Hashtags, social scolding & the Fragility of Freedom.

25 Monday Jun 2018

Posted by Thin Air Factory in Uncategorized

Tags

#metoo, Antiques Roadshow, Barbara Ellen, Byron, Charlie Hebdo, Chimpanzees, Christopher Hitchens, Donald J, Family Guy, Free Speech, Germaine Greer, gogglebox, Jo Cox, Kathy Acker, Language, Naomi Wolff, P Funk, The Oxford Union, Trolls, Trump, twitter

Who’d listen to an apparently ‘recidivist’, feminist academic and some right-wing lite writer of semi erotic literature?

Me. I happily listen to, read and respect (though not feverishly) the positions of both Germaine Greer and Jilly Cooper for exactly the same reason that I read Barbara Ellen, Naomi Woolf and Kathy Acker.

Do I always like what they say? No. Do I find some of it a bit one dimensional? Yup. Do I sometimes react like an overly defensive bloke? I’m certain I do. But do I find a lot of what they say illuminating, transformative and inspirational. All day long. Do their perspectives improve me? Without question.

I read and engage with them for exactly the same reason I like P. Funk, Christopher Hitchens, Family Guy, the Antiques Roadshow, Gogglebox and Byron: for the human colour and texture delivered by opposing narratives and the frictions held within them. They often fundamentally contradict each other – and throw spanners in each other’s engines and excreta at each other’s windows. That’s good. That’s one of the greatest upsides of enjoying Freedom of Speech.

Where would the joy be if we weren’t free to mock Donald J? That’s satire. That’s a healthy reaction. A massive baby Donald is a perfectly acceptable scale of riposte to a man who holds the attention of the world in his twitter-like hand, and shakes his status like a plastic rattle.

As long as it is done openly, in the light of day, spoken with the courage of one’s convictions, in a peer reviewed, open-sided environment with some basic rules of engagement – that’s all good.

But recently, as the darker corners of the #metoo, clean food and transgender campaigns have demonstrated, it can get ugly our there even when you begin with the best intentions in the world. Boisterous debate, informed discourse and heated discussion can quickly be replaced by something far more insidious and, to me, more dangerous.

I am talking about our provisional transition from open debate and respect for free speech (and the accompanying chimpanzee-like pooh flinging) to a narrow, closed form of cod-intellectual ‘social shout-down’ and the deafening absence of the Right of Reply.

There needs to be a tension, a friction in our evolutions – that’s human – and some subjects need to be approached with a degree of disruptive vigour.

There needs to be some punkish and raw fire blown into some social constructs and mores, mostly because they have become sclerotic. And Free Speech is about giving the fire the oxygen it needs.

But for some, Free Speech is seen as a Trojan horse for self-interest, bullying, dogma, schism, proselytising and propaganda. Well, no shit Sherlock. The openness of Free Speech means that, at some point, some very twisted and odd individuals will abuse the ability and opportunity to state their case.

But Free Speech’s defence mechanism against the twisted idiots and cruelty mongers prevailing lies in its very openness – and an environment rooted in an open Right of Reply on a mass scale. In each person resides the right to say No, I disagree, or ‘that is bad’, or ‘this could be better.’ Free Speech is a human block chain system by which we manage the security and integrity of our social, cultural, ethical and moral codes

It requires us all to be open to a reciprocal respect in the exchange. And it requires us to accept that the outpourings of Free Speech may very well make us feel very aggrieved or uncomfortable, and often so.

That’s its point. It is meant to be the valve in the pressure cooker; the thing that mostly helps to stop large swathes of people feeling they have no voice and reaching boiling point.

Free Speech is a good thing. But it does come with rules of engagement, and with responsibilities and accountabilities that we need to accept.

Free Speech has consequences. And we need to accept these in the brutal cold light of day. Framed in human, living terms, – not just in its philosophical and notional or legal and constitutional terms.

What do I mean by human living terms? Just the random and chaotic emotional truths of how people respond to stuff they are wound up about. Feelings can be uncomfortable. Insights can seem loaded. Emotions can be raw. Thoughts can be dangerous. Beliefs can be murderous. Never more so when they are voiced into the world with seemingly little attention or consideration for how they may be received.

But this is Free Speech is it not?

Freedom of Speech also means that we have the freedom to respond or not to statements and polemics however hateful with greater wit, charm intellect or persuasion than that with which they were served to us.

But sometimes the response is brutal, mindless or violent with little opportunity for debate or discourse.

The French satirists of Charlie Hebdo making cartoons of the Prophet can be viewed as either extraordinarily disrespectful smart arses who misread their right to mock with dreadful consequence or brave defenders of Free Speech. Regardless, most would accept that they knew what the extremity of the response might be. That is where courage or recklessness must step up and accept that the consequence of its actions though inhuman or horrific or criminal are none the less potential consequences. Je suis Charlie.

Free Speech is, in itself, open and equal – but that comes at a price.

Firstly, that we have to also listen to preachers and proselytisers of all kinds of shite wanging on endlessly with their propaganda or their misshapen and offensive views. And secondly we must accept that Free Speech is there to defend our right to have a voice, not to protect us against violent, harmful of hateful riposte. That is the role of the laws and systems of our democratic constitutions to uphold that side of the Suffrage bargain – that I am free to state my views and beliefs openly without fear of violent or harmful response. But in real, raw human everyday terms, might a psychotic or a fundamentalist or worse still a foreign government actor ‘get’ to me before the police man or woman (or howsoever they might identify) placed there to protect my Human Right to Free Speech. Yup. Jo Cox paid the greatest price for the freedom to voice our beliefs and politics in an all too human realm of ignorant response.

Silencing voices we do not like the sound and metre of is not democratic. Suppressing opposition is not how an open society operates. But we do it anyway. And sometimes the most successful way to hide something slightly dodgy is in plain sight, in this instance dressed up as a digital pillar of freedom of expression.

Here we return to the issue of No Voice or No Right to Reply and the socio-cultural twitter smack-down of Free Speech

The Oxford Union’s persistent need to silence hate mongers, sexists and racists disguised as authors, politicians, artists, academics or celebrity speakers, citing them as evil, is, I believe, a childish response from what is supposed to be a bastion of enlightenment, intelligence and wannabe stalwarts of the freedom to practice and speak freely.

I expect them to be at the forefront of this issue. Not on the back-foot.

That the Oxford Union cannot a) manage just 1 hour of ‘discomfort’ (the discomforting effect of listening to some twisted manipulator of reason and belief) in a seat in one of the most socially comfortable and privileged environments in the world and b) find the wherewithal to illuminate the insanity and misguided-ness of those people beggars belief.

If the intellectual bastions of a democratic society are too fragile or easily damaged by the turgid minds of the extremist, then we have a problem.

If you believe someone is citing or excusing violence, suppression or prejudice against the person either emotionally, physically, philosophically, spiritually or politically; make your case. Take the podium and illuminate the insanity of their bullshit through reasoned and sometimes unreasonable discourse.

But perhaps therein lies the point. Charlie Hebddo has demonstrated that you have to do this in the full knowledge that the boisterous but ultimately harmless debating society approach to conflict and problem resolution is a luxury that few people have and even fewer respect.

The world does not always respond in the measured, monochromatic mid-tones of a Mid-Western Psychologist.

Maybe that’s the issue for our delicate intelligentia?

You need to be prepared for what humans throw at you. And its messy.

We resort to chimp like shit flinging at the drop of a hat. And if we can beat our chests and rally a crowd of the intellectually lazy, spiritually misguided or emotionally stunted to our cause, chances are, we will, regardless of the veracity of our arguments or the quality of their support.

When we close down or silence those voices (instead of hearing them out and then deconstructing them at scale) we create a vacuum; an absence of natural tension. And history has shown that the smallest, pettiest, most vicious personal human agendas can rise up freely inside a vacuum.

If we don’t like the language or the statements of the likes of Donald J Trump or Germaine Greer, we need to use our own to rebuff them. Not just close them down.

But if we do that in the belief that everyone will play fair, we are ignoring the bestial creature truth of humanity.

Hopefully we are learning to understand that free speech, shaped as it is by the human psyche, is often going to be incendiary, disgraceful, unpleasant or, mostly, disagreeable, (unless I happen to be the person freeing my speech of course).

Free Speech has consequences, for the listener, and for the speaker. In the basest human terms those consequences can be hostile, violent, diminishing, degrading and sometimes criminal. This is the cause and effect of being human. Our beliefs whether communicated through speech, action or gesture will be both proselytised in a raw human manner and received in the same. Often an extreme response cannot be claimed to be truly surprising. Shocking perhaps. But not surprising.

For example:

If I am a man (or, more likely in this example, a sexually retarded fantasist game designer ‘child’ of a man running the upgrade on Grand Theft Auto), who has spouted the twisted belief that every rape ‘wants it’, and, subsequently, I get violently anally pegged by a troubled-turned-violent rape victim in some act of vengeance against my publically spouted beliefs, so be it.

Now that may sound a little extreme but is it wholly unexpected? How could it be? We know that trauma scars people physically and emotionally. A victim of extreme physical abuse can sometimes be driven to consider undertaking vengeful actions. Fact. This is not some movie fantasy of revenge. It would be naive to pretend it was.

So, if I voice an opinion, even as an ignorant provocation, I know what I am saying and my intention in saying it. Does that deserve a criminal or life disfiguring act against me? Or even a murderous one? Possibly not. And there are laws to dissuade someone from thinking otherwise.

BUT it IS a possibility I must consider when I open my mouth and speak, especially on incendiary topics. Because I live in a raw and human world, democratic or otherwise.

We are creatures with a genetic lineage that was shaped across hundreds of thousands of generations before we even thought to set up one camp together, let alone a civilised society. The complexity of what runs beneath the surface of us – what systems we’re running behind the interface of our conscious self – is only just beginning to be revealed by science and psychology.

We are ancient creatures with a modern veneer of civility. We are, in phone terms, a Nokia 100 with a state of the art Android interface. And Freedom of Speech and people’s responses to it are the raw proof of that.

The language we use when we spout anything – from the sublime and enlightening to the ridiculous and disagreeable – is a powerful technology that we’ve been honing for a while. It has impact and reach. Wrap an opinion or a belief in it and we in effect light blue touch paper. It can be devastating. In some instances Sticks and stones would be the kinder option.

The learned experiences, beliefs and strategies that we use language to communicate are not always positive or palatable ones and they are not always done with a view to the common good (unless in some weird moment you think that the common good might be served by all-white sections of the UK, a transgender ban, and men-only golf clubs!). It goes with the territory.

Human language is a sharp tool that can both help and harm. And like all sharp tools, we need to tread cautiously in how when and where we use it; and to whom. And take responsibility for what happens when we do.

Regardless of the nature or capability of your exercising your right to use language freely to make your point, the main thing again is that it is undertaken with openness and the Right to Reply.

Tyrannical smack downs of someone who says something we don’t like are an unsurprising emotional reaction. Humans don’t like being wrong but, more importantly, are truly dreadful when they are feeling ‘really’ right.

This is less about the mitigation of the wrongness that sometimes occurs in environments of free speech, and more about the application of Righteousness in those events.

Righteousness is a wonderful word for a dreadful human nature. It brings together the spirit of divine complicity (support from on high) in your cause or belief, with a big slather of super conservative institutional rigour and supposed socio-cultural substance (regardless of whether ‘the party’ is of a left wing or right wing disposition).

And righteousnessis the only thing I could call the cultural shift that now has us banning dickheads from publically spouting their dickheadedness in environments like the Oxford Union where they can at least be dis-assembled publically – and the twisted logic that led a large number of smart intelligent people to not only take Margaret Atwood to task on her watch outs for #metoo but to damn her outright with no Right of Reply. Smackdown!

If the ‘Snowflake generation,’ as Millennials are so called, are at the forefront of these shifts, then we simply need to be conscious of that old cause and effect paradigm and be aware that the effect may be equally distasteful .

The Snowflake generation are called as much because they are seen by some as insufferably fragile – children in the world, bred to be easily damaged, hurt or offended by even the slightest harshness in tone, content, belief, polemic or politic. In this world view, everything becomes viewed through the filter of a threat to be shut or shot down.

The proof given is that when people cite something that doesn’t suit their world view, it’s damned or dismissed as recidivist or self-serving. (That it might just be a well founded and timeless piece of wisdom, or intelligently arrived at point of view worthy of consideration seems to be irrelevant.)

And therein lies the cliché. The Smackdown is simply another tyranny to replace other tyrannies. I had hoped we were less obvious but we’re not. The seemingly weak being in fact aggressors in the exercise and application of their fears in the world is a reoccurring human truth.

Tyrants do not like Free Speech. Especially the real kind. Hence the Fake News campaign of one Donald J. Am I comparing #metoo and Donald J’s Fake News? Yes – but only in the fact that they both have used social networks, especially that of the unsophisticated, stunted responses of twitter (AKA Troll heaven) to silence and shame their detractors.

I am not for one moment venturing that their politics or ethics are similar. Just their tools and the spirit in which they apply them.

They have both adopted the same mechanism – of scolding and damnation – by which to quash what they don’t want to hear.

So my hope is that Free Speech, the real version will a) be recognised for the powerful and democratic tool it is b) respected as something that has consequences for both the speaker and the listener. Both good and bad.

Fridge magnets, Porpoise & the power of language in Innovation.

15 Thursday Dec 2016

Posted by Thin Air Factory in Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

#mayarse, Anarchy, Blackadder, Corporate Speak, Creativity, Digital, Easter Island, Genome, Guttenberg Press, Identity, Idiom, kaizen, Language, Porpoise, punctuation, purpose, Roald Dahl, rote, Slang, social networks, Socialising the Genome, Sound, Tabloids, technology, The BFG, vernacular, Vinyl, Wax Cylinders, Yoda

Words are funny things.

Haphazard, abstract, profound, silly, shape shifting, infinitely playful, confounding, eternally powerful and utterly malleable. Language is a remarkable technology.

Glyphs, scratches and symbolic signing of sounds eventually dragged kicking and screaming into some vaguely coherent order that ticks a few syntactical boxes and language rules and shazzam! the fun begins.

Suddenly these scatters and blocks of marks, letters and symbolic sounds forge themselves into desires expressed, thoughts formed, theories expounded, opinions offered, information fixed, stories told and dreams captured. Sounds cut into the wax cylinder of our minds and played out through sharp stone point, stylus, quill and nib onto cloth, wood, parchment, stone and flax.

And our eyes scan across them and our tongues run along them like a needle in a vinyl groove, transforming them into the sound of speaking.

As time has marched the expression of our expression has been altered by the nature of how we generate the text. We have hopped skipped and jumped from painful rendering every letter by hand over vast tracts of time, illuminated by curlicues, cartoons, motifs and scenes – and the silent furious industry of re-rendering the same again and again for the benefit of a rare few – to carved crafted blocks to be set in lines, paragraphs and pages – inked rolled and pressed into sheets to be shared and distributed amongst the many.

Technology elevates technology as the presses become mechanised and the inks become jets. Vast universal printed broadsheets supplemented by the intimate particular of typing machines that throw metal letters through ink ribbons onto pages layered with carbons for multiple copies. Until the binary marks of programmes on a different ribbon digitised everything at the speed of light.

So we now find ourselves with the ability to use these marks and symbols at the speed of swipe and type in real time to fire them across the world via networks and platforms.

Yes the books still fill shelves and the magazines still scatter coffee tables. But they have become the paper monoliths of what was. The printed word and how we consume it versus how we consume its digital cousin have become fundamentally different.

For your words to be ‘in print’ still carries a deeper value. Words on a physical printed page feel more meaningful, eternal, immortal. They are the Easter Island Statues of the written word. Their digital counterparts the writing in the sand on the beach.

The way new technologies have gamified they way we think and more importantly the way we express those thoughts through writing enables a very particular kind of playfulness rooted in eclectic multidirectional multi channel distribution. The Ephemeral Passing nature of the txt blog tweet and the written content of the live in-flow constant beta site allows everyone to ‘play’ – text as balls to be lobbed tossed kicked, rolled and scattered in every direction, only to return transformed, tweaked, built upon liked loved berated and bludgeoned.

The creativity inherent in the technology of language and subsequently in the technology we use to generate language in flow seems to have two forms when it comes to words and how we express ourselves with them.

Creativity is still as much about liberating expression as it is about liberating distribution. Language as a technology has been tinkered and played with by everyone from the lowest order to the highest mind since the technology was invented. Derivation. Disruption. Disorder. All of these traits have been alive in the spoken and written language since its inception.

New technology does not advance innovation. It accelerates our ability to unpack and play with the given wisdoms and expressions to seek something new and different. This is the fuel of innovation – new technology merely the accelerator. And the role of language in innovation and technology’s ability to accelerate it is remarkable.

Word play – a lightness of spirit and a subversive nature in regards to language – has always enjoyed turning the given rules upside down and back to front – messing with words and language because we can – as a mark of our individual nature and curiosity.

Thats why vernaculars and slang and idiom are so important to individuals – and why corporate language is so disliked avoided and derided by ordinary people. Corporate language and ‘speak’ smacks of an Order of the Few inflicted on the Spirit of the Many.

It is an intellectual door policy – if you ain’t got a ticket you can’t come in – the bouncer on the door of the exclusive club.

Ordinary people like to own and share the language they use to express their most individual selves, in their own way on their own terms. They reserve the right to speak as they wish, express in the manner they feel most comfortable with.

It is unsurprising that fads and trends especially in the highly socialised accelerated age see @everything and #anything already running out of steam. This is not due to the academics deriding them. It is mainly due to ‘rules’ being applied. A new higher order or High Priest of Digital Expression has risen out of the chaos – defining rules of use and relevance. Thankfully it spikes the oldest of human responses. Dissent.

Rules? #myarse.

The intellectualisation of language will always occur while the human nature of assertion and pursuit of social exclusivity remains. We simply can’t help ourselves.

Language gets used to include and exclude. It always has and it always will in some shape or form. It is a tool in our tendency to assert and control. You’re not in our club. How you order sentences. How you punctuate. How you correct and edit yourself. How you use common signifiers of expression. Words and language are the cutlery of expression. How you use your knife speaks volumes about you. And there will always be those that use it against you.

BUT.

If thats the case, I say fill your boots. Subvert at every opportunity. Break a language rule everyday. Smash the shackle.

Start with fridge magnets and madness. before you take one step towards the workplace, make some shit up out of a load of words on the fridge. Set your mind free. Gobbledegook is good for the soul. Have a BFG day. Using phantasmapoppingful words. Go Yoda and reorder a sentence – like someone’s put a Germanic grammar filter on your English. Pop some nonsense in a sensical world. Embrace puns at every opportunity.

And if you’re in business – especially one that involves speaking to ordinary people – use pub speak in board meetings. Ask a 70 and a 7 year old to edit the CEOs keynote. And see the tyrannical use of language for what it is. An ugly veneer behind which mediocrity and insecurity can often lurk.

If you are working with multiple nationalities there has to be some common ground. But at least allow every one to bring a little of their own cultural idiom into the room before you set out on some highly controlled over strung and soul-less corporate conversation. Allow their free mind out as a matter of course. Build a ‘Sling Some Slang’ into every meeting. Allow each nationality to ‘play’ in their own language and share it. You will be far more likely to find yourself with human beings in the room. Much more helpful to collaboration and co creation.

Innovation starts with language and how it is used and embraced. Rote cultures create Rote people. And innovation and creativity withers on the vine. The confidence to ‘mess’ with language shows an ability to break from the norm, to turn something upside down and the wrong way around to take a different view. Mistakes are the fuel of invention. Failure is a central tenet of Kaizen. We should embrace failings in language. Before dispensing with them, check to see if there is anything good hidden in there.

So can everything be chaos and subversion? No. Like anarchy, it only exists meaningfully if there is a counterpoint to it to keep it relevant and focused. If everyone is an anarchist. Their is no anarchy. Just conformity.

A perfect example of deconstructive/destructive language play was to be found in a conversation I had with a friend of mine. Both utterly child-like far to often, we found ourselves discussing Purpose and Purposeful businesses and the manner in which this word has been taken and chiseled into a corporate straight jacket. It has lost its original profundity; replaced with a pompous self-righteousness. We found ourselves having to use ‘cod’ Noo Yawker accents to continue the conversation with any feeling.

So Purpose became Poiypuss. What! Who knoo! Badda bing badda boom. I gotta poiypuss ‘n’ I’m gonna use it.

Cue more cod accenting until eventually Blackadder and the Prince and The Porpoise sketch prevailed. And so Purpose became Porpoise.

Happiness.

PORPOISE. The prefect name for an agency that believes deeply in Purpose but with a profound dislike for the way in which it has been hijacked; made humourless, confined, dislocated; rendered inhuman and spiritless.

Porpoise. Creating Purpose with a difference: purpose with a human touch. Nice logo. Disney meets Vector with a scattering of fun.

Ridiculous. perhaps. But I do have evidence that this childlike view of the world can sometimes create breakthroughs in communication and engagement.

In a recent project – Socialising the Genome – I worked with Dr Anna Middleton to try and unpack the arcane language of Genomic science and the impenetrable academic and clinical terminology it uses when speaking to ordinary people. The objective? To be able to engage with a greater number of ordinary people around the benefits of GENOMIC science and data gathering to improve individual and collective health care.

We found that in almost every qualitative research group people had a tendency to drop the first E in GENOME, and quickly deconstruct it into something far more friendly and more palatable and less scary. GNOME.

So the massed intellect, discovery and genius at work in the world of GENOMIC science and discovery – and the gateway to understanding our most precious personal selves and the data that defines it – was enshrined in a picture of a small bearded man with a fishing rod. Cue Double Helix fish and chats about fishing in our DNA for answers – and the idea that sometimes that fishing just comes up with an old shopping trolley and river bed junk. And sometimes with something more remarkable and enlightening.

So language – a beautiful technology accelerated by newer ones. But it is not sacrosanct. It demands that we flex with it, play with it, mess it up, test its edges. Because in doing so we test our selves and the ideas we have – and through it we find new iterations and expressions.

Which is a good thing, No?

LANGUAGE NOTE: My use of No? at the end of the final sentence is in homage to the idioms of the French “…, nest pas?”, the Spanish “…, No?”, the Scandinavian “…, Nej? and the Glaswegian “know whit ah mean, big man, no?” and ending one’s sentence with an upward inflection “No?”.

And because it really, really irritates purists – as does the doubling up of adverbs like ‘really’.

Living memory, resilience & the art of not forgetting

02 Monday May 2016

Posted by Thin Air Factory in Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Alzheimer's, ard drives, Arts, company culture, data points, degenerative disease, desire, drama, Elegy, Evolution, Gladiator, Identity, Language, literature, Living memory, Maximus, Nock Payne, resilience, self expression, smart phones, Social Memory, technologies, telecomms, The Book Of Life, Virgin Accelerator

Funny thing memory

We tend to pay little attention to it; until it starts to fail us.

Sometimes its reason for failing us is a conspiracy of genes + environment – creating a disposition to Alzheimer’s and other forms of degenerative disease – the desperate creeping extinction of everything that made us one the whole beautiful living breathing loving human being we are.

At other times it’s disappearance is to do with the impact of new technologies. Recent technologies tempt us to dispense with our need to ‘remember’. Or they diffuse or diminish our natural ability to remember those things most important and valuable to us. In his book the shallows, Nicholas Carr points to how excessive immersion in the internet and the digital world disturbs our ability to transfer and store working memory into our deeper long term memory, reshaping our neural pathways.

Unlike language, art or drama – older human technologies designed to mine, explore, capture, elevate and replay memory and the experience and impact of living – our most recent technologies sometimes seem to seek to simply mathematically atomise our lives and the memory of them until human feeling is viewed as nothing more than a data point – something to be measured calibrated and engineered.

The idea that consciousness, identity and the precious value of memory is a form or condition of existence that can simply be dissected, measured, data pointed, and reengineered by science is a theme explored in Nick Payne’s play Elegy. A woman raddled by a degenerative disease that will eventually kill her is told her condition can be halted by ‘life saving’ surgery – the miracle of science – but only at the cost of catastrophic loss of memory. At which point one has to ask: ‘What life are you saving if not the recollected one; the one filled with precious riches and experiences?’

In some ways the diaspora of memories and recollections once housed in picture frames diaries sketchbooks letters and albums into the lost vaults of smart phone devices and hard drives is robbing us of tangible tactile living memory. This functional un-remembering allow us to abdicate the responsibility for maintaining those experiences, memories or recollections and synthesizing them. The machine nature of calling up data is very different to the human nature of recollecting memory – the former is perfect, linear, modal and cached, the second, imperfect, linear, messy and overlapping, every journey into it opening up the possibilities of new revelation – as opposed to the same data cache relentlessly replayed like the locked loop in a stored file.

One of the most powerful drivers of our progress and evolution and of our astonishing resilience as a species is personal and shared recollection. Perhaps memory is a just a simple evolutionary trait mythologised – of collected wisdoms and experiences of fear pain survival and joy, regurgitated in fire side stories, tales, mementoes, symbols artefacts and dramas.

But to connect memory or remembering to some higher order of existence – to have created the thread between what is, what has been and what will be via the technology of memory is some proof of our ability to transcend the claw and scratch of base existence.

That the memory of us and what we do may well be a vanity particular to our species – a desperate need for our life to be more than some nihilistic little blip on a cosmic scale.

Nonetheless, our need to try and reach beyond the brackets of birth and death and seize immortality; whether it be through our beliefs, by our actions, the legacies we leave, the children we bear or the blunt tool of extending our physical and conscious existence, is a defining trait in us.

Gladiator’s Maximus demonstrates our need to be remembered as an inspiration of improvement and achievement when he states: “What we do in life echoes in eternity”

To be forgotten is a terrible thing. Immortality, until some scientific trickster or data consciousness A.I. guru makes it otherwise , is mostly an exercise in seeding a process of relentless remembering.

We have a number of simple systems already in place, some rooted in thousands of years of repeated doing and some rooted in immoveable belief systems, and some developed through more recent technologies.

Some forms or remembering have until recently been seen as the sign of mental distress or illness. Take Nostalgia. Sneaking off for a quick youtube binge of TV theme tunes from childhood or rummaging through pictures of old Y Front adverts (love Retronaut!!) and a desperate yearning to watch the infamous Ziggy Stardust Top of the Pops is usually seen by the up-tight ‘its all abut the Now man’ zealots as some mawkish sentimentality BUT recent developments in psychoanalysis have shown that nostalgia is a powerful human tool – and can actually strengthen our sense of self and centre our identity, enabling us to weather greater shifts, turbulence and transition.

Look Back In Joy, a recent Guardian article looking at the power of Nostalgia, focuses on an Greek Born American academic, Constantine Sedikides, who had left the University of North Carolina to become Professor of Social & Personality Psychology at the University of Southampton. He realised that he was using nostalgia to manage the turbulence and dislocation of changing continents. This led him to exploring in far more robust academic terms the role and facility that nostalgia provides us with. His findings are liberating. Sedikides talks of nostalgia as the “perfect internal politician, connecting the past with the present, pointing optimistically to the future” and a mental state “absolutely central to human experience”.

For me this quick blog journey through the Art of Remembering was bough on by a recent collision of banal choices, a profound realisation and professional curiosity.

First up.

The banal. Sky movie choice time with my children. “What about The Book of Life?” – a simple, beautiful whimsical story with a simple point by the master Guillermo Del Toro. Yes, its about greatness. Yes, its about the illusion of courage. Yes, its about true love. yes, its about belonging – but really, it id a film about not forgetting. Relentlessly Remembering is about Not Forgetting. Memory and the act of remembering are the most powerful tools that we have at our disposal. We are all kept alive in the hearts and minds eyes and memories of those who love us and have lived out some part of their lives in around and about us.

Second up.

The profound. In a simple exchange between my brother and I, we reminded ourselves that the effects of my beautiful but now dead mother will eventually need to be shared out between my he and I – the next step in the atomisation of her living memory into our lives and eventually the lives of my children and so on. Each effect vibrates with associated memory – sodden with the context which arrives like a steam train every time they are recalled into being – expressions, sounds, smells, feelings, times and experiences. The atomic truth that an atom never dies – and that the world vibrates with the atomic echoes of every one who has ever lived needs to include the more ephemeral but still equally powerful atomic nature of the vibrations of memory that run through the effects of those we have loved. Their atomic nature is indirectly imbued by their having been part of a life. They are rendered ‘animate’ by those vibrations. This belief in this form of conscious osmosis doesn’t stop at the effects and belongings of those who have passed out of sight. We also apply it to sites and buildings – from Stone Henge and battle fields to the blue plaques on buildings. We make pilgrimages to the hallowed halls of here and there, wishing for the conscious greatness and wellhead of wisdom and learning steeped in their walls to pour out into us.

Third up.

The professional. This curiosity arose while exploring the purpose of one of the Virgin Accelerator businesses I have had the pleasure of working with. In a world of zero hours and the death of the social contract between large corporations and their employees, their idea of a platform that links previous, present and future employees creates a simple and compelling way for rebuilding a powerful and precious social memory into a company.

Social or Living Memory in a corporation or business is increasingly left to chance and the random foray into face-book pages, LinkedIn and the odd Instagram surge. Fully connecting with a company’s Now – amongst its employees, the communities it touches, its customers, its partners and suppliers – is only part of true socialisation

Socialising a company requires more than just acting in the Now. But few companies actively connect their past with their present and even fewer attach it to their future. The anti-socialising of a company – the active dislocation and rupture the social threads that run through it – the ties that bind it from its past to its future – are not just an oversight on the part of the social strategy or HR.

It is not just economic pressures or the trend for zero hours that destroy the social contract and living memory of a business. Many ambitious and venal execs actively dispense with the ‘dead wood’ and not always for the right reasons. This forest fire approach is often simply a way of removing those with a greater living memory of the business than the ‘new’ order now prevailing and controlling it .

Agreed, often the human nature of getting stuck in our ways: fixing things: securing them and subsequently seeing all change to them as alien or dangerous can kill a business; sucking the light and life out of it. But the baby & bathwater approach to removing people who’ve been around too long can rob corporations of a vital cornerstone of their resilience. When done wilfully this kind of action should be seen as an aggression against the business and in turn the shareholder – because it is purposefully eviscerating a source of memory and knowledge that though in its linear and previous form may be obsolete, could be re-tasked and transformed into a new and more powerful resource to greater long term value.

All of these impacts, however great or small, can create a form of Corporate Alzheimer’s – the degeneration of the social memory of the company, and with it the very thing that made the company burn so brilliantly for so long.

In a conversation with a large American telecomm business about how they might help High School kids resist dropping out, I was surprised to find that they struggled to see the value in connecting their ex employees – a truly universal and multitudinous cohort of living memory and life experience – with the young high school crowd via a weekly skype roulette. The idea was simple – for a massive telecoms and connectivity provider to create a showcase of meaningful connections by using social platforms to randomly connect high school kids and oldies to share moments of life and experience to mutual benefit. I realised that to grasp the value of this and institute this type of initiative requires an innate understanding of the power and value of being remembered for ex employees and of memory to those just staring on their journey.

Regardless of what a company gets wrong, and many get much wrong in regards to how they treat their employees over time – the truth is those companies still invest an enormous amount of time and money into training up and expanding the capabilities of their workforce (self interestedly granted but in that mutual self interest lies the truth of the social contract between an employee and an employer).Why let it all walk out the door when the employee leaves? Because sometimes their tenure was bumpy or you didn’t act in the best manner towards them?

At the close of the Theory of Everything , when Steven and his ex wife Jane watch their children playing in the garden, their exchange summarises the value and potency of connected imperfections perfectly.

“Look what we made”.

For all the mistakes. For all the disappointments. For all the pain. Would you have it any other way? Memory can hurt. But is can also heal. Forgetting is a cop out.

Some people and the companies they run would be all the better for taking this view – and in doing so commit to rebuild their ability to relentlessly remember – drawing a long line from their past to their future. Social or Living memory is not only one of the most powerful human facilities. It could also be the cornerstone of a companies greatest resilience in our accelerating atomizing world.

Purpose, the north star of any company, is one of its tools for Relentless Remembering – and it becomes meaningless if it is only socialised in the Now.

A purpose must be part of a continuum that reaches from the beginning of a company to its end. And to do that it must exist inside a structure that values and facilitates everyone’s ability to relentlessly remember and be improved and enlightened by that remembering.

Academic Lag, Advertising Jag & the task of Socialising the Genome

14 Tuesday Jul 2015

Posted by Thin Air Factory in Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Academia, Academic Lag, Acclimatisation, Advertising, Advertising Jag, andy lamb, big data, Brian Cox, conversation, Creative Action Research, Decompression, Demand, desire, DNA, Evolution, Genome, Genomic Science, Guttenberg Press, Hadron Collider, Health, health Screening, Human Behaviour, human essence, Identity, Insight Ladder, Intellectuals, Language, Living The Dream, marketing communications, networks of academic collaboration, NHS, Populists, Sanger Institute, social networks, Socialisation, Syntax, utility, wellbeing

LAG:

A period of time: a noticeable delay between action and reaction – Failing to keep up with another or others in movement or development

JAG:

A short period of overindulgence in an activity: a shopping jag: a crying jag A stab; an intense and concentrated movement or action

I increasingly find myself at a very particular and exciting intersection.

I find myself there not by accident but by design: having helped build a methodology that reaps its greatest rewards at the point where applied science and commercial creativity collide.

(The creativity is commercial in that the point of collision is designed to generate pieces of communication to a specific end and utility – functional with tangible benefits – as opposed to a piece of pure art or some material assemblage generated to no end other than to create feeling and effect through its aesthetic – experiential with intangible benefits.)

Over the last year and a half I have been working on a project that seeks simple answers to some quite complex questions rooted in deep science:

How do we scale the ‘everyday’ conversation around genome science and DNA beyond the scientists, academics, clinicians and the rare interested civilian party?

How do we illuminate the scientific mysteries and wonder of our DNA in such a way that everyone can understand them, embrace them, engage with them, and reap the rewards that come from them?

And ultimately how do we help the greatest number of us to enhance the nature, quality and duration of our human tenure through informed choice and enlightened action in regards to our DNA?

This search for a more compelling narrative and conversation at the point where science and everyday humanity meet is not an isolated pursuit.

It is also true of the ‘Living The Dream’ project I am currently helping to steer. The project also seeks to scale the conversation around what constitutes a more enduring model of prosperity and sustainable consumption by finding a more ‘human’ narrative to replace the existing one, rooted as it is in the science, engineering and ‘reason’ of sustainability as opposed to human emotion of it.

In both cases we need to find a way of communicating complex concepts and constructs in the simplest way possible to the largest number of people without destroying the integrity of the scientific truths in the process.

In both cases there are untold rewards for society and humankind both individually and collectively if we can scale these conversations.

So I find myself working at this intersection of multiple collisions: between scientific integrity and human sociability: between depth and structure and lightness and elasticity; between applied science and commercial creativity.

MAKING CONVERSATION

To reap the untold rewards we simply need the communities of science and academia to meet the man and woman in the street and have a good ‘chat’:

And boy do they have some great stuff to talk about: life changing, existence enhancing stuff.

In the case of genomics, simply put, if enough of us embrace the advantages that the advances in the science offer in our everyday lives, using the revelations of DNA in an applied manner both individually and for the common good, we could eventually move ourselves from the old curative model of health care to a new and far more dynamic preventative model: one that will not only just change the way we live but also alter the duration of that living.

Making smarter and easily comprehensible lifestyle choices informed and underwritten by a deeper and more intimate understanding of what makes us who we are can help us to embrace a more positive approach to the lives we lead. Those choices made en masse will equally inform and illuminate how best the health service of the future can better sustain its ability to continue to serve our society both systemically and financially.

Now logic would predict that given the enormous impact and beneficial nature of those potential outcomes, everyone should already be ‘all over that conversation’: chatting away furiously, listening intently, sharing the conversation with friends and reaping the rewards of a better life.

SPEAKING IN TONGUES

The problem is – we’re not.

Why?

The greatest barrier seems to be one of simple comprehension and understanding.

The scientists and academics simply communicate in a different language to the everyday people they are trying to reach. Their particular languages have different vocabularies, inflections, idioms, energies and vernaculars – which is unsurprising given that both parties live in very, very different worlds.

In one world we have the ‘splendid isolation’ of existence required to nurture intense, interrogative and highly rational scientific thought and action – and the codified, particular language and almost impenetrable texts, dissertations and white papers that accompany and support it.

In the other world we find the hyper-connected and hyper-socialised immersion of our emotionally charged everyday existence, fuelled and accelerated by smart devices and sprawling digital platforms of human interaction filled with billions of TXTS, tweets, emojis, memes, slang and banter.

One exists in a mode of hyper dislocation; the other in a mode of hyper socialisation.

And it seems that each speaks in riddles as far as the other is concerned.

A chasm exists between the world of academia and the sciences and that of the everyday person in the street. And as with all worlds of such different ‘atmospheres’, there needs to be a process of acclimatisation when travelling between one and the other.

In the context of Socialising the Genome (and my Living The Dream project) it is the conversational ‘syntax’ – the framing, structure, language and phrasing of these arguments – that needs to ‘acclimatise’ to the atmosphere of everyday needs and desires and the language they speak.

The highly tuned language, intense qualification and proofs of the scientists and academics need to ‘decompress’ on the way up into the ‘real world’ – otherwise they will suffer a bout of the communication ‘bends’ – where they either over compensate and try to hard – become too ‘matey’; the NBF of the person in the street… : ) : )

Or they simply come across like a geek at a fancy dress party – awkward, uncomfortable and so wrong on so many counts.

Putting deep science and academic concepts and truths through a ‘decompression and acclimatisation’ process can of course be undertaken as a one off – but realistically, if our ambition in this instance is to ‘socialise’ the conversation, we have to assume a fluid and escalating dialogue of increasing and expanding value and reach – and for that to happen we realised that we needed to keep the findings, revelations and insights of the academics and scientists constantly ‘in flow’; moving seamlessly and effortlessly between one world and the other: elastic and evolving.

To achieve this they need to be ‘sensitive’ of, keep pace with and be true to the everyday shifts and nuances in the behaviours, attitudes and language of the people whose existence they seek to improve. To be resilient and meaningful they must remain ‘relevant’ at all times.

(There is little point in deep diving for a populist answer only to find that on surfacing with one 2 years later, the question has changed. Herein lurks the danger of the academic lag.)

So, in the process of designing the methodology that would facilitate this we found ourselves with two acute questions to answer:

How do we create an offset strategy for the academic lag – one that allows the worlds of academia and the deep sciences to remain ‘present’ – to exist both in the accelerated and socialised Now while still mining in splendid isolation?

How do we design a ‘decompression and acclimatisation’ process that enables a smarter simpler flow of ideas and findings – a ‘conversation’ or dialogue – between one world and the other?

CUE ADVERTISING JAG.

To reap the ultimate rewards that the advances in Genomic science offer us, the screening and storing our DNA as would have to become an everyday part of our health profile: it would have to become second nature to every one of us: a common place behaviour: something that we do without ‘thinking’.

But we’re a long way from a chirpy chat along the lines of:

‘hey Trish. Sorry. Can we say 7.30ish now? Running a bit late at the DNA screening clinic – mines a large glass of DWW! ; ) Jax xxx’

Genomic science tends to only enter our conversation either because we are forced to engage with it or by an accident of revelation.

Even when the more moderated conversations do occur they can quickly tip into ethical minefields around data storage and security, commercial abuses by insurance companies and self interested corporates, elitist tiers and eugenics, socio cultural stratification and the Police Database. There issues around identity privacy and confidentiality are staggering in some of their complexities and contradictions.

The complexities of genomic science are simply not ‘everyday’, not everyone’s ‘cup of tea’ and are at best incomprehensible and at worst quickly controversial.

But Advertising & Communication people spend their whole life not only trying to decipher what someone’s ‘cup of tea’ might be but also how they might get them to drink more of it

The nature of the models and frameworks used by marketing communications specialists to mine and shape insights, propositions and narratives – the intensity, speed and use of both broad stroke universal consumer insight and atomic data modelling – is driven by the voracious desire in corporates to ‘keep up’ with the fluid and ever changing nature of consumer demand and desires. These models have grown ever more agile due to:

The direct impact of technology and the social networks across the value chains and markets of the big corporate consumer brands:

The age of data big bang: an ever-expanding viral surge of relentlessly dividing and multiplying data on every aspect and dimension of how we live, act, interact and transact.

It is in the intensity, approach and most importantly the creative storytelling aspect of this ‘jag’ of activity that we believe our off set strategy can be found.

ADVERTISING SCHMADVERTISING

One of the greatest tension points in the new methodology we have engineered in Socialising The Genome is the point at which advertising exclamation collides with academic exposition.

There are fundamental and quite combative points of difference between the worlds of the Sciences & Medicine and the Humanities & Arts – in nature, methodology and application; and in their concepts of what constitutes integrity and substance (especially when the latter are of the populist persuader type – the advertising and marketing agencies and their kind).

Many wholly reason-based intellectuals and practitioners harbour a quite fixed (and many would say hugely justifiable) sense of distrust in what they regard as a moral and intellectual vacuum in the marketing communications agencies, institutions and organisations that manipulate and leverage ‘emotion’ and a lazy populism for commercial gain.

To allow the conversation around something as precious and fragile as genomic science to be driven by base desires pumped up on the wisdom of the crowds with no form of enlightened filter or curation, might well be perceived as not only risky but also irresponsible.

“Fine, if you’re just pushing another million or so 6-bladed, swivel-hipped funky junky disposable plastic razors” but matters of this level of human importance are quite a different thing entirely.

Alternately, on the other side of the conversational fence, we have the champions of ‘everyday’ people, the populist movers, shakers, creators and commentators who celebrate them, their language, their culture, their leisure and their past-times, and who shape, shade and distribute the myriad simple pleasures that they enjoy and engage with. For these people, unless science, like technology, is wrapped up in a Brian Cox-like, ‘whoops that’s my Collider’ approachability or celebrity, they are quite disdainful or disinterested in what they see as arcane and impenetrable conversations. They see no point in a dialogue that seems circular and closed in its nature and not of any use to anyone without a PhD.

Their attitude broadly runs along the lines of:

“don’t care – all a bit to serious and arch for me – lighten up, get over yourself – short time living long time dead – if you cant take the banter we’re not listening – and while you’re at it, mine’s a highly-advertised pint of unexceptional lager please!”

BUT, in a balanced world and all things being even – somewhere between the two polarities lies an answer – midway between the extremities of emotional populism on the one side and high-minded rationalism on the other.

Neither one nor the other can develop the conversation by itself in isolation. Each needs the other to create a full and robust conversation that is both substantial and sociable.

In our particular instance, we needed to go on a journey from the clinical utility of the genome conversation as it is now – closed alienating isolating and impenetrable in large tracts – to a one more rooted in concepts of positive identity and improved existence – open inclusive socialised and empowering.

We realised that to do that we needed to decipher how we could use the tension that exists between the worlds of science and society to most positive effect – to facilitate and accelerate that journey.

MIND THE GAP

To be clear, the absence of accelerated improvement in our human existence through Genomic science is not an issue of supply. (There are a lot of brilliant minds moving the science forwards). This is an issue of demand.

While ‘everyday’ people continue to not understand the real and substantial benefits of that science, they will not demand its benefits as a standard and inextricable part of their everyday lives

Communicating the inspirational, revelatory and highly beneficial impact of embracing our DNA to the greatest number of people in their terms in their world is central to all of this because it will fuel and fire ‘demand’ for better.

TWAS EVER THUS

Demystifying and popularising rare knowledge of a scientific, political, economic or theological nature has always been a critical step in the march of human progress (whether the scientists, politicians, economists and the theologians like it or not).

‘Dumbing down’ as some elevated minds like to think of it is actually humanity’s way of smartening up. And inspiring and wild-firing everyday conversation is a vital lever in that smartening up.

So first things first: we needed to accept that the challenges to easy conversation are substantial – the impenetrable nature of the science; a very human, provincially minded fear of the unknown; the conflicted nature of our feeling towards ‘disease prediction’; a general fear of ‘science going too far & meddling with the cosmos; the primal compulsion to ‘move away from’ any form of human flaw (our own or anyone else’s); either in the form of disability or crippling disease; or those flaws as might potentially be revealed by DNA screening.

We need to accept that none of the ‘conversation’ generated so far has enabled us to move very far beyond our current audiences – and that we have so far failed to present a set of positives that outweigh the existing negatives.

Genomic science and the subject of DNA need to be lightly dealt with or presented in such a way as to find their way into pub banter framed and informed by a ‘did you see? Did you know?’ Intelligence Lite, fuelled by lifestyle magazines, Sunday supplements and the Discovery Channel.

And given that film is the most shared currency in the socially networked world, film needs to be the base currency of our highly socialised cultural economy.

So our key objectives for success were:

to create a methodology that enabled us to look up through the emotionally driven human and the everyday insight – not down through the rationally driven science and the clinical language

to develop and distribute the seeds of a new and scaled conversation through the power of shareable film.

CREATIVE ACTION RESEARCH

My work over the last year or so with Dr. Anna Middleton of the Sanger Institute focuses solely how we reconcile the perspectives of our two worlds to shape and scale the conversation around DNA and Genomic science to greater human benefit.

And it is in the circular and iterative nature of the interaction between her world – that of the Academic Lag – and mine – that of the Advertising Jag – that we believe will deliver the language and framing for and therefore the scale of conversation that we need to transform the way people see DNA in their lives.

With CAR, we have constructed a methodology where, even when in the midst of the deep dive nature of her qualitative ethical research process, Anna is able to utilize my and my collaborator’s ability to reframe, rephrase and represent science or research fact in more populist social storytelling terms and framings to play beck into and inform the more academic process she is undertaking.

CAR – TESTING THE EDGES OF CONVERSATION

CAR combines traditional qualitative research, rooted in group discussions and in depth interviews and discourse interpretation with quantitative research that introduces fresh creatively-framed seeds of Genome and DNA conversation into the social networks to provide a simple speedy test of whether those seeds have the ability to inspire and engage people in such a way that they might in turn share it amongst their own social network both real and virtual.

The method we have devised for creating the simple seeds of a new conversation revolves around taking an existing piece of knowledge or scientific fact and creating different types of ‘conversation’ or story telling around it.

We then use these seeds of conversation as foils and flash cards in both a quantitative socialised environment and the more in depth and metered qualitative research groups and in-depths.

To ensure that in the migration from science or clinical insight to creative idea we did and do not fall foul of confecting, manipulating, misrepresenting and ultimately distorting or twisting the knowledge or facts we are using, every creative idea has to be rooted in an insight ladder.

The Insight Ladder is a simple proprietary tool that I have developed for this project that aims to lock the more creatively framed seed of conversation to the scientific fact truth or insight that inspired it: a sort of plumb line of integrity that runs through each ‘conversation’.

QUALITATIVE RESEARCH

A number of traditional qualitative research group discussions and some in depths will begin to explore some of the everyday language and insights around genome science and DNA.

A dry Discussion Guide takes each participant in the qualitative groups from a condition of lowest point of knowledge – do you know what DNA is? – through a natural arc of expanding conversation – knowledge of DNA – benefits or not to the individual – its role in improved healthcare – moral and ethical issues around the science – data privacy and security – and at its most extreme – and ultimately, the nature of improved DNA and genome science on a thriving UK PLC as a mark of global leadership in the advancement of improved human existence through scientific and social enlightenment and application.

Once the open and freeform discussion has come to a close we will use some of the seed ideas that we have developed from existing insights to see how opening doors to the subject using more creative everyday storytelling potentially changes or alters people’s disposition, perception and appreciation of the subject.

QUANTITATIVE RESEARCH

Once the qualitative groups have been transcribed we will then select the most potent insights and creative storytelling and framings so that they may be turned into simple animated pieces of film storytelling.

We will use an online research tool to see which film inspires the most attention and why with a representative UK sample, as well as sharing them in the social networks to the same purpose.

Both actions will seek simple responses and opinions through both closed and open data capture.

Ultimately we are seeking one or two ideas with the potential to develop into a greater scale of everyday conversation using socially dynamic communications and advocacy strategies to wildfire those conversations.

BONFIRE OF THE HUMANITIES

The creative jag in CAR endeavours to act like a repeated finger tap in the centre of the academic ‘chest’ – a way of bringing the science into the moment, connecting it in visceral emotional and social terms to the everyday Now – an intense injection of populist framing and storytelling for those somewhat consumed in the Academic Lag.

In that way, the advertising Jag acts as a form of ‘Mindfulness’ for the scientist, academic and clinician deep-diving into the world of the genome – providing a ‘Look Up’ orientation strategy for them to use while potholing in the caves between what is know and unknown.

Therefore Creative Action Research aims to use a complimentary fusion of:

Academic Lag – Reason – utility, interrogation & measure – resilience – the individual

Advertising Jag – Emotion – identity, expression & impact – desire – the crowd

to scale the conversation and socialise the Genome.

CAR accepts that there is no simple black & white answer here. It will take time and the attentions of both the Laggers and the Jaggers to get to the scale of conversation this deserves and needs.

In some ways, as with our DNA, it might just prove that the things that unite us are greater than those that divide us.

In finding a way to socialise the Genome we might just find a way to both educate the populous and socialise academia. And perhaps that is not a bad thing at all.

In the meantime lets pop on our Bordieu T Shirt – and be a great destroyer of Either/Or.

thinairfactoryblog

~ A topnotch WordPress.com site

Tag Archives: Language

Hashtags, social scolding & the Fragility of Freedom.