't let your growth as a person be stunted, when you control the height of the bar you set.       5-19-19

"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals and you know it." - Kay from Men in Black played by Tommy Lee Jones You absolutely can, and when necessary you should, outgrow and pass right by people you used to strive to be like. Moral growth from generation to generation is based largely in part to the fact that society can find the flaws of the predecessors and try to correct them and to build on their positives to move forward. Just read a book, unless of course those a conspiracy too, (I have argued points with those who absolutely believe school lessons were fabricated to side with one side or the other, usually within our U.S. education, which is already lacking, some people believe its part of that "liberal agenda" lol). Its no wonder we lag so far behind so many other countries in this arena. It has been proven repeatedly throughout history with great strides progressing forward with equality as the end goal, that we were, in fact, moving forward at one, or rather, several points throughout time. Why are we slipping back??? " . . .there are some things you should know, and one of them is that there is absolutely no evidence to support the statement that we’re the greatest country in the world. We’re seventh in literacy, twenty-seventh in math, twenty-second in science, forty-ninth in life expectancy, 178th in infant mortality, third in median household income, number four in labor force, and number four in exports. We lead the world in only three categories: number of incarcerated citizens per capita, number of adults who believe angels are real, and defense spending, where we spend more than the next twenty-six countries combined, twenty-five of whom are allies… . . We sure used to be. We stood up for what was right! We fought for moral reasons, we passed and struck down laws for moral reasons. We waged wars on poverty, not poor people. We sacrificed, we cared about our neighbors, we put our money where our mouths were, and we never beat our chest. We built great big things, made ungodly technological advances, explored the universe, cured diseases, and cultivated the world’s greatest artists and the world’s greatest economy. We reached for the stars, and we acted like men. We aspired to intelligence; we didn’t belittle it; it didn’t make us feel inferior. We didn’t identify ourselves by who we voted for in the last election, and we didn’t scare so easy. And we were able to be all these things and do all these things because we were informed. By great men, men who were revered. The first step in solving any problem is recognizing there is one—America is not the greatest country in the world anymore.” - Will McAvoy There was once a man from Nantucket, who just decided "Fuck it". I'm not from Nantucket though.  I'm actually from right here in the great midwest, where the hate and ignorance go hand in hand and is spreading like wildfire in great part because of older people that should God damn know better by now. I'm torn between they have to know better and they just don't care, but either way, I'm done reading their nonsense, and I'll be damned if I'll ever hear them talk in real life they way post to social media.   For the last time, IT IS NOT JUST A DIFFERENCE OF OPINION EITHER. I mean, in part, I suppose hating on a whole group of people is considered an opinion, but that's not all it is.   And all the positive steps forward we've made toward equality is slowly and sickeningly, being unraveled and undone, right in front of us. The fact that it doesn't bother more people hurts my heart to the point of actual pain. It's gross and ugly the way we treat other people, the way we treat each other, whether its directly or indirectly, especially when we have such potential for greater works for all, through caring, empathy, compassion, and of course kindness. The same kindness that I am still convinced will eventually rule the day and save the world. Needless to say, that after favoring some rational thought, I had a couple of interesting things happen that swayed my hows and whys of social media. Having limited means to connect with people and conversate with people who have opposing views is getting increasingly harder for me to handle, because of how they act or react, and especially since I don't need it in my life at all. Keep your hate, I already lived that, so I'm good now. Except for a once a week check-in, at which time I'll post my entry, I am done with Facebook for a while, I imagine quite a while. I've got so much real and direct life things going on right now, I don't need the extra unwanted ridiculousness. I mean I could unfriend, unfollow, and block some of them, but they are people super close to my heart and that makes it even harder to not say something when they spread exaggerated falsehoods that promote more hate and turmoil. The fact that I sincerely feel most of them know it's wrong and still continue with it, only plays a part in how urgent the feeling is that I tell them, which rarely dissuades them from what I understand always ends up making them look bad, dumb, or ignorant or whatever. For what it's worth, they do that part all on their own. What I actually try to do is get them to understand this. It's wrong, why it's wrong etc. It usually falls on deaf ears anyways. People like that are living in a blissful kind of fear and hate because ignorance truly is bliss because they don't see a direct negative effect for their action. These are the same people who used to get on me constantly about grouping all cops together for the actions of a few bad ones, for which I learned to stop spreading the exaggerations as facts for all. It was absurd that I did this at all. I have grown, even if only slightly, in these areas. Its why I feel they know better, because in hindsight, in my heart, I knew it was wrong, but my hate for the few outweighed what was right for the good ones.   I'm going to keep living my life as best I can. Making right decisions every chance I get. Living with integrity, honesty, goodness, and gratitude will continue to be the goals I aspire to, hopefully forever. I knew better then, and I damn sure know better now, and if they are over age 30, I got money on the fact they, too, fucking know better. WWFRD? Rest assured it wouldn't be any of that. Since I wasn't going to change that much of the world through Facebook posts anyways, I know in my heart that I'm cool with the decision to leave it alone. Its a great form of misleading the masses anyways. lol If it ever turns that part off, I'll come back regularly, but I don't see that happening anyways. Keep living in your "bliss", I'm out. I imagine it's going to be like when I quit smoking. I know its better for my health, but what do I do to fill in that time? lolol In real life, I'm building a life with my family and friends and making memories that memes will never outweigh, ever. I, unlike some people, will continue to live my best life the same way out here, as I say I do in here. Lol If you know me in real life, then you know I'm 100% the same as the words you read on these pages. It's such an easier, more peaceful, less stressful way to live anyways. I've helped serve food at missions. I've been to protests as well. I've had some real-life applications to my mission for kindness that I will keep working on here as well. I am still setting routine with the family, but the "free to help others" days are coming eventually. And, for the first time, I plan to actually vote when it comes time, because the state of our current situation isn't one that I am ok with, with the back peddling like we are, especially for my kids and grandkids to have to live in. Pathetic. I still, with my whole heart,  know we can do better, be better as a people. Its usually when we are a collective that we become the ugliest versions that we can be as a people, but what if we can turn our collective into a positive and make good, sound, reasonable and rational changes to our future instead? Wouldn't that be awesome? I suppose I am finished with this one. The best part of emptying my thoughts and my heart in here every week, is the relief. I don't have to live weighted down, struggling to breathe on the inside. It works every time, even if no one was to read it. We all know what we carry in our hearts, but until we can all push that out into the real world, like all the time, we will all suffer a little. Good luck with holding any hate in your heart and then trying to relieve the stress it puts on your heart. Do better, be better, and it's not on just one of us. It's on all of us. Whether you adhere to it or not, its a shared responsibility for all of mankind. Some people just lack more than others. It's also nice living a life, so blessed that some of my biggest stressors are how others treat each other. lol That's a great feeling. Stop being ugly to each other, maybe start there, then. . . Share the love and the laughter you have with the world around you, and please, please be civil, as you push your way toward living in kindness. It should absolutely be a way of life, not just an event manifestation. Until next week; "Be inspired by those worthy of inspiration as you aspire to be inspirational." - Elizabeth A. Donley

[jeanshesallenberger]

Conversational Design

A note from the editors: We’re pleased to share an excerpt from Chapter 1 of Erika Hall’s new book, Conversational Design, available now from A Book Apart.

Texting is how we talk now. We talk by tapping tiny messages on touchscreens—we message using SMS via mobile data networks, or through apps like Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp.

In 2015, the Pew Research Center found that 64% of American adults owned a smartphone of some kind, up from 35% in 2011. We still refer to these personal, pocket-sized computers as phones, but “Phone” is now just one of many communication apps we neglect in favor of texting. Texting is the most widely used mobile data service in America. And in the wider world, four billion people have mobile phones, so 4 billion people have access to SMS or other messaging apps. For some, dictating messages into a wristwatch offers an appealing alternative to placing a call.

The popularity of texting can be partially explained by the medium’s ability to offer the easy give-and-take of conversation without requiring continuous attention. Texting feels like direct human connection, made even more captivating by unpredictable lag and irregular breaks. Any typing is incidental because the experience of texting barely resembles “writing,” a term that carries associations of considered composition. In his TED talk, Columbia University linguist John McWhorter called texting “fingered conversation”—terminology I find awkward, but accurate. The physical act—typing—isn’t what defines the form or its conventions. Technology is breaking down our traditional categories of communication.

By the numbers, texting is the most compelling computer-human interaction going. When we text, we become immersed and forget our exchanges are computer-mediated at all. We can learn a lot about digital design from the inescapable draw of these bite-sized interactions, specifically the use of language.

What Texting Teaches Us

This is an interesting example of what makes computer-mediated interaction interesting. The reasons people are compelled to attend to their text messages—even at risk to their own health and safety—aren’t high-production values, so-called rich media, or the complexity of the feature set.

Texting, and other forms of social media, tap into something very primitive in the human brain. These systems offer always-available social connection. The brevity and unpredictability of the messages themselves triggers the release of dopamine that motivates seeking behavior and keeps people coming back for more. What makes interactions interesting may start on a screen, but the really interesting stuff happens in the mind. And language is a critical part of that. Our conscious minds are made of language, so it’s easy to perceive the messages you read not just as words but as the thoughts of another mingled with your own. Loneliness seems impossible with so many voices in your head.

With minimal visual embellishment, texts can deliver personality, pathos, humor, and narrative. This is apparent in “Texts from Dog,” which, as the title indicates, is a series of imagined text exchanges between a man and his dog. (Fig 1.1). With just a few words, and some considered capitalization, Joe Butcher (writing as October Jones) creates a vivid picture of the relationship between a neurotic canine and his weary owner.

Fig 1.1: “Texts from Dog” shows how lively a simple text exchange can be.

Using words is key to connecting with other humans online, just as it is in the so-called “real world.” Imbuing interfaces with the attributes of conversation can be powerful. I’m far from the first person to suggest this. However, as computers mediate more and more relationships, including customer relationships, anyone thinking about digital products and services is in a challenging place. We’re caught between tried-and-true past practices and the urge to adopt the “next big thing,” sometimes at the exclusion of all else.

Being intentionally conversational isn’t easy. This is especially true in business and at scale, such as in digital systems. Professional writers use different types of writing for different purposes, and each has rules that can be learned. The love of language is often fueled by a passion for rules — rules we received in the classroom and revisit in manuals of style, and rules that offer writers the comfort of being correct outside of any specific context. Also, there is the comfort of being finished with a piece of writing and moving on. Conversation, on the other hand, is a context-dependent social activity that implies a potentially terrifying immediacy.

Moving from the idea of publishing content to engaging in conversation can be uncomfortable for businesses and professional writers alike. There are no rules. There is no done. It all feels more personal. Using colloquial language, even in “simplifying” interactive experiences, can conflict with a desire to appear authoritative. Or the pendulum swings to the other extreme and a breezy style gets applied to a laborious process like a thin coat of paint.

As a material for design and an ingredient in interactions, words need to emerge from the content shed and be considered from the start.  The way humans use language—easily, joyfully, sometimes painfully—should anchor the foundation of all interactions with digital systems.

The way we use language and the way we socialize are what make us human; our past contains the key to what commands our attention in the present, and what will command it in the future. To understand how we came to be so perplexed by our most human quality, it’s worth taking a quick look at, oh!, the entire known history of communication technology.

