Random Acts of Criticism

The fact of the matter is, there is more content to read and interpret now than ever before in the course of human history.

Due to the ubiquity and persistence of Google in particular, and the internet in general, more people have more to read that ever before.

The problem is not that audiences have suddenly become alliterate, illiterate, or even semi-literate. The problem is not that there is an abundance of writing: good, bad, ugly and indifferent. The problems isn’t even in the declining power of the critic to influence and push a set of ideas.

The problem is that the act of criticism has always inherently been based upon an assumption of scarcity: both in content and in opinion.

Gatekeepers of all kinds exist to inform audiences about that which is “good” and about that which is “bad.”

But in a world where everyone can ignore the critic (or choose to revoke the critic’s power through denying them permission to influence a choice), the act of criticism has to shift from one of determining and enforcing a regime of quality to the act of educating, advocating and taking a position.

And defending it.

Of course, the critic should read, watch, listen or otherwise take in the content that they are seeking to critique. But if they don’t, then the audience owes them little in the way of attention and credibility.

Otherwise, the critic is no different than a member of the audience—albeit one with more reach, but not more impact.

Culture of Immediacy

The culture of immediacy that we have created with our digital social communication tools, has convinced our brains that problems of all kinds should be solvable immediately, to our specifications, and with little effort (or friction) on our part.

Here are a few examples. Your mileage (and examples) may vary:

Climate change could be solved tomorrow…if only the “right” people oversaw the solutions. Like the people who populate my Facebook feed…

Elections could turn out with the “right” outcome with results that I could see immediately…just like a Twitter poll does…

People could treat each other with fairness, justice, and equality in a pretty cool and hip way…if only it were the “right” people doling out the fairness, justice and equality…and all others who don’t agree (or aren’t hip or cool enough) could be blocked or never seen anyway….just like in my SnapChat feed…

Rights, responsibility, accountability, and freedom. These are human conditions that took centuries to adjudicate, argue over, and have conflict about, to come to the space of where we are now as a global culture.

They will not fall to the growing culture of immediacy anytime soon.

Netflix, podcasts, YouTube videos, search results. These are tools of communication that operate on the principles of speed to market (your eyes) and entertainment (your brain).

The slow, plodding things that need to change (i.e. systems) are hard to shift, require emotional energy in the face of human intransigence and institutional friction, and need conflict to change. It used to be that we recognized and passed on to the next generation, the idea that incremental change was enough and that lifetime change (on the scale of anywhere from 35.5 to 78.8 years) was enough to get a society and culture to where it could reasonably be expected to be.

But this idea of plodding, incremental change is slowly eroding in the face of collective minds, attitudes, and behaviors being transformed by the culture of immediacy that our digital social communication tools provide.

Combine this fact with the reality that the inner workings (both the how and the why) of our digital social communication have become incomprehensible for the average person and that we have elevated this incomprehensibility from a minor annoyance (think about how you could repair a car in your garage only 50 years ago) to a belief in the magical genius of self-interested companies (think Google and how the algorithm of search works), and we have a giant problem on our global cultural hands.

Relationships with people are boring, mundane, exciting, and thrilling.

Solutions to people problems cannot be solved through the clever application of another frictionless algorithm.

People cannot be inspired through speed, or motivated through impatience to change.

The hard work, the meaningful work, the work of people conflicting against other people, is the last thing that will survive the cult of immediacy we have built.

If we let it.

And the changes that can come about from that survival is worth leveraging all the immediacy-based, incomprehensible tools for good, that you can.

[Podcast] Earbud_U, Season Five, Episode #3 – Katie Vaz

[Podcast] Earbud_U, Season Five, Episode #2 – Katie Vaz, Illustrator, Graphic Designer, and Author of “Don’t Worry, Eat Cake”

[powerpress]

Love is a many splendor thing.

…maybe that’s splendid…

Or so it is said.

