stimulant

If you read read the last post you should have already updated bookmarks, etc. But just in case, my blog is now here, and should stay there for a long while.

I’ll be migrating this blog over to our new server for the sprouts over the next few days. The URL http://alecresnick.org will point there, but if you’re interested in checking it out in the meantime, head on over to http://aresnick.blogs.thesprouts.org.

So for the past couple weeks, I’ve been putting together what will be the next version of my blog and site. Rather than just using it as a soapbox and place to write, I’m working to make my website more about my management of information and profitable sharing of ideas and workflow. But, in working on sprout, I’ve been writing and reading and coding a bunch with Shaunalynn and Nagle, which has left me little time to keep up with my personal writing and reading. But! I’m aiming to change that this week. Hopefully, that means that in the next couple weeks, you should see a shift to a new domain and the initial trickle of a steady flow of content (and not just my del.icio.us bookmarks).

a few, tasty links
(December 31st - January 2nd):¹

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1. If you’re interested, you can access my del.icio.us bookmarks here. [↩]

a few, tasty links
(December 18th - December 31st):¹

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1. If you’re interested, you can access my del.icio.us bookmarks here. [↩]

a few, tasty links
(December 3rd - December 16th):¹

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1. If you’re interested, you can access my del.icio.us bookmarks here. [↩]

a few, tasty links
(November 25th - December 2nd):¹

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1. If you’re interested, you can access my del.icio.us bookmarks here. [↩]

a few, tasty links
(November 20th - November 24th):¹

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1. If you’re interested, you can access my del.icio.us bookmarks here. [↩]

The idea that knowledge can be effectively broken down into categories is deeply rooted in our attitudes about the world. We taxonomize knowledge and skill very early on, and we see it everywhere. Driven by the increasing economic pressure for specialization and the fundamental role we let career play in defining our identity, “the field you work in” is a unit of knowledge that we take for granted. People find it hard to answer simple questions like, “What does it mean to be a scientist?” When you exclude someone’s career, the question, “Who are you?” gets much more uncomfortable for many, because we get so little practice thinking of ourselves as more than our career, much less more than what we do.

The illusion of a neat set of bins¹ into which you can place all knowledge and experience is reinforced and rehashed in school, where the entirety of your school experience is defined in terms of concrete units of time given names like “Math” and “English.” As the underlying structure behind the defining, dominant activity for most youth (i.e., school), this classification exacerbates the confusion between activity (what you do) and identity (who you are). People grow up being “good at math” or “a talented athlete.” For a decade, we’re asked, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” and simultaneously told that we are “students,” further reinforcing the coupling between an artificial organization of knowledge and our identity. Then we head off to college, where that relationship deepens, giving us the language to discuss our intellectual curiosity and muddling that with what we do and who we are.

A lot of collateral psychological damage is incurred in this long narrative of assumptions about the nature of expertise. Unfortunately, simply being aware of these problems and articulating them is not enough to insulate you from their effects.² People have talked about the need for cross-disciplinary thinking in science for years. And with the arrival of “design thinking” on the education scene, more people are beginning to use that type of language. Nonetheless, the disempowering role of the idea of expertise is still well-entrenched across every domain in which an institution dominates that domain’s definition. Plenty of people identify as parents and can incorporate that into their identity. But for most, calling yourself an artist because you draw and paint is a much harder jump. In part, this is because people differentiate between activities defined by doing and activities defined by being. That difference does not exist. It is a myth entirely perpetuated by the very idea of expertise being something intrinsic to a person, and therefore inaccessible to some people.

I can work eight hours a day as a waiter and go home to play music with my friends and call myself a musician, or paint portraits in my spare time and call myself an artist. This is possible only because there exist infrastructures and narratives which I can comfortably integrate myself into that permit me to do this. The musician-trying-to-make-it-big is an archetype: they play gigs and long to become part of the mainstream media so that thier identity as a musician can be validated by an external definition of success. The “starving artist” has a bit easier of a time permitting themselves their identity, because the starving artist narrative has some amount of counterculture built in at the ground floor (i.e. that is, to some extent, some people feel like rejection and marginalization are a necessary part of being an artist. Not that they’d turn down a gallery showing.)

But what if I just paint? Or fiddle with a guitar every now and then? Why can’t wielding a paintbrush every now and then be enough to call myself a painter? Or even better, why do I need to call myself a painter? Why can’t I just be painting?

I’m ignoring plenty of complicating issues, not the least of which is the fact that activity is strongly correlated to identity, particularly when a community grows around an activity.³ The group of people who associate themselves with classical concert performance share not only an activity, but an entire culture and mindset. Unfortunately, people usually lack the language to differentiate between an activity as an indicator (something which is correlated to membership in a certain culture) and an activity as an identifier (something which is part of that culture’s definition).

How do we change this? The end goal is to empower a person to approach an activity without comparing themselves against some sort of stifling, mental standard, requiring the activity to be common or otherwise unmysterious, diversely peopled, and open to engagement at many levels.