The Mother Tongue

Accustomed to eyeballing type, we can forget language began in our mouths as a series of sounds, like the calls and growls of other animals. We’ll never know for sure how long we’ve been talking—speech itself leaves no trace—but we do know it’s been a mighty long time.

Archaeologist Natalie Thais Uomini and psychologist Georg Friedrich Meyer concluded that our ancestors began to develop language as early as 1.75 million years ago. Per the fossil record, modern humans emerged at least 190,000 years ago in the African savannah. Evidence of cave painting goes back 30,000 years (Fig 1.2).

Then, a mere 6,000 years ago, ancient Sumerian commodity traders grew tired of getting ripped off. Around 3200 BCE, one of them had the idea to track accounts by scratching wedges in wet clay tablets. Cuneiform was born.

So, don’t feel bad about procrastinating when you need to write—humanity put the whole thing off for a couple hundred thousand years! By a conservative estimate, we’ve had writing for about 4% of the time we’ve been human. Chatting is easy; writing is an arduous chore.

Prior to mechanical reproduction, literacy was limited to the elite by the time and cost of hand-copying manuscripts. It was the rise of printing that led to widespread literacy; mass distribution of text allowed information and revolutionary ideas to circulate across borders and class divisions. The sharp increase in literacy bolstered an emerging middle class. And the ability to record and share knowledge accelerated all other advances in technology: photography, radio, TV, computers, internet, and now the mobile web. And our talking speakers.

Fig 1.2: In hindsight, “literate culture” now seems like an annoying phase we had to go through so we could get to texting.

Every time our communication technology advances and changes, so does the surrounding culture—then it disrupts the power structure and upsets the people in charge. Catholic archbishops railed against mechanical movable type in the fifteenth century. Today, English teachers deplore texting emoji. Resistance is, as always, futile. OMG is now listed in the Oxford English Dictionary.

But while these developments have changed the world and how we relate to one another, they haven’t altered our deep oral core.

Orality, Say It with Me

Orality knits persons into community.

Walter Ong

Today, when we record everything in all media without much thought, it’s almost impossible to conceive of a world in which the sum of our culture existed only as thoughts.

Before literacy, words were ephemeral and all knowledge was social and communal. There was no “save” option and no intellectual property. The only way to sustain an idea was to share it, speaking aloud to another person in a way that made it easy for them to remember. This was orality—the first interface.

We can never know for certain what purely oral cultures were like. People without writing are terrible at keeping records. But we can examine oral traditions that persist for clues.

The oral formula

Reading and writing remained elite activities for centuries after their invention. In cultures without a writing system, oral characteristics persisted to help transmit poetry, history, law and other knowledge across generations.

The epic poems of Homer rely on meter, formulas, and repetition to aid memory:

Far as a man with his eyes sees into the mist of the distance Sitting aloft on a crag to gaze over the wine-dark seaway, Just so far were the loud-neighing steeds of the gods overleaping.

Iliad, 5.770

Concrete images like rosy-fingered dawn, loud-neighing steeds, wine-dark seaway, and swift-footed Achilles served to aid the teller and to sear the story into the listener’s memory.

Biblical proverbs also encode wisdom in a memorable format:

As a dog returns to its vomit, so fools repeat their folly.

Proverbs 26:11

That is vivid.

And a saying that originated in China hundreds of years ago can prove sufficiently durable to adorn a few hundred Etsy items:

A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.

Tao Te Ching, Chapter 64, ascribed to Lao Tzu The labor of literature

Literacy created distance in time and space and decoupled shared knowledge from social interaction. Human thought escaped the existential present. The reader doesn’t need to be alive at the same time as the writer, let alone hanging out around the same fire pit or agora. 

Freed from the constraints of orality, thinkers explored new forms to preserve their thoughts. And what verbose and convoluted forms these could take:

The Reader will I doubt too soon discover that so large an interval of time was not spent in writing this discourse; the very length of it will convince him, that the writer had not time enough to make a shorter.

George Tullie, An Answer to a Discourse Concerning the Celibacy of the Clergy, 1688

There’s no such thing as an oral semicolon. And George Tullie has no way of knowing anything about his future audience. He addresses himself to a generic reader he will never see, nor receive feedback from. Writing in this manner is terrific for precision, but not good at all for interaction.

Writing allowed literate people to become hermits and hoarders, able to record and consume knowledge in total solitude, invest authority in them, and defend ownership of them. Though much writing preserved the dullest of records, the small minority of language communities that made the leap to literacy also gained the ability to compose, revise, and perfect works of magnificent complexity, utility, and beauty.

The qualities of oral culture

In Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, Walter Ong explored the “psychodynamics of orality,” which is, coincidentally, quite a mouthful.  Through his research, he found that the ability to preserve ideas in writing not only increased knowledge, it altered values and behavior. People who grow up and live in a community that has never known writing are different from literate people—they depend upon one another to preserve and share knowledge. This makes for a completely different, and much more intimate, relationship between ideas and communities.

Oral culture is immediate and social

In a society without writing, communication can happen only in the moment and face-to-face. It sounds like the introvert’s nightmare! Oral culture has several other hallmarks as well:

Spoken words are events that exist in time. It’s impossible to step back and examine a spoken word or phrase. While the speaker can try to repeat, there’s no way to capture or replay an utterance.

All knowledge is social, and lives in memory. Formulas and patterns are essential to transmitting and retaining knowledge. When the knowledge stops being interesting to the audience, it stops existing.

Individuals need to be present to exchange knowledge or communicate. All communication is participatory and immediate. The speaker can adjust the message to the context. Conversation, contention, and struggle help to retain this new knowledge.

The community owns knowledge, not individuals. Everyone draws on the same themes, so not only is originality not helpful, it’s nonsensical to claim an idea as your own.

There are no dictionaries or authoritative sources. The right use of a word is determined by how it’s being used right now.

Literate culture promotes authority and ownership

Printed books enabled mass-distribution and dispensed with handicraft of manuscripts, alienating readers from the source of the ideas, and from each other. (Ong pg. 100):

The printed text is an independent physical object. Ideas can be preserved as a thing, completely apart from the thinker.

Portable printed works enable individual consumption. The need and desire for private space accompanied the emergence of silent, solo reading.

Print creates a sense of private ownership of words. Plagiarism is possible.

Individual attribution is possible. The ability to identify a sole author increases the value of originality and creativity.

Print fosters a sense of closure. Once a work is printed, it is final and closed.

Print-based literacy ascended to a position of authority and cultural dominance, but it didn’t eliminate oral culture completely.

Technology brought us together again

All that studying allowed people to accumulate and share knowledge, speeding up the pace of technological change. And technology transformed communication in turn. It took less than 150 years to get from the telegraph to the World Wide Web. And with the web—a technology that requires literacy—Ong identified a return to the values of the earlier oral culture. He called this secondary orality. Then he died in 2003, before the rise of the mobile internet, when things really got interesting.

Secondary orality is:

Immediate. There is no necessary delay between the expression of an idea and its reception. Physical distance is meaningless.

Socially aware and group-minded. The number of people who can hear and see the same thing simultaneously is in the billions.

Conversational. This is in the sense of being both more interactive and less formal.

Collaborative. Communication invites and enables a response, which may then become part of the message.

Intertextual. The products of our culture reflect and influence one another.

Social, ephemeral, participatory, anti-authoritarian, and opposed to individual ownership of ideas—these qualities sound a lot like internet culture.

Wikipedia: Knowledge Talks

When someone mentions a genre of music you’re unfamiliar with—electroclash, say, or plainsong—what do you do to find out more? It’s quite possible you type the term into Google and end up on Wikipedia, the improbably successful, collaborative encyclopedia that would be absent without the internet.

According to Wikipedia, encyclopedias have existed for around two-thousand years. Wikipedia has existed since 2001, and it’s the fifth most-popular site on the web. Wikipedia is not a publication so much as a society that provides access to knowledge. A volunteer community of “Wikipedians” continuously adds to and improves millions of articles in over 200 languages. It’s a phenomenon manifesting all the values of secondary orality:

Anyone can contribute anonymously and anyone can modify the contributions of another.

The output is free.

The encyclopedia articles are not attributed to any sole creator. A single article might have 2 editors or 1,000.

Each article has an accompanying “talk” page where editors discuss potential improvements, and a “history” page that tracks all revisions. Heated arguments are not documented. They take place as revisions within documents.

Wikipedia is disruptive in the true Clayton Christensen sense. It’s created immense value and wrecked an existing business model. Traditional encyclopedias are publications governed by authority, and created by experts and fact checkers. A volunteer project collaboratively run by unpaid amateurs shows that conversation is more powerful than authority, and that human knowledge is immense and dynamic.

In an interview with The Guardian, a British librarian expressed some disdain about Wikipedia.

The main problem is the lack of authority. With printed publications, the publishers must ensure that their data are reliable, as their livelihood depends on it. But with something like this, all that goes out the window.

Philip Bradley, “Who knows?”, The Guardian, October 26, 2004

Wikipedia is immediate, group-minded, conversational, collaborative, and intertextual— secondary orality in action—but it relies on traditionally published sources for its authority. After all, anything new that changes the world does so by fitting into the world. As we design for new methods of communication, we should remember that nothing is more valuable simply because it’s new; rather, technology is valuable when it brings us more of what’s already meaningful.

From Documents to Events

Pages and documents organize information in space. Space used to be more of a constraint back when we printed conversation out. Now that the internet has given us virtually infinite space, we need to mind how conversation moves through time. Thinking about serving the needs of people in an internet-based culture requires a shift from thinking about how information occupies space—documents—to how it occupies time—events.

Texting means that we’ve never been more lively (yet silent) in our communications. While we still have plenty of in-person interactions, it’s gotten easy to go without. We text grocery requests to our spouses. We click through a menu in a mobile app to summon dinner (the order may still arrive at the restaurant by fax, proving William Gibson’s maxim that the future is unevenly distributed). We exchange messages on Twitter and Facebook instead of visiting friends in person, or even while visiting friends in person. We work at home and Slack our colleagues.

We’re rapidly approaching a future where humans text other humans and only speak aloud to computers. A text-based interaction with a machine that’s standing in for a human should feel like a text-based interaction with a human. Words are a fundamental part of the experience, and they are part of the design. Words should be the basis for defining and creating the design.

We’re participating in a radical cultural transformation. The possibilities manifest in systems like Wikipedia that succeed in changing the world by using technology to connect people in a single collaborative effort. And even those of us creating the change suffer from some lag. The dominant educational and professional culture remains based in literary values. We’ve been rewarded for individual achievement rather than collaboration. We seek to “make our mark,” even when designing changeable systems too complex for any one person to claim authorship. We look for approval from an authority figure. Working in a social, interactive way should feel like the most natural thing in the world, but it will probably take some doing.

Literary writing—any writing that emerges from the culture and standards of literacy—is inherently not interactive. We need to approach the verbal design not as a literary work, but as a conversation. Designing human-centered interactive systems requires us to reflect on our deep-seated orientation around artifacts and ownership. We must alienate ourselves from a set of standards that no longer apply.

Most advice on “writing for the web” or “creating content” starts from the presumption that we are “writing,” just for a different medium. But when we approach communication as an assembly of pieces of content rather than an interaction, customers who might have been expecting a conversation end up feeling like they’ve been handed a manual instead.