When you get to do what you love every day, it doesn’t seem like work. But the thing is, many people don’t do what they love every day.

Many people, for a variety of reasons, do what they have to do, what they are required to do, or what they are told to do.

Our guest today, Katie Vaz, a graphic designer and illustrator, and author of Don’t Worry, Eat Cake, is living the life that she wants to live, doing what she wants to do, and creating a voice and an oeuvre of work that shows what can happen when you march to the beat of your own drummer.

And now, a word about coloring books:

There’s a growing movement of providing coloring books for adults, and Katie’s book is about tapping into this phenomenon.

I personally have never colored (with the exception of finger painting and whatever I did in college art classes for my major), but I understand the sentiment behind the idea in a world where love is the hardest thing to attain.

What the world needs now, is love, sweet love.

That, and coloring books.

And cake.

Definitely cake….

Connect with Katie in all the ways that you can below:

Etsy Store (Use code EARBUD20 for 20% off orders for Valentine’s Day): https://www.etsy.com/shop/katievaz

Website: http://katievaz.com/

Blog: http://katievaz.com/blog/

Book: https://www.amazon.com/Dont-Worry-Eat-Cake-Everything/dp/1449478123

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/katievaz

Twitter: https://twitter.com/katievaz

Katie Vaz Design on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/KatieVazDesign

You Were Already Angry Before the Internet Came Along

When people talked with each other across the fences in the backyard, they knew (with some certainty, though certainly not ontological certainty) which of their neighbors were angry and which were pleasant.

The bowling league, the local bar, the country club, and even the grocery store served as locations that allowed people to bump into each other in ways both random and purposeful, and to take each other’s’ temperature about the news of the day.

There were opportunities for thought leaders, opinion makers, and public intellectuals to educate the public about what they believed, and because first the Church, and then the government, and then the corporations acted as gatekeepers, democracy of thought and passion was tamped down successfully enough.

If you were an individual looking to step out from the shadow of conformity and the comfort of the crowd, there were few venues that existed for you to walk out those minority viewpoints, and the gatekeepers of the majority existed primarily to ensure that the minority was never heard from.

Or at least, rarely heard from.

Fighting for a minority belief against a seemingly overwhelming power structure became sauce for the cooking of the goose of ideas, and passions, and sometimes, those ideas broke through the dominant culture, leaped over the gatekeepers and struck a chord with millions of people.

In the 4th great human revolution, the one being driven by a global communication channel known as the Internet, the gatekeepers have little power to police, minority voices and viewpoints can connect with each other and influence like never before, and you know how angry your neighbor is, because she tweeted out a passionate comment last week and it popped up in your feed.

Here’s the thing that we forget, in light of the technological show being put on by the Internet now:

Your neighbor was always angry and disgruntled about the way that the world fundamentally worked.

There were always minority viewpoints in the culture, looking for connection, engagement, and searching for meaning against a dominant culture that was perceived as arrogant, conformist and overbearing.

The bowling league, the local bar, the country club, and even the grocery store have been replaced first by chat rooms, and now by the “impermanent” web, and will be replaced further by whatever comes next.

Since the magnification of a problem is not the same as the problem’s ‘root cause,’ it should come as no surprise to us that people are at the root of our angry, passionate, loud discourse, on an open, democratic and connecting tool.

We all can now say, due to the overwhelming evidence and with almost ontological certainty, that if we fix the people the tool will magically change.

Great People of History

There used to be a lot of talk about great people in history.

Books, philosophies, ideas, inventions, and other movements in the past were lionized by being included as part of an overall “canon” of history that people in a present age dutifully memorized, internalized, and regurgitated to the next generation, creating a virtuous circle.

This memorization was designed to educate, inculcate, and to inspire. It was done with the best of intentions and was meant to join people’s current struggles (even if they weren’t great struggles, just mundane ones) to a past perceived to be great.