The typical pop song involves an enormous amount of work to create. The fact that all that work is hidden from people means it is difficult to feel empowered to create music, because an entire industry is devoted to making it seem easy, effortless. The conflation of the artist and their art only exacerbates this problem. Even in a pop song, because it is seen as “accessible” [for listening, if not writing] suggests that classical music is even further removed.

Within a field, this raises an issue for everyone who’s not at the top of the artificially defined hierarchy of expertise. Musicians who haven’t “made it” wonder about the workflows of musicians who have [“made it”]. Even if they understand that it isn’t an issue of talent but of work, the mystery surrounding the workflow is disempowering.

Turning to science, we find the same problem: for motives different than the music industry’s, producing papers which hide all your mistakes and mis-steps is [mis-]incentivized.⁴ so strongly that we have given a name to scientists’ particular insecurities.

The situation is the same everywhere you turn: doctors, artists, athletes — everywhere an expertise is defined, the fact that “experts” in that field feel the need to maintain and extend the importance of their identifying skill means that there is a feedback loop encouraging the increasing commodification and obfuscation of indicators for that particular skill. The art industry is infamous for the disconnect between quality and credentials — when people are in a museum complaining that, “my toddler could paint that,” what they are revealing is a deep ignorance, disempowerment, and resultant bitterness about the artistic process. Experts cannot exist without defining amateurs, and that will always set up a disempowering dynamic if it is seen as a component of identity.

These problems are generalizations of the process of artificially defining poverty. In Deschooling Society, Illich wrote (emphasis mine),

Every simple need to which an institutional answer is found permits the invention of a new class of poor and a new definition of poverty. Ten years ago in Mexico it was the normal thing to be born and to die in one’s own home and to be buried by one’s friends. Only the soul’s needs were taken care of by the institutional church. Now to begin and end life at home become signs either of poverty or of special privilege. Dying and death have come under the institutional management of doctors and undertakers. Once basic needs have been translated by a society into demands for scientifically produced commodities, poverty is defined by standards which the technocrats can change at will. Poverty then refers to those who have fallen behind an advertised ideal of consumption in some important respect. In Mexico the poor are those who lack three years of schooling, and in New York they are those who lack twelve.

Instead of technologies separating the rich from the poor, it is more abstract commodities like access to credentials or studio labels or museum galleries. And I think that this generalization highlights the first, concrete step in addressing these issues.

During the 2008 election, a plethora of musical and visual works were created by “everyday” citizens to support Barack Obama. From the polish of Yes, We Can to the parody of No, You Can’t to the antics of Obama Girl, dozens of music videos of all levels of skill were created to communicate a message and define a community. Graphic designers and artists and “simply” excited people with Adobe Illustrator came together in parallel and created hundreds of powerful designs advertising for Obama. At this point, despite the fact that there are thousands of academic, professional blogs and videobloggers, blogs and YouTube are generally regarded as fundamentally vulgar⁵. This access has meant that thousands of people feel empowered and secure enough to dip their toes into an activity and medium that was otherwise off-limits.

Taking this as a blueprint would suggest that for a given domain there are a few components to empowering people broadly:

• Recontextualize the activity :: Blogging doesn’t have to be about Writing, it’s about writing-about-what-I-ate-for-lunch-today. A video with music in it doesn’t have to be about Music, it can be about how much I like Barack Obama. Drawing doesn’t have to be about Art, it can be about my enthusiasm for anime.
• Expose the process :: When people realize that the distance between high quality video productions and films and your daily dose of YouTube is more about hard work and small details than anything else, it’s a big deal. People realize that trade secrets are powerful, but knowable.
• Take back — or relinquish — linguistic real estate :: Just because Tradition has already homesteaded words like “scientist” and “artist” and “philosopher” doesn’t mean that needs to matter. You can either attack that problem directly — makers and hackers have been calling themselves engineers for years — or you can make the question irrelevant. Even if I’m a Writer because I blog, I don’t need to care about that identification, rendering the distinction powerless to make me insecure.

I still need to concretize what this means for individual domains in which I am interested (in particular, science and education — what’s the difference between a good teacher and a good communicator? Between a scientist and someone who explores their world in a rational, curious way?).

Comments and critiques welcome. Poke holes in these claims!

1. That is, a taxonomy [↩]
2. Or at least, it hasn’t been, for me [↩]
3. Consider the entire idea of a community of practice. [↩]
4. Think about the implications of plagiarism’s precedence in music and science. Setting aside the debatable issues of intellectual property, plagiarism’s ethical prominence highlights how starkly money and credit oppose the enhancement and refinement of fields they dominate. [↩]
5. In the sense of the the original Latin, vulgaris, meaning the “common folk”, not in the sense of obscenity or crudeness [↩]

a few, tasty links
(November 17th - November 20th):¹

(more…)

1. If you’re interested, you can access my del.icio.us bookmarks here. [↩]