Software is on a path to participating in our culture as a peer.  So, it should behave like a person—alive and present. It doesn’t matter how much so-called machine intelligence is under the hood—a perceptive set of programmatic responses, rather than a series of documents, can be enough if they have the qualities of conversation.

Interactive systems should evoke the best qualities of living human communities—active, social, simple, and present—not passive, isolated, complex, or closed off.

Life Beyond Literacy

Indeed, language changes lives. It builds society, expresses our highest aspirations, our basest thoughts, our emotions and our philosophies of life. But all language is ultimately at the service of human interaction. Other components of language—things like grammar and stories—are secondary to conversation.

Daniel L. Everett, How Language Began

Literacy has gotten us far. It’s gotten you this far in this book. So, it’s not surprising we’re attached to the idea. Writing has allowed us to create technologies that give us the ability to interact with one another across time and space, and have instantaneous access to knowledge in a way our ancestors would equate with magic. However, creating and exchanging documents, while powerful, is not a good model for lively interaction. Misplaced literate values can lead to misery—working alone and worrying too much about posterity.

So, it’s time to let go and live a little! We’re at an exciting moment. The computer screen that once stood for a page can offer a window into a continuous present that still remembers everything. Or, the screen might disappear completely.

Now we can start imagining, in an open-ended way, what constellation of connected devices any given person will have around them, and how we can deliver a meaningful, memorable experience on any one of them. We can step away from the screen and consider what set of inputs, outputs, events, and information add up to the best experience.

This is daunting for designers, sure, yet phenomenal for people. Thinking about human-computer interactions from a screen-based perspective was never truly human-centered from the start. The ideal interface is an interface that’s not noticeable at all—a world in which the distance from thought to action has collapsed and merely uttering a phrase can make it so.

We’re fast moving past “computer literacy.” It’s on us to ensure all systems speak human fluently.

http://ift.tt/2DsNpNF

[waltercostellone]

Conversational Design

A note from the editors: We’re pleased to share an excerpt from Chapter 1 of Erika Hall’s new book, Conversational Design, available now from A Book Apart.

Texting is how we talk now. We talk by tapping tiny messages on touchscreens—we message using SMS via mobile data networks, or through apps like Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp.

In 2015, the Pew Research Center found that 64% of American adults owned a smartphone of some kind, up from 35% in 2011. We still refer to these personal, pocket-sized computers as phones, but “Phone” is now just one of many communication apps we neglect in favor of texting. Texting is the most widely used mobile data service in America. And in the wider world, four billion people have mobile phones, so 4 billion people have access to SMS or other messaging apps. For some, dictating messages into a wristwatch offers an appealing alternative to placing a call.

The popularity of texting can be partially explained by the medium’s ability to offer the easy give-and-take of conversation without requiring continuous attention. Texting feels like direct human connection, made even more captivating by unpredictable lag and irregular breaks. Any typing is incidental because the experience of texting barely resembles “writing,” a term that carries associations of considered composition. In his TED talk, Columbia University linguist John McWhorter called texting “fingered conversation”—terminology I find awkward, but accurate. The physical act—typing—isn’t what defines the form or its conventions. Technology is breaking down our traditional categories of communication.

By the numbers, texting is the most compelling computer-human interaction going. When we text, we become immersed and forget our exchanges are computer-mediated at all. We can learn a lot about digital design from the inescapable draw of these bite-sized interactions, specifically the use of language.

What Texting Teaches Us

This is an interesting example of what makes computer-mediated interaction interesting. The reasons people are compelled to attend to their text messages—even at risk to their own health and safety—aren’t high-production values, so-called rich media, or the complexity of the feature set.

Texting, and other forms of social media, tap into something very primitive in the human brain. These systems offer always-available social connection. The brevity and unpredictability of the messages themselves triggers the release of dopamine that motivates seeking behavior and keeps people coming back for more. What makes interactions interesting may start on a screen, but the really interesting stuff happens in the mind. And language is a critical part of that. Our conscious minds are made of language, so it’s easy to perceive the messages you read not just as words but as the thoughts of another mingled with your own. Loneliness seems impossible with so many voices in your head.

With minimal visual embellishment, texts can deliver personality, pathos, humor, and narrative. This is apparent in “Texts from Dog,” which, as the title indicates, is a series of imagined text exchanges between a man and his dog. (Fig 1.1). With just a few words, and some considered capitalization, Joe Butcher (writing as October Jones) creates a vivid picture of the relationship between a neurotic canine and his weary owner.

Fig 1.1: “Texts from Dog” shows how lively a simple text exchange can be.

Using words is key to connecting with other humans online, just as it is in the so-called “real world.” Imbuing interfaces with the attributes of conversation can be powerful. I’m far from the first person to suggest this. However, as computers mediate more and more relationships, including customer relationships, anyone thinking about digital products and services is in a challenging place. We’re caught between tried-and-true past practices and the urge to adopt the “next big thing,” sometimes at the exclusion of all else.

Being intentionally conversational isn’t easy. This is especially true in business and at scale, such as in digital systems. Professional writers use different types of writing for different purposes, and each has rules that can be learned. The love of language is often fueled by a passion for rules — rules we received in the classroom and revisit in manuals of style, and rules that offer writers the comfort of being correct outside of any specific context. Also, there is the comfort of being finished with a piece of writing and moving on. Conversation, on the other hand, is a context-dependent social activity that implies a potentially terrifying immediacy.

Moving from the idea of publishing content to engaging in conversation can be uncomfortable for businesses and professional writers alike. There are no rules. There is no done. It all feels more personal. Using colloquial language, even in “simplifying” interactive experiences, can conflict with a desire to appear authoritative. Or the pendulum swings to the other extreme and a breezy style gets applied to a laborious process like a thin coat of paint.

As a material for design and an ingredient in interactions, words need to emerge from the content shed and be considered from the start.  The way humans use language—easily, joyfully, sometimes painfully—should anchor the foundation of all interactions with digital systems.

The way we use language and the way we socialize are what make us human; our past contains the key to what commands our attention in the present, and what will command it in the future. To understand how we came to be so perplexed by our most human quality, it’s worth taking a quick look at, oh!, the entire known history of communication technology.

The Mother Tongue

Accustomed to eyeballing type, we can forget language began in our mouths as a series of sounds, like the calls and growls of other animals. We’ll never know for sure how long we’ve been talking—speech itself leaves no trace—but we do know it’s been a mighty long time.

Archaeologist Natalie Thais Uomini and psychologist Georg Friedrich Meyer concluded that our ancestors began to develop language as early as 1.75 million years ago. Per the fossil record, modern humans emerged at least 190,000 years ago in the African savannah. Evidence of cave painting goes back 30,000 years (Fig 1.2).

Then, a mere 6,000 years ago, ancient Sumerian commodity traders grew tired of getting ripped off. Around 3200 BCE, one of them had the idea to track accounts by scratching wedges in wet clay tablets. Cuneiform was born.

So, don’t feel bad about procrastinating when you need to write—humanity put the whole thing off for a couple hundred thousand years! By a conservative estimate, we’ve had writing for about 4% of the time we’ve been human. Chatting is easy; writing is an arduous chore.

Prior to mechanical reproduction, literacy was limited to the elite by the time and cost of hand-copying manuscripts. It was the rise of printing that led to widespread literacy; mass distribution of text allowed information and revolutionary ideas to circulate across borders and class divisions. The sharp increase in literacy bolstered an emerging middle class. And the ability to record and share knowledge accelerated all other advances in technology: photography, radio, TV, computers, internet, and now the mobile web. And our talking speakers.

Fig 1.2: In hindsight, “literate culture” now seems like an annoying phase we had to go through so we could get to texting.

Every time our communication technology advances and changes, so does the surrounding culture—then it disrupts the power structure and upsets the people in charge. Catholic archbishops railed against mechanical movable type in the fifteenth century. Today, English teachers deplore texting emoji. Resistance is, as always, futile. OMG is now listed in the Oxford English Dictionary.

But while these developments have changed the world and how we relate to one another, they haven’t altered our deep oral core.

Orality, Say It with Me

Orality knits persons into community.

Walter Ong

Today, when we record everything in all media without much thought, it’s almost impossible to conceive of a world in which the sum of our culture existed only as thoughts.

Before literacy, words were ephemeral and all knowledge was social and communal. There was no “save” option and no intellectual property. The only way to sustain an idea was to share it, speaking aloud to another person in a way that made it easy for them to remember. This was orality—the first interface.

We can never know for certain what purely oral cultures were like. People without writing are terrible at keeping records. But we can examine oral traditions that persist for clues.

The oral formula

Reading and writing remained elite activities for centuries after their invention. In cultures without a writing system, oral characteristics persisted to help transmit poetry, history, law and other knowledge across generations.

The epic poems of Homer rely on meter, formulas, and repetition to aid memory:

Far as a man with his eyes sees into the mist of the distance Sitting aloft on a crag to gaze over the wine-dark seaway, Just so far were the loud-neighing steeds of the gods overleaping.

Iliad, 5.770

Concrete images like rosy-fingered dawn, loud-neighing steeds, wine-dark seaway, and swift-footed Achilles served to aid the teller and to sear the story into the listener’s memory.

Biblical proverbs also encode wisdom in a memorable format:

As a dog returns to its vomit, so fools repeat their folly.

Proverbs 26:11

That is vivid.

And a saying that originated in China hundreds of years ago can prove sufficiently durable to adorn a few hundred Etsy items:

A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.

Tao Te Ching, Chapter 64, ascribed to Lao Tzu The labor of literature

Literacy created distance in time and space and decoupled shared knowledge from social interaction. Human thought escaped the existential present. The reader doesn’t need to be alive at the same time as the writer, let alone hanging out around the same fire pit or agora. 

Freed from the constraints of orality, thinkers explored new forms to preserve their thoughts. And what verbose and convoluted forms these could take:

The Reader will I doubt too soon discover that so large an interval of time was not spent in writing this discourse; the very length of it will convince him, that the writer had not time enough to make a shorter.

George Tullie, An Answer to a Discourse Concerning the Celibacy of the Clergy, 1688

There’s no such thing as an oral semicolon. And George Tullie has no way of knowing anything about his future audience. He addresses himself to a generic reader he will never see, nor receive feedback from. Writing in this manner is terrific for precision, but not good at all for interaction.

Writing allowed literate people to become hermits and hoarders, able to record and consume knowledge in total solitude, invest authority in them, and defend ownership of them. Though much writing preserved the dullest of records, the small minority of language communities that made the leap to literacy also gained the ability to compose, revise, and perfect works of magnificent complexity, utility, and beauty.

The qualities of oral culture

In Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, Walter Ong explored the “psychodynamics of orality,” which is, coincidentally, quite a mouthful.  Through his research, he found that the ability to preserve ideas in writing not only increased knowledge, it altered values and behavior. People who grow up and live in a community that has never known writing are different from literate people—they depend upon one another to preserve and share knowledge. This makes for a completely different, and much more intimate, relationship between ideas and communities.

Oral culture is immediate and social

In a society without writing, communication can happen only in the moment and face-to-face. It sounds like the introvert’s nightmare! Oral culture has several other hallmarks as well:

Spoken words are events that exist in time. It’s impossible to step back and examine a spoken word or phrase. While the speaker can try to repeat, there’s no way to capture or replay an utterance.

All knowledge is social, and lives in memory. Formulas and patterns are essential to transmitting and retaining knowledge. When the knowledge stops being interesting to the audience, it stops existing.

Individuals need to be present to exchange knowledge or communicate. All communication is participatory and immediate. The speaker can adjust the message to the context. Conversation, contention, and struggle help to retain this new knowledge.

The community owns knowledge, not individuals. Everyone draws on the same themes, so not only is originality not helpful, it’s nonsensical to claim an idea as your own.

There are no dictionaries or authoritative sources. The right use of a word is determined by how it’s being used right now.

Literate culture promotes authority and ownership

Printed books enabled mass-distribution and dispensed with handicraft of manuscripts, alienating readers from the source of the ideas, and from each other. (Ong pg. 100):

The printed text is an independent physical object. Ideas can be preserved as a thing, completely apart from the thinker.

Portable printed works enable individual consumption. The need and desire for private space accompanied the emergence of silent, solo reading.

Print creates a sense of private ownership of words. Plagiarism is possible.

Individual attribution is possible. The ability to identify a sole author increases the value of originality and creativity.

Print fosters a sense of closure. Once a work is printed, it is final and closed.

Print-based literacy ascended to a position of authority and cultural dominance, but it didn’t eliminate oral culture completely.

Technology brought us together again

All that studying allowed people to accumulate and share knowledge, speeding up the pace of technological change. And technology transformed communication in turn. It took less than 150 years to get from the telegraph to the World Wide Web. And with the web—a technology that requires literacy—Ong identified a return to the values of the earlier oral culture. He called this secondary orality. Then he died in 2003, before the rise of the mobile internet, when things really got interesting.

Secondary orality is:

Immediate. There is no necessary delay between the expression of an idea and its reception. Physical distance is meaningless.

Socially aware and group-minded. The number of people who can hear and see the same thing simultaneously is in the billions.

Conversational. This is in the sense of being both more interactive and less formal.

Collaborative. Communication invites and enables a response, which may then become part of the message.

Intertextual. The products of our culture reflect and influence one another.

Social, ephemeral, participatory, anti-authoritarian, and opposed to individual ownership of ideas—these qualities sound a lot like internet culture.

Wikipedia: Knowledge Talks

When someone mentions a genre of music you’re unfamiliar with—electroclash, say, or plainsong—what do you do to find out more? It’s quite possible you type the term into Google and end up on Wikipedia, the improbably successful, collaborative encyclopedia that would be absent without the internet.

According to Wikipedia, encyclopedias have existed for around two-thousand years. Wikipedia has existed since 2001, and it’s the fifth most-popular site on the web. Wikipedia is not a publication so much as a society that provides access to knowledge. A volunteer community of “Wikipedians” continuously adds to and improves millions of articles in over 200 languages. It’s a phenomenon manifesting all the values of secondary orality:

Anyone can contribute anonymously and anyone can modify the contributions of another.

The output is free.

The encyclopedia articles are not attributed to any sole creator. A single article might have 2 editors or 1,000.

Each article has an accompanying “talk” page where editors discuss potential improvements, and a “history” page that tracks all revisions. Heated arguments are not documented. They take place as revisions within documents.

Wikipedia is disruptive in the true Clayton Christensen sense. It’s created immense value and wrecked an existing business model. Traditional encyclopedias are publications governed by authority, and created by experts and fact checkers. A volunteer project collaboratively run by unpaid amateurs shows that conversation is more powerful than authority, and that human knowledge is immense and dynamic.

In an interview with The Guardian, a British librarian expressed some disdain about Wikipedia.

The main problem is the lack of authority. With printed publications, the publishers must ensure that their data are reliable, as their livelihood depends on it. But with something like this, all that goes out the window.

Philip Bradley, “Who knows?”, The Guardian, October 26, 2004

Wikipedia is immediate, group-minded, conversational, collaborative, and intertextual— secondary orality in action—but it relies on traditionally published sources for its authority. After all, anything new that changes the world does so by fitting into the world. As we design for new methods of communication, we should remember that nothing is more valuable simply because it’s new; rather, technology is valuable when it brings us more of what’s already meaningful.

From Documents to Events

Pages and documents organize information in space. Space used to be more of a constraint back when we printed conversation out. Now that the internet has given us virtually infinite space, we need to mind how conversation moves through time. Thinking about serving the needs of people in an internet-based culture requires a shift from thinking about how information occupies space—documents—to how it occupies time—events.

Texting means that we’ve never been more lively (yet silent) in our communications. While we still have plenty of in-person interactions, it’s gotten easy to go without. We text grocery requests to our spouses. We click through a menu in a mobile app to summon dinner (the order may still arrive at the restaurant by fax, proving William Gibson’s maxim that the future is unevenly distributed). We exchange messages on Twitter and Facebook instead of visiting friends in person, or even while visiting friends in person. We work at home and Slack our colleagues.

We’re rapidly approaching a future where humans text other humans and only speak aloud to computers. A text-based interaction with a machine that’s standing in for a human should feel like a text-based interaction with a human. Words are a fundamental part of the experience, and they are part of the design. Words should be the basis for defining and creating the design.

We’re participating in a radical cultural transformation. The possibilities manifest in systems like Wikipedia that succeed in changing the world by using technology to connect people in a single collaborative effort. And even those of us creating the change suffer from some lag. The dominant educational and professional culture remains based in literary values. We’ve been rewarded for individual achievement rather than collaboration. We seek to “make our mark,” even when designing changeable systems too complex for any one person to claim authorship. We look for approval from an authority figure. Working in a social, interactive way should feel like the most natural thing in the world, but it will probably take some doing.

Literary writing—any writing that emerges from the culture and standards of literacy—is inherently not interactive. We need to approach the verbal design not as a literary work, but as a conversation. Designing human-centered interactive systems requires us to reflect on our deep-seated orientation around artifacts and ownership. We must alienate ourselves from a set of standards that no longer apply.

Most advice on “writing for the web” or “creating content” starts from the presumption that we are “writing,” just for a different medium. But when we approach communication as an assembly of pieces of content rather than an interaction, customers who might have been expecting a conversation end up feeling like they’ve been handed a manual instead.

Software is on a path to participating in our culture as a peer.  So, it should behave like a person—alive and present. It doesn’t matter how much so-called machine intelligence is under the hood—a perceptive set of programmatic responses, rather than a series of documents, can be enough if they have the qualities of conversation.

Interactive systems should evoke the best qualities of living human communities—active, social, simple, and present—not passive, isolated, complex, or closed off.

Life Beyond Literacy

Indeed, language changes lives. It builds society, expresses our highest aspirations, our basest thoughts, our emotions and our philosophies of life. But all language is ultimately at the service of human interaction. Other components of language—things like grammar and stories—are secondary to conversation.

Daniel L. Everett, How Language Began

Literacy has gotten us far. It’s gotten you this far in this book. So, it’s not surprising we’re attached to the idea. Writing has allowed us to create technologies that give us the ability to interact with one another across time and space, and have instantaneous access to knowledge in a way our ancestors would equate with magic. However, creating and exchanging documents, while powerful, is not a good model for lively interaction. Misplaced literate values can lead to misery—working alone and worrying too much about posterity.

So, it’s time to let go and live a little! We’re at an exciting moment. The computer screen that once stood for a page can offer a window into a continuous present that still remembers everything. Or, the screen might disappear completely.

Now we can start imagining, in an open-ended way, what constellation of connected devices any given person will have around them, and how we can deliver a meaningful, memorable experience on any one of them. We can step away from the screen and consider what set of inputs, outputs, events, and information add up to the best experience.

This is daunting for designers, sure, yet phenomenal for people. Thinking about human-computer interactions from a screen-based perspective was never truly human-centered from the start. The ideal interface is an interface that’s not noticeable at all—a world in which the distance from thought to action has collapsed and merely uttering a phrase can make it so.

We’re fast moving past “computer literacy.” It’s on us to ensure all systems speak human fluently.

http://ift.tt/2DsNpNF

[mariaaklnthony]

Conversational Design

A note from the editors: We’re pleased to share an excerpt from Chapter 1 of Erika Hall’s new book, Conversational Design, available now from A Book Apart.

Texting is how we talk now. We talk by tapping tiny messages on touchscreens—we message using SMS via mobile data networks, or through apps like Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp.

In 2015, the Pew Research Center found that 64% of American adults owned a smartphone of some kind, up from 35% in 2011. We still refer to these personal, pocket-sized computers as phones, but “Phone” is now just one of many communication apps we neglect in favor of texting. Texting is the most widely used mobile data service in America. And in the wider world, four billion people have mobile phones, so 4 billion people have access to SMS or other messaging apps. For some, dictating messages into a wristwatch offers an appealing alternative to placing a call.

The popularity of texting can be partially explained by the medium’s ability to offer the easy give-and-take of conversation without requiring continuous attention. Texting feels like direct human connection, made even more captivating by unpredictable lag and irregular breaks. Any typing is incidental because the experience of texting barely resembles “writing,” a term that carries associations of considered composition. In his TED talk, Columbia University linguist John McWhorter called texting “fingered conversation”—terminology I find awkward, but accurate. The physical act—typing—isn’t what defines the form or its conventions. Technology is breaking down our traditional categories of communication.

By the numbers, texting is the most compelling computer-human interaction going. When we text, we become immersed and forget our exchanges are computer-mediated at all. We can learn a lot about digital design from the inescapable draw of these bite-sized interactions, specifically the use of language.

What Texting Teaches Us

This is an interesting example of what makes computer-mediated interaction interesting. The reasons people are compelled to attend to their text messages—even at risk to their own health and safety—aren’t high-production values, so-called rich media, or the complexity of the feature set.

Texting, and other forms of social media, tap into something very primitive in the human brain. These systems offer always-available social connection. The brevity and unpredictability of the messages themselves triggers the release of dopamine that motivates seeking behavior and keeps people coming back for more. What makes interactions interesting may start on a screen, but the really interesting stuff happens in the mind. And language is a critical part of that. Our conscious minds are made of language, so it’s easy to perceive the messages you read not just as words but as the thoughts of another mingled with your own. Loneliness seems impossible with so many voices in your head.

With minimal visual embellishment, texts can deliver personality, pathos, humor, and narrative. This is apparent in “Texts from Dog,” which, as the title indicates, is a series of imagined text exchanges between a man and his dog. (Fig 1.1). With just a few words, and some considered capitalization, Joe Butcher (writing as October Jones) creates a vivid picture of the relationship between a neurotic canine and his weary owner.

Fig 1.1: “Texts from Dog” shows how lively a simple text exchange can be.

Using words is key to connecting with other humans online, just as it is in the so-called “real world.” Imbuing interfaces with the attributes of conversation can be powerful. I’m far from the first person to suggest this. However, as computers mediate more and more relationships, including customer relationships, anyone thinking about digital products and services is in a challenging place. We’re caught between tried-and-true past practices and the urge to adopt the “next big thing,” sometimes at the exclusion of all else.

Being intentionally conversational isn’t easy. This is especially true in business and at scale, such as in digital systems. Professional writers use different types of writing for different purposes, and each has rules that can be learned. The love of language is often fueled by a passion for rules — rules we received in the classroom and revisit in manuals of style, and rules that offer writers the comfort of being correct outside of any specific context. Also, there is the comfort of being finished with a piece of writing and moving on. Conversation, on the other hand, is a context-dependent social activity that implies a potentially terrifying immediacy.

Moving from the idea of publishing content to engaging in conversation can be uncomfortable for businesses and professional writers alike. There are no rules. There is no done. It all feels more personal. Using colloquial language, even in “simplifying” interactive experiences, can conflict with a desire to appear authoritative. Or the pendulum swings to the other extreme and a breezy style gets applied to a laborious process like a thin coat of paint.

As a material for design and an ingredient in interactions, words need to emerge from the content shed and be considered from the start.  The way humans use language—easily, joyfully, sometimes painfully—should anchor the foundation of all interactions with digital systems.

The way we use language and the way we socialize are what make us human; our past contains the key to what commands our attention in the present, and what will command it in the future. To understand how we came to be so perplexed by our most human quality, it’s worth taking a quick look at, oh!, the entire known history of communication technology.

The Mother Tongue

Accustomed to eyeballing type, we can forget language began in our mouths as a series of sounds, like the calls and growls of other animals. We’ll never know for sure how long we’ve been talking—speech itself leaves no trace—but we do know it’s been a mighty long time.

Archaeologist Natalie Thais Uomini and psychologist Georg Friedrich Meyer concluded that our ancestors began to develop language as early as 1.75 million years ago. Per the fossil record, modern humans emerged at least 190,000 years ago in the African savannah. Evidence of cave painting goes back 30,000 years (Fig 1.2).

Then, a mere 6,000 years ago, ancient Sumerian commodity traders grew tired of getting ripped off. Around 3200 BCE, one of them had the idea to track accounts by scratching wedges in wet clay tablets. Cuneiform was born.

So, don’t feel bad about procrastinating when you need to write—humanity put the whole thing off for a couple hundred thousand years! By a conservative estimate, we’ve had writing for about 4% of the time we’ve been human. Chatting is easy; writing is an arduous chore.

Prior to mechanical reproduction, literacy was limited to the elite by the time and cost of hand-copying manuscripts. It was the rise of printing that led to widespread literacy; mass distribution of text allowed information and revolutionary ideas to circulate across borders and class divisions. The sharp increase in literacy bolstered an emerging middle class. And the ability to record and share knowledge accelerated all other advances in technology: photography, radio, TV, computers, internet, and now the mobile web. And our talking speakers.

Fig 1.2: In hindsight, “literate culture” now seems like an annoying phase we had to go through so we could get to texting.

Every time our communication technology advances and changes, so does the surrounding culture—then it disrupts the power structure and upsets the people in charge. Catholic archbishops railed against mechanical movable type in the fifteenth century. Today, English teachers deplore texting emoji. Resistance is, as always, futile. OMG is now listed in the Oxford English Dictionary.

But while these developments have changed the world and how we relate to one another, they haven’t altered our deep oral core.

Orality, Say It with Me

Orality knits persons into community.

Walter Ong

Today, when we record everything in all media without much thought, it’s almost impossible to conceive of a world in which the sum of our culture existed only as thoughts.

Before literacy, words were ephemeral and all knowledge was social and communal. There was no “save” option and no intellectual property. The only way to sustain an idea was to share it, speaking aloud to another person in a way that made it easy for them to remember. This was orality—the first interface.

We can never know for certain what purely oral cultures were like. People without writing are terrible at keeping records. But we can examine oral traditions that persist for clues.

The oral formula

Reading and writing remained elite activities for centuries after their invention. In cultures without a writing system, oral characteristics persisted to help transmit poetry, history, law and other knowledge across generations.

The epic poems of Homer rely on meter, formulas, and repetition to aid memory:

Far as a man with his eyes sees into the mist of the distance Sitting aloft on a crag to gaze over the wine-dark seaway, Just so far were the loud-neighing steeds of the gods overleaping.

Iliad, 5.770

Concrete images like rosy-fingered dawn, loud-neighing steeds, wine-dark seaway, and swift-footed Achilles served to aid the teller and to sear the story into the listener’s memory.

Biblical proverbs also encode wisdom in a memorable format:

As a dog returns to its vomit, so fools repeat their folly.

Proverbs 26:11

That is vivid.

And a saying that originated in China hundreds of years ago can prove sufficiently durable to adorn a few hundred Etsy items:

A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.

Tao Te Ching, Chapter 64, ascribed to Lao Tzu The labor of literature

Literacy created distance in time and space and decoupled shared knowledge from social interaction. Human thought escaped the existential present. The reader doesn’t need to be alive at the same time as the writer, let alone hanging out around the same fire pit or agora. 

Freed from the constraints of orality, thinkers explored new forms to preserve their thoughts. And what verbose and convoluted forms these could take:

The Reader will I doubt too soon discover that so large an interval of time was not spent in writing this discourse; the very length of it will convince him, that the writer had not time enough to make a shorter.

George Tullie, An Answer to a Discourse Concerning the Celibacy of the Clergy, 1688

There’s no such thing as an oral semicolon. And George Tullie has no way of knowing anything about his future audience. He addresses himself to a generic reader he will never see, nor receive feedback from. Writing in this manner is terrific for precision, but not good at all for interaction.

Writing allowed literate people to become hermits and hoarders, able to record and consume knowledge in total solitude, invest authority in them, and defend ownership of them. Though much writing preserved the dullest of records, the small minority of language communities that made the leap to literacy also gained the ability to compose, revise, and perfect works of magnificent complexity, utility, and beauty.

The qualities of oral culture

In Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, Walter Ong explored the “psychodynamics of orality,” which is, coincidentally, quite a mouthful.  Through his research, he found that the ability to preserve ideas in writing not only increased knowledge, it altered values and behavior. People who grow up and live in a community that has never known writing are different from literate people—they depend upon one another to preserve and share knowledge. This makes for a completely different, and much more intimate, relationship between ideas and communities.

Oral culture is immediate and social

In a society without writing, communication can happen only in the moment and face-to-face. It sounds like the introvert’s nightmare! Oral culture has several other hallmarks as well:

Spoken words are events that exist in time. It’s impossible to step back and examine a spoken word or phrase. While the speaker can try to repeat, there’s no way to capture or replay an utterance.

All knowledge is social, and lives in memory. Formulas and patterns are essential to transmitting and retaining knowledge. When the knowledge stops being interesting to the audience, it stops existing.

Individuals need to be present to exchange knowledge or communicate. All communication is participatory and immediate. The speaker can adjust the message to the context. Conversation, contention, and struggle help to retain this new knowledge.

The community owns knowledge, not individuals. Everyone draws on the same themes, so not only is originality not helpful, it’s nonsensical to claim an idea as your own.

There are no dictionaries or authoritative sources. The right use of a word is determined by how it’s being used right now.

Literate culture promotes authority and ownership

Printed books enabled mass-distribution and dispensed with handicraft of manuscripts, alienating readers from the source of the ideas, and from each other. (Ong pg. 100):

The printed text is an independent physical object. Ideas can be preserved as a thing, completely apart from the thinker.

Portable printed works enable individual consumption. The need and desire for private space accompanied the emergence of silent, solo reading.

Print creates a sense of private ownership of words. Plagiarism is possible.

Individual attribution is possible. The ability to identify a sole author increases the value of originality and creativity.

Print fosters a sense of closure. Once a work is printed, it is final and closed.

Print-based literacy ascended to a position of authority and cultural dominance, but it didn’t eliminate oral culture completely.

Technology brought us together again

All that studying allowed people to accumulate and share knowledge, speeding up the pace of technological change. And technology transformed communication in turn. It took less than 150 years to get from the telegraph to the World Wide Web. And with the web—a technology that requires literacy—Ong identified a return to the values of the earlier oral culture. He called this secondary orality. Then he died in 2003, before the rise of the mobile internet, when things really got interesting.

Secondary orality is:

Immediate. There is no necessary delay between the expression of an idea and its reception. Physical distance is meaningless.

Socially aware and group-minded. The number of people who can hear and see the same thing simultaneously is in the billions.

Conversational. This is in the sense of being both more interactive and less formal.

Collaborative. Communication invites and enables a response, which may then become part of the message.

Intertextual. The products of our culture reflect and influence one another.

Social, ephemeral, participatory, anti-authoritarian, and opposed to individual ownership of ideas—these qualities sound a lot like internet culture.

Wikipedia: Knowledge Talks

When someone mentions a genre of music you’re unfamiliar with—electroclash, say, or plainsong—what do you do to find out more? It’s quite possible you type the term into Google and end up on Wikipedia, the improbably successful, collaborative encyclopedia that would be absent without the internet.

According to Wikipedia, encyclopedias have existed for around two-thousand years. Wikipedia has existed since 2001, and it’s the fifth most-popular site on the web. Wikipedia is not a publication so much as a society that provides access to knowledge. A volunteer community of “Wikipedians” continuously adds to and improves millions of articles in over 200 languages. It’s a phenomenon manifesting all the values of secondary orality:

Anyone can contribute anonymously and anyone can modify the contributions of another.

The output is free.

The encyclopedia articles are not attributed to any sole creator. A single article might have 2 editors or 1,000.

Each article has an accompanying “talk” page where editors discuss potential improvements, and a “history” page that tracks all revisions. Heated arguments are not documented. They take place as revisions within documents.

Wikipedia is disruptive in the true Clayton Christensen sense. It’s created immense value and wrecked an existing business model. Traditional encyclopedias are publications governed by authority, and created by experts and fact checkers. A volunteer project collaboratively run by unpaid amateurs shows that conversation is more powerful than authority, and that human knowledge is immense and dynamic.

In an interview with The Guardian, a British librarian expressed some disdain about Wikipedia.

The main problem is the lack of authority. With printed publications, the publishers must ensure that their data are reliable, as their livelihood depends on it. But with something like this, all that goes out the window.

Philip Bradley, “Who knows?”, The Guardian, October 26, 2004

Wikipedia is immediate, group-minded, conversational, collaborative, and intertextual— secondary orality in action—but it relies on traditionally published sources for its authority. After all, anything new that changes the world does so by fitting into the world. As we design for new methods of communication, we should remember that nothing is more valuable simply because it’s new; rather, technology is valuable when it brings us more of what’s already meaningful.

From Documents to Events

Pages and documents organize information in space. Space used to be more of a constraint back when we printed conversation out. Now that the internet has given us virtually infinite space, we need to mind how conversation moves through time. Thinking about serving the needs of people in an internet-based culture requires a shift from thinking about how information occupies space—documents—to how it occupies time—events.

Texting means that we’ve never been more lively (yet silent) in our communications. While we still have plenty of in-person interactions, it’s gotten easy to go without. We text grocery requests to our spouses. We click through a menu in a mobile app to summon dinner (the order may still arrive at the restaurant by fax, proving William Gibson’s maxim that the future is unevenly distributed). We exchange messages on Twitter and Facebook instead of visiting friends in person, or even while visiting friends in person. We work at home and Slack our colleagues.

We’re rapidly approaching a future where humans text other humans and only speak aloud to computers. A text-based interaction with a machine that’s standing in for a human should feel like a text-based interaction with a human. Words are a fundamental part of the experience, and they are part of the design. Words should be the basis for defining and creating the design.

We’re participating in a radical cultural transformation. The possibilities manifest in systems like Wikipedia that succeed in changing the world by using technology to connect people in a single collaborative effort. And even those of us creating the change suffer from some lag. The dominant educational and professional culture remains based in literary values. We’ve been rewarded for individual achievement rather than collaboration. We seek to “make our mark,” even when designing changeable systems too complex for any one person to claim authorship. We look for approval from an authority figure. Working in a social, interactive way should feel like the most natural thing in the world, but it will probably take some doing.

Literary writing—any writing that emerges from the culture and standards of literacy—is inherently not interactive. We need to approach the verbal design not as a literary work, but as a conversation. Designing human-centered interactive systems requires us to reflect on our deep-seated orientation around artifacts and ownership. We must alienate ourselves from a set of standards that no longer apply.

Most advice on “writing for the web” or “creating content” starts from the presumption that we are “writing,” just for a different medium. But when we approach communication as an assembly of pieces of content rather than an interaction, customers who might have been expecting a conversation end up feeling like they’ve been handed a manual instead.

Software is on a path to participating in our culture as a peer.  So, it should behave like a person—alive and present. It doesn’t matter how much so-called machine intelligence is under the hood—a perceptive set of programmatic responses, rather than a series of documents, can be enough if they have the qualities of conversation.

Interactive systems should evoke the best qualities of living human communities—active, social, simple, and present—not passive, isolated, complex, or closed off.

Life Beyond Literacy

Indeed, language changes lives. It builds society, expresses our highest aspirations, our basest thoughts, our emotions and our philosophies of life. But all language is ultimately at the service of human interaction. Other components of language—things like grammar and stories—are secondary to conversation.

Daniel L. Everett, How Language Began

Literacy has gotten us far. It’s gotten you this far in this book. So, it’s not surprising we’re attached to the idea. Writing has allowed us to create technologies that give us the ability to interact with one another across time and space, and have instantaneous access to knowledge in a way our ancestors would equate with magic. However, creating and exchanging documents, while powerful, is not a good model for lively interaction. Misplaced literate values can lead to misery—working alone and worrying too much about posterity.

So, it’s time to let go and live a little! We’re at an exciting moment. The computer screen that once stood for a page can offer a window into a continuous present that still remembers everything. Or, the screen might disappear completely.

Now we can start imagining, in an open-ended way, what constellation of connected devices any given person will have around them, and how we can deliver a meaningful, memorable experience on any one of them. We can step away from the screen and consider what set of inputs, outputs, events, and information add up to the best experience.

This is daunting for designers, sure, yet phenomenal for people. Thinking about human-computer interactions from a screen-based perspective was never truly human-centered from the start. The ideal interface is an interface that’s not noticeable at all—a world in which the distance from thought to action has collapsed and merely uttering a phrase can make it so.

We’re fast moving past “computer literacy.” It’s on us to ensure all systems speak human fluently.

http://ift.tt/2DsNpNF

[pattersondonaldblk5]

Conversational Design

A note from the editors: We’re pleased to share an excerpt from Chapter 1 of Erika Hall’s new book, Conversational Design, available now from A Book Apart.

Texting is how we talk now. We talk by tapping tiny messages on touchscreens—we message using SMS via mobile data networks, or through apps like Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp.

In 2015, the Pew Research Center found that 64% of American adults owned a smartphone of some kind, up from 35% in 2011. We still refer to these personal, pocket-sized computers as phones, but “Phone” is now just one of many communication apps we neglect in favor of texting. Texting is the most widely used mobile data service in America. And in the wider world, four billion people have mobile phones, so 4 billion people have access to SMS or other messaging apps. For some, dictating messages into a wristwatch offers an appealing alternative to placing a call.

The popularity of texting can be partially explained by the medium’s ability to offer the easy give-and-take of conversation without requiring continuous attention. Texting feels like direct human connection, made even more captivating by unpredictable lag and irregular breaks. Any typing is incidental because the experience of texting barely resembles “writing,” a term that carries associations of considered composition. In his TED talk, Columbia University linguist John McWhorter called texting “fingered conversation”—terminology I find awkward, but accurate. The physical act—typing—isn’t what defines the form or its conventions. Technology is breaking down our traditional categories of communication.

By the numbers, texting is the most compelling computer-human interaction going. When we text, we become immersed and forget our exchanges are computer-mediated at all. We can learn a lot about digital design from the inescapable draw of these bite-sized interactions, specifically the use of language.

What Texting Teaches Us

This is an interesting example of what makes computer-mediated interaction interesting. The reasons people are compelled to attend to their text messages—even at risk to their own health and safety—aren’t high-production values, so-called rich media, or the complexity of the feature set.

Texting, and other forms of social media, tap into something very primitive in the human brain. These systems offer always-available social connection. The brevity and unpredictability of the messages themselves triggers the release of dopamine that motivates seeking behavior and keeps people coming back for more. What makes interactions interesting may start on a screen, but the really interesting stuff happens in the mind. And language is a critical part of that. Our conscious minds are made of language, so it’s easy to perceive the messages you read not just as words but as the thoughts of another mingled with your own. Loneliness seems impossible with so many voices in your head.

With minimal visual embellishment, texts can deliver personality, pathos, humor, and narrative. This is apparent in “Texts from Dog,” which, as the title indicates, is a series of imagined text exchanges between a man and his dog. (Fig 1.1). With just a few words, and some considered capitalization, Joe Butcher (writing as October Jones) creates a vivid picture of the relationship between a neurotic canine and his weary owner.

Fig 1.1: “Texts from Dog” shows how lively a simple text exchange can be.

Using words is key to connecting with other humans online, just as it is in the so-called “real world.” Imbuing interfaces with the attributes of conversation can be powerful. I’m far from the first person to suggest this. However, as computers mediate more and more relationships, including customer relationships, anyone thinking about digital products and services is in a challenging place. We’re caught between tried-and-true past practices and the urge to adopt the “next big thing,” sometimes at the exclusion of all else.

Being intentionally conversational isn’t easy. This is especially true in business and at scale, such as in digital systems. Professional writers use different types of writing for different purposes, and each has rules that can be learned. The love of language is often fueled by a passion for rules — rules we received in the classroom and revisit in manuals of style, and rules that offer writers the comfort of being correct outside of any specific context. Also, there is the comfort of being finished with a piece of writing and moving on. Conversation, on the other hand, is a context-dependent social activity that implies a potentially terrifying immediacy.

Moving from the idea of publishing content to engaging in conversation can be uncomfortable for businesses and professional writers alike. There are no rules. There is no done. It all feels more personal. Using colloquial language, even in “simplifying” interactive experiences, can conflict with a desire to appear authoritative. Or the pendulum swings to the other extreme and a breezy style gets applied to a laborious process like a thin coat of paint.

As a material for design and an ingredient in interactions, words need to emerge from the content shed and be considered from the start.  The way humans use language—easily, joyfully, sometimes painfully—should anchor the foundation of all interactions with digital systems.

The way we use language and the way we socialize are what make us human; our past contains the key to what commands our attention in the present, and what will command it in the future. To understand how we came to be so perplexed by our most human quality, it’s worth taking a quick look at, oh!, the entire known history of communication technology.

The Mother Tongue

Accustomed to eyeballing type, we can forget language began in our mouths as a series of sounds, like the calls and growls of other animals. We’ll never know for sure how long we’ve been talking—speech itself leaves no trace—but we do know it’s been a mighty long time.

Archaeologist Natalie Thais Uomini and psychologist Georg Friedrich Meyer concluded that our ancestors began to develop language as early as 1.75 million years ago. Per the fossil record, modern humans emerged at least 190,000 years ago in the African savannah. Evidence of cave painting goes back 30,000 years (Fig 1.2).

Then, a mere 6,000 years ago, ancient Sumerian commodity traders grew tired of getting ripped off. Around 3200 BCE, one of them had the idea to track accounts by scratching wedges in wet clay tablets. Cuneiform was born.

So, don’t feel bad about procrastinating when you need to write—humanity put the whole thing off for a couple hundred thousand years! By a conservative estimate, we’ve had writing for about 4% of the time we’ve been human. Chatting is easy; writing is an arduous chore.

Prior to mechanical reproduction, literacy was limited to the elite by the time and cost of hand-copying manuscripts. It was the rise of printing that led to widespread literacy; mass distribution of text allowed information and revolutionary ideas to circulate across borders and class divisions. The sharp increase in literacy bolstered an emerging middle class. And the ability to record and share knowledge accelerated all other advances in technology: photography, radio, TV, computers, internet, and now the mobile web. And our talking speakers.

Fig 1.2: In hindsight, “literate culture” now seems like an annoying phase we had to go through so we could get to texting.

Every time our communication technology advances and changes, so does the surrounding culture—then it disrupts the power structure and upsets the people in charge. Catholic archbishops railed against mechanical movable type in the fifteenth century. Today, English teachers deplore texting emoji. Resistance is, as always, futile. OMG is now listed in the Oxford English Dictionary.

But while these developments have changed the world and how we relate to one another, they haven’t altered our deep oral core.

Orality, Say It with Me

Orality knits persons into community.

Walter Ong

Today, when we record everything in all media without much thought, it’s almost impossible to conceive of a world in which the sum of our culture existed only as thoughts.

Before literacy, words were ephemeral and all knowledge was social and communal. There was no “save” option and no intellectual property. The only way to sustain an idea was to share it, speaking aloud to another person in a way that made it easy for them to remember. This was orality—the first interface.

We can never know for certain what purely oral cultures were like. People without writing are terrible at keeping records. But we can examine oral traditions that persist for clues.

The oral formula

Reading and writing remained elite activities for centuries after their invention. In cultures without a writing system, oral characteristics persisted to help transmit poetry, history, law and other knowledge across generations.

The epic poems of Homer rely on meter, formulas, and repetition to aid memory:

Far as a man with his eyes sees into the mist of the distance Sitting aloft on a crag to gaze over the wine-dark seaway, Just so far were the loud-neighing steeds of the gods overleaping.

Iliad, 5.770

Concrete images like rosy-fingered dawn, loud-neighing steeds, wine-dark seaway, and swift-footed Achilles served to aid the teller and to sear the story into the listener’s memory.

Biblical proverbs also encode wisdom in a memorable format:

As a dog returns to its vomit, so fools repeat their folly.

Proverbs 26:11

That is vivid.

And a saying that originated in China hundreds of years ago can prove sufficiently durable to adorn a few hundred Etsy items:

A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.

Tao Te Ching, Chapter 64, ascribed to Lao Tzu The labor of literature

Literacy created distance in time and space and decoupled shared knowledge from social interaction. Human thought escaped the existential present. The reader doesn’t need to be alive at the same time as the writer, let alone hanging out around the same fire pit or agora. 

Freed from the constraints of orality, thinkers explored new forms to preserve their thoughts. And what verbose and convoluted forms these could take:

The Reader will I doubt too soon discover that so large an interval of time was not spent in writing this discourse; the very length of it will convince him, that the writer had not time enough to make a shorter.

George Tullie, An Answer to a Discourse Concerning the Celibacy of the Clergy, 1688

There’s no such thing as an oral semicolon. And George Tullie has no way of knowing anything about his future audience. He addresses himself to a generic reader he will never see, nor receive feedback from. Writing in this manner is terrific for precision, but not good at all for interaction.

Writing allowed literate people to become hermits and hoarders, able to record and consume knowledge in total solitude, invest authority in them, and defend ownership of them. Though much writing preserved the dullest of records, the small minority of language communities that made the leap to literacy also gained the ability to compose, revise, and perfect works of magnificent complexity, utility, and beauty.

The qualities of oral culture

In Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, Walter Ong explored the “psychodynamics of orality,” which is, coincidentally, quite a mouthful.  Through his research, he found that the ability to preserve ideas in writing not only increased knowledge, it altered values and behavior. People who grow up and live in a community that has never known writing are different from literate people—they depend upon one another to preserve and share knowledge. This makes for a completely different, and much more intimate, relationship between ideas and communities.

Oral culture is immediate and social

In a society without writing, communication can happen only in the moment and face-to-face. It sounds like the introvert’s nightmare! Oral culture has several other hallmarks as well:

Spoken words are events that exist in time. It’s impossible to step back and examine a spoken word or phrase. While the speaker can try to repeat, there’s no way to capture or replay an utterance.

All knowledge is social, and lives in memory. Formulas and patterns are essential to transmitting and retaining knowledge. When the knowledge stops being interesting to the audience, it stops existing.

Individuals need to be present to exchange knowledge or communicate. All communication is participatory and immediate. The speaker can adjust the message to the context. Conversation, contention, and struggle help to retain this new knowledge.

The community owns knowledge, not individuals. Everyone draws on the same themes, so not only is originality not helpful, it’s nonsensical to claim an idea as your own.

There are no dictionaries or authoritative sources. The right use of a word is determined by how it’s being used right now.

Literate culture promotes authority and ownership

Printed books enabled mass-distribution and dispensed with handicraft of manuscripts, alienating readers from the source of the ideas, and from each other. (Ong pg. 100):

The printed text is an independent physical object. Ideas can be preserved as a thing, completely apart from the thinker.

Portable printed works enable individual consumption. The need and desire for private space accompanied the emergence of silent, solo reading.

Print creates a sense of private ownership of words. Plagiarism is possible.

Individual attribution is possible. The ability to identify a sole author increases the value of originality and creativity.

Print fosters a sense of closure. Once a work is printed, it is final and closed.

Print-based literacy ascended to a position of authority and cultural dominance, but it didn’t eliminate oral culture completely.

Technology brought us together again

All that studying allowed people to accumulate and share knowledge, speeding up the pace of technological change. And technology transformed communication in turn. It took less than 150 years to get from the telegraph to the World Wide Web. And with the web—a technology that requires literacy—Ong identified a return to the values of the earlier oral culture. He called this secondary orality. Then he died in 2003, before the rise of the mobile internet, when things really got interesting.

Secondary orality is:

Immediate. There is no necessary delay between the expression of an idea and its reception. Physical distance is meaningless.

Socially aware and group-minded. The number of people who can hear and see the same thing simultaneously is in the billions.

Conversational. This is in the sense of being both more interactive and less formal.

Collaborative. Communication invites and enables a response, which may then become part of the message.

Intertextual. The products of our culture reflect and influence one another.

Social, ephemeral, participatory, anti-authoritarian, and opposed to individual ownership of ideas—these qualities sound a lot like internet culture.

Wikipedia: Knowledge Talks

When someone mentions a genre of music you’re unfamiliar with—electroclash, say, or plainsong—what do you do to find out more? It’s quite possible you type the term into Google and end up on Wikipedia, the improbably successful, collaborative encyclopedia that would be absent without the internet.

According to Wikipedia, encyclopedias have existed for around two-thousand years. Wikipedia has existed since 2001, and it’s the fifth most-popular site on the web. Wikipedia is not a publication so much as a society that provides access to knowledge. A volunteer community of “Wikipedians” continuously adds to and improves millions of articles in over 200 languages. It’s a phenomenon manifesting all the values of secondary orality:

Anyone can contribute anonymously and anyone can modify the contributions of another.

The output is free.

The encyclopedia articles are not attributed to any sole creator. A single article might have 2 editors or 1,000.

Each article has an accompanying “talk” page where editors discuss potential improvements, and a “history” page that tracks all revisions. Heated arguments are not documented. They take place as revisions within documents.

Wikipedia is disruptive in the true Clayton Christensen sense. It’s created immense value and wrecked an existing business model. Traditional encyclopedias are publications governed by authority, and created by experts and fact checkers. A volunteer project collaboratively run by unpaid amateurs shows that conversation is more powerful than authority, and that human knowledge is immense and dynamic.

In an interview with The Guardian, a British librarian expressed some disdain about Wikipedia.

The main problem is the lack of authority. With printed publications, the publishers must ensure that their data are reliable, as their livelihood depends on it. But with something like this, all that goes out the window.

Philip Bradley, “Who knows?”, The Guardian, October 26, 2004

Wikipedia is immediate, group-minded, conversational, collaborative, and intertextual— secondary orality in action—but it relies on traditionally published sources for its authority. After all, anything new that changes the world does so by fitting into the world. As we design for new methods of communication, we should remember that nothing is more valuable simply because it’s new; rather, technology is valuable when it brings us more of what’s already meaningful.

From Documents to Events

Pages and documents organize information in space. Space used to be more of a constraint back when we printed conversation out. Now that the internet has given us virtually infinite space, we need to mind how conversation moves through time. Thinking about serving the needs of people in an internet-based culture requires a shift from thinking about how information occupies space—documents—to how it occupies time—events.

Texting means that we’ve never been more lively (yet silent) in our communications. While we still have plenty of in-person interactions, it’s gotten easy to go without. We text grocery requests to our spouses. We click through a menu in a mobile app to summon dinner (the order may still arrive at the restaurant by fax, proving William Gibson’s maxim that the future is unevenly distributed). We exchange messages on Twitter and Facebook instead of visiting friends in person, or even while visiting friends in person. We work at home and Slack our colleagues.

We’re rapidly approaching a future where humans text other humans and only speak aloud to computers. A text-based interaction with a machine that’s standing in for a human should feel like a text-based interaction with a human. Words are a fundamental part of the experience, and they are part of the design. Words should be the basis for defining and creating the design.

We’re participating in a radical cultural transformation. The possibilities manifest in systems like Wikipedia that succeed in changing the world by using technology to connect people in a single collaborative effort. And even those of us creating the change suffer from some lag. The dominant educational and professional culture remains based in literary values. We’ve been rewarded for individual achievement rather than collaboration. We seek to “make our mark,” even when designing changeable systems too complex for any one person to claim authorship. We look for approval from an authority figure. Working in a social, interactive way should feel like the most natural thing in the world, but it will probably take some doing.

Literary writing—any writing that emerges from the culture and standards of literacy—is inherently not interactive. We need to approach the verbal design not as a literary work, but as a conversation. Designing human-centered interactive systems requires us to reflect on our deep-seated orientation around artifacts and ownership. We must alienate ourselves from a set of standards that no longer apply.

Most advice on “writing for the web” or “creating content” starts from the presumption that we are “writing,” just for a different medium. But when we approach communication as an assembly of pieces of content rather than an interaction, customers who might have been expecting a conversation end up feeling like they’ve been handed a manual instead.

Software is on a path to participating in our culture as a peer.  So, it should behave like a person—alive and present. It doesn’t matter how much so-called machine intelligence is under the hood—a perceptive set of programmatic responses, rather than a series of documents, can be enough if they have the qualities of conversation.

Interactive systems should evoke the best qualities of living human communities—active, social, simple, and present—not passive, isolated, complex, or closed off.

Life Beyond Literacy

Indeed, language changes lives. It builds society, expresses our highest aspirations, our basest thoughts, our emotions and our philosophies of life. But all language is ultimately at the service of human interaction. Other components of language—things like grammar and stories—are secondary to conversation.

Daniel L. Everett, How Language Began

Literacy has gotten us far. It’s gotten you this far in this book. So, it’s not surprising we’re attached to the idea. Writing has allowed us to create technologies that give us the ability to interact with one another across time and space, and have instantaneous access to knowledge in a way our ancestors would equate with magic. However, creating and exchanging documents, while powerful, is not a good model for lively interaction. Misplaced literate values can lead to misery—working alone and worrying too much about posterity.

So, it’s time to let go and live a little! We’re at an exciting moment. The computer screen that once stood for a page can offer a window into a continuous present that still remembers everything. Or, the screen might disappear completely.

Now we can start imagining, in an open-ended way, what constellation of connected devices any given person will have around them, and how we can deliver a meaningful, memorable experience on any one of them. We can step away from the screen and consider what set of inputs, outputs, events, and information add up to the best experience.

This is daunting for designers, sure, yet phenomenal for people. Thinking about human-computer interactions from a screen-based perspective was never truly human-centered from the start. The ideal interface is an interface that’s not noticeable at all—a world in which the distance from thought to action has collapsed and merely uttering a phrase can make it so.

We’re fast moving past “computer literacy.” It’s on us to ensure all systems speak human fluently.

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[madelinepreston]

            I would first like to start off by stating that I identify as a white, able-bodied, cisgendered, heterosexual female. I am aware of my privilege, but am not ignorant to the disempowered groups around me.  For the purpose of this analysis, I am to aligning myself with black women and the struggles they face as seen in the Oscar nominated film Hidden Figures - after all, solidarity for women and all that jazz. But seriously, the media has long wrongly or underrepresented women and the power they have, so it is incredibly refreshing to see strong black women being portrayed in this film. From a plot perspective, I was hooked from the very first scene – 3 strong, independent women on their way to work, fixing their own car at the side of the road. I buckled in for an empowering film that I was sure to love whilst yelling “go get em’ girl” at the screen *cue boyfriend eye roll*. If you haven’t gotten off the couch to a movie theatre near you to see the film, Peter Debruge couldn’t have said it any better:

While an all-male team of engineers performed the calculations for potential space travel, women mathematicians checked their work, playing a vital role at a moment when the United States was neck-and-neck with the Soviets in the space race. As brash, bright, and broad as Hollywood studio movies come, "Hidden Figures" tells the story of three of these unsung heroes, all of them African-American, who fought a doubly steep uphill battle --as crusaders for both feminism and civil rights in segregated Virginia--to help put an American into orbit.

The movie is fascinatingly based on real people (Katherine Goble, Mary Jackson and Dorothy Vaughn) and events, which were actually created from the non-fiction book of the same name (Melfi and Schroeder). Not only did I love this movie for the refreshingly kick-ass women (both the actresses and their characters), but I also loved the “on-the-nose” dialogue. A perfect example of this is when Kevin Costner’s character learns that Katherine is consistently never around because she is running to “the coloured bathroom” on the opposite side of the campus. This already had my blood boiling, cause when a girls gotta go, she’s gotta go. The light-hearted “Running” theme song by Pharrell Williams did not uplift my mood one iota. It honestly was adding insult to injury, I feel, and was making light of a situation which is steeped in systematic, blatant, intolerable racism! The scene continues with Katherine returning from one of her bathroom breaks and Costner’s character consequently cut down the ‘coloured bathroom’ sign and yells, “Here at NASA, we all pee the same colour!” (Debruge 182) – I’m glad someone finally did. The inhumanity of it all had me feeling uneasy and a bit disgusted. However, this film brought forth two extremely necessary topics of the 1960’s which we still struggle with today – women and the racial ‘other.’

            What I mean to say here is similar to Stuart Hall’s argument that explains: “we know what black means, not because there is some essence of ‘blackness’ but because we can contrast it with its opposite – ‘white’ (26).  The same can even be said about masculine and feminine, especially within this movie. We see opposing ‘black’ versus ‘white’ and ‘masculine’ versus ‘feminine’, but as we know today there are so many things in between. Even the word ‘versus’ really translates as ‘against’ – setting the ‘bad’ versus ‘good’ in these examples. So basically, the world is doomed to repeat itself if we don’t make necessary changes – not to be dramatic or anything. I also just have to add that it’s all fine and well that she can pee in the other bathroom again, but once again it is a man stepping in to “save the day”. I am happy about the positive message, but I really can’t help but think about the way this once again reinforces these stereotypes and systems of oppression, but I digress…

            As Hall describes reminiscing of the past:

During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries popular representations of daily life under slavery, ownership and servitude are shown as so ‘natural’ that they require no comment. It was part of the natural order of things that white men should sit and slaves should stand; that white women rode and slave men ran after them shading them from the Louisiana sun with an umbrella…” (37)

This can be seen all too well within Hidden Figures. For example, when Dorothy Vaughn is looking for a certain book, the librarian insists she has “books in the coloured section” trying to rush her out. Dorothy stands her ground and the librarian replies with an indignant, “that’s just the way it is” and escorts her out by security. This situation is one of the most infuriating parts of the movie for me because as an English major I advocate for the promotion of early and for all, literacy. The only thing that brought me some sort of faith in people again was the way in which Dorothy uses this as a way to teach her kids: “Separate and equal are two different things. Just cause’ it’s the way doesn’t make it right. Understand? You act right, you are right…” (Hidden Figures). I couldn’t believe that a woman that was just kicked out of a library for being black, turned it into a lesson learned for her children and a calm attitude to move forward. Dorothy still provides her children with a lesson while sitting at the back of the bus on seats labelled “For Coloured Patrons Only.” However, Dorothy handles her anger in a dignified manner – more than I could say for myself if it were me *cue Mean Girls clip of Cady Heron tackling Regina George*. This is exactly what Sara Ahmed describes in her article “Feminist Killjoys”:

[…] The anger of feminists of colour is attributed. So you might be angry about how racism and sexism diminish life choices for women of colour. Your anger is a judgement that something is wrong. But in being heard as angry, your speech is read as motivated by anger. Your anger is read as unattributed, as if you are against x. You become angry at the injustice of being heard as motivated by anger, which makes it harder to separate yourself from the object of your anger. You become entangled with what you are angry about because you are angry about how they have entangled you in your anger. In becoming angry about that entanglement, you confirm their commitment to your anger as the truth “behind” your speech, which is what blocks your anger, stops it from getting through. You are blocked by not getting through. (98)

            In this case, Dorothy doesn’t give in to the ‘angry black woman’ stereotype Ahmed talks about, knowing its adverse effects – now that’s some will power. Although, on the flip side why can’t a woman express her emotions (in this case anger) in the way she sees fit?! After all, Dorothy is clearly being mistreated. Men can beat women, each other, really anything they want to a pulp but God forbid a woman show anything besides grace and dignity? – Gimmie a break. The double standards continue.

            Anyway, what is most important to acknowledge here is that this segregation and racism extends even into the more modernized environments; it’s not something just seen back in the day, it’s happening now! An example is Katherine Goble’s work environment in the film. Through stereotyping, the “‘binding’ or bonding together of all of Us who are ‘normal’ into one ‘imagined community’; and it sends into symbolic exile all of Them – ‘the Others’ – who are in some way different…” (Hall 50). This acknowledgement is the foundation for the movie. When Katherine moves to a new team, she is greeted with a man handing her the trash bin stating: “This wasn’t emptied last night” (Hidden Figures) – this is exactly what I am talking about. OF COURSE the black woman was most likely a custodian and not one of the greatest minds of her time. Why else would she be here? – I’d tell him exactly where I’d like him to put that trash can…This stereotyping is what Hall refers to as “classifying people according to norm and constructs the excluded ‘other’” (51).

            Speaking of all this stereotyping and unequal relations, can we also talk about the power of white society? Hell yes we can. And we should. It was an extremely hard pill to swallow watching the only female co-worker Katherine had, explain: “I don’t know where your bathrooms are” (Hidden Figures). What struck me was the way that female relationships did not even supersede the racial divide within the movie. For example, in the way Vivian Mitchell (Kirsten Dunst) treats the black women: ���As a woman, Vivian can empathize with Katherine's workplace challenges; and yet, as a white woman, she doesn't get it at all, oblivious to her subconscious role in keeping Katherine down” (Debruge). Whatever happened to a little female solidarity? This is what is referred to as “white feminism versus feminism” (UWIRE). Although the women have a common goal, characters like Vivian are only interested in the white woman’s plight as a separate issue. How can we win a fight for women, when all women aren’t united? When Vivian finds that Mary has applied for the engineer training program she storms in: “NASA doesn’t commission females for the engineer training program,” […] “We now require advanced extension courses through the University of Virginia.” This is an all-white school, making it impossible for Mary to attend – think maybe they did this on purpose? Mary is clearly disappointed: “Every time we have a chance to get ahead, they move the finish line” with which Vivian retorts “Ya’ll should be thankful you have jobs at all” (Hidden Figures). I could not believe that she had the guts to even say something like that to another person, let alone a fellow woman. What is crazy to me is that the women don’t share in their fight for equality. The white women still treat the black women like slaves, even though they themselves feel the oppression of the white patriarchal society – talk about a flaw in logic. UWIRE Text provides one of those ‘I couldn’t have said it better myself’ moments:

We see that the black women in the film stick together and uplift one another. Together, they try to ensure the one another's success. Yet, the white women -- who already held higher positions than their female counterparts -- were only trying to achieve personal gain. They struggled with the fact that the men dominated the workplace. Although they didn't work against black women, they certainly didn't work in favor of them […] Just remember, this is an inclusive movement. You cannot call yourself a feminist if you're not fighting for the advancement of all women -- of all backgrounds. White feminism is not feminism.

Again, for anyone who didn’t get that– white feminism. is. not. feminism.

          Speaking of white patriarchal society, what is everyone’s problem with these 3 African-American women within NASA? Well, one of the main aspects we see is what Katie Milestone and Anneke Meyer describe as contempt for women exhibiting “the new femininity that gives girls the licence to engage in practices and display attitudes previously reserved for men” (119) – and thank God for that. The privileges other women have fought to provide me things such as; a life that revolves around more than marriage and babies – hallelujah. My University diploma (soon to be) and my one bedroom apartment can attest to that. In my opinion, Milestone and Meyer’s argument can easily be seen in the relationship between Paul Stafford (Jim Parsons) and Katherine Goble. Paul clearly feels threatened that Katherine is told to check his math (can men be any more insecure?), and the reports that Katherine creates can’t even have her own name on them? Let alone the fact that Paul has no problem telling her: “Computers don’t author reports.” Not to mention when Katherine wants to attend the briefings in order to accurately do her job, Paul declares: “There is no protocol for a woman in there” (Hidden Figures) – Guess you better get one then eh, Paul? Milestone and Meyer’s refer to this on page 120 of their article explaining: “From a feminist point of view the intense critique of women do not conform to behaviours prescribed as appropriate by emphasized femininity, then they will be symbolically punished.” This interaction between Paul and Katherine surrounds the idea that “men are associated with the public domain and the world of work, women are associated with the private space and the domestic” (Milestone and Meyer 124). And, at the heart of this feminist struggle lies the plight of women to get educated and out to work into good jobs (125). Not only is this discrimination dripping off Paul, but the team for which Katherine works, is all men. The only exception is one other female who seems to be doing administrative work – not math or ‘man’s work.’ What a shock that was for me. I currently work in an office surrounded with both strong and leadership oriented women – I was so not impressed with the egos and maltreatment from the men. 

          One of the most laughable aspects for me is the character of Al Harrison (Kevin Costner). Mostly because he is portrayed as ‘one of the good guys’ and an ‘advocate’ for the women within NASA. However, our prince charming is seriously flawed *cue Shrek montage*. Al is supposed to be one of the only ones ‘on our side,’ but even he struggles with some of the encounters regarding both colour, and women. For example, even when Al is providing a motivational speech and states: “I suggest you call your wives, and tell them how it’s gunna be.” So many things are wrong with this statement for me. I have become so much more aware of social taboos. Like, 1. Why is it “call your wives” – this leaves no room for any other sexual orientation (I know it’s the 1960’s, but someone was definitely secretly cringing inside here); 2. Why is it mid-day and your wives are home – this reinforces the gender stereotype of the woman at home in the domestic space and not within the work force *eye roll*; 3.  He says: “tell them how it’s gunna be” – let me tell you, if any man ever thought they could ‘tell me’ what to do, they would have another thing coming. Not to mention after all of this, Al was fully aware that Katherine and her other female co-worker were in the room – like, what’s a woman gotta do to get a little respect? He excluded her, maybe not on purpose, but by instinct. The tragedy of it all is that the film captures one tragic main element: “the reality that no matter the amount of intelligence a black woman may have, she'll always have to work considerably harder than the average white man” (UWIRE). The even sadder part is that this is still all too true today. Women are still making less money than their male counterparts and have far less opportunity for advancement and recognition. And you can be sure that black women have to fight even harder.

            One of the refreshing aspects for me was to not only see a movie with 3 strong female leads being nominated for an Oscar, but that all three of the women are black. Andi Zeisler provides an intriguing new outlook on this aspect of film: “Perhaps parts created for women of colour would be not only more plentiful but also less stereotypical. Perhaps the juiciest roles for women – would be something other than […] ‘hookers, victims, and doormats’” (143). Although Zeisler sees less promise back in 2008, we have made huge leaps today. Maybe that’s why this film is so important. It changes people’s perspectives and attitudes.

            The last thing that is notable to mention about Hidden Figures is that is a celebratory story. The movie is first and foremost about “a group of extraordinary women into an account of how they overcame race and gender barriers, while helping to win the space race” (Kumar). The most important aspect is that the movie “celebrates the skills, achievements and tenacity of women like Dorothy Vaughan, Katherine Johnson and Mary Jackson as they helped launch rockets and humans into space” (Kumar). Can I get a hell ya? CNN Wire touches on this perfectly:

A clever title with multiple meanings, "Hidden Figures" captures the enthusiasm that surrounded putting men in space, but tempers it with the injustices faced by those who assisted them back on Earth. That includes the brilliantly capable Katherine being told by her immediate supervisor ("The Big Bang Theory's" Jim Parsons) that "computers," the rather amusing job title back then for those working in the math department, don't put their names on reports.

I think the fact that it celebrates women, and most importantly women of all colours, is what makes me the proudest. Privileged as I may be in modern society, we (women) still have large steps to climb when it comes to inequality. Manjit Kumar has it right for all of us: “There's an easy moral here: that Neil Armstrong's "giant leap for mankind" will only loom larger in our imaginations once we appreciate all the people - men and women - who got him there."

            Hidden Figures makes me feel proud to be a woman and to face our inequality head on. My voice will be heard. I will continue to take a stand – will you?