This “canon” of great people of the past primarily included political, social, and military leaders (and yes, the majority were men, and–in the West at least–white) but this was designed to pass along to future generations the idea that certain people have the ability to “stand astride history” and that conflicts, disagreements, and disputations could be solved by examining successful best practices (and failures) gleaned from large examples.

But now, sixteen years into the 21st century, all of that is over.

The philosophical, political, and cultural movements of the 19th, 20th and 21st century have sought first to expand the “canon” of who can be included as “great” (i.e. women, minorities, etc.) and then to expand the “canon” of what ideas can be considered “great” (i.e. Marxism, religious atheism, feminism, historical determinism, etc.).

With this expansion two things have happened concurrently:

The glorious historical past has become untethered from the inglorious day-to-day present. Along with this, the lessons from the formerly glorious historical past have become untethered from the inglorious problems and concerns of the day-to-day present.

The glorious historical past has become an object to be examined through the lens of current events, and day-to-day struggles, in an ever more frustrating search for pure meaning and linkage.

Both of these expansions underlie our current cultural, political, and moral anxieties, which manifest in conflicts and disagreements between people, institutions, nation-states, and even philosophies and ideas.

But these expansions also form the basis for generating the solutions to conflicts, disagreements, and disputations. And to ending our modern anxieties about seemingly intractable problems.

Because, as the present has become more and more democratic, individuals have the opportunity, the power, and the need to ascend to being great people in, not only our own personal histories but also, in the history of the world.

Network Leap 2

The leap from here to there has never been closer.

Sure, leaping is naturally hard.

That’s why people caution other people, before they embark on a path they can’t see, into a future they can’t understand, with outcomes that are unimaginable, to “look before you leap.”

It’s been written before that, in the context of a conflict, this is terrible advice, most often given terribly.

In the context of the idea of the primacy of the network over everything else , leaping from the Internet “in here” (the greatest communications disruption tool invented by man yet) to the network of physical relationships, textures, and moments in the world “out there” (the physical world), it’s actually great advice.

The difficulty of leaping from inside the machine to outside the machine is misunderstood and underappreciated. Google is trying it’s best to make that leap, as is Facebook, but the real players in the leap from virtual to physical, might be platform builders who understand two things:

Connectivity is not a bug, it’s a feature. Too often in the non-virtual world, connection is now shifting from being treated as something to be hoarded (though there are still those who do that) to something to be freely shared. This shift is thought of by the hoarders as a bug in the system and they do all they can to wipe it out.

Access is a responsibility. Too often in the physical world the location where the fiber optic wire ends (the last mile concept) is thought of as the place where it’s not financially worth it (a profit can’t be made) to provide access to the people living beyond that, sometimes literal, “last mile.” This mindset is shifting, because the reality is that access is gradually moving from a limited privilege to a global civic good.

Once people, businesses, and networks wrap their heads around these two philosophies, and then are self-aware enough to act on them with intentionality, “look before you leap” will return to being the terrible advice it always was.

[Opinion] Live with the Outcome of the Vote

Tomorrow in the United States, is election day.

There is, during local, state, and national elections, the usual appeals to get people to engage in phone calling for candidates, rallies, polling, and all the other “get out the vote” parts of an election campaign.

The appeals come from the idea that it is easy to convince people not to vote; thus, by getting in their face with constant appeals to participate in all aspects of the voting process (from planting a yard sign to actually voting) the candidates hope to ensure that people are persuaded to vote.

This is all well and good. But towards the end of an elections cycle, such appeals can rise to the level of farce.

What’s far more important is how candidates, and their supporters, live with the outcome of an election.

Candidates and supporters don’t need to be told how to get out the vote.

Candidates and supporters need to be told how to live with outcomes they might not like.

Or that they might have voted against.

This ability to deal with outcomes that are not voted for, without engaging in disruptive revolution, is a fixture of the United States electoral process, because of how the electoral process is designed via the Constitution: A candidate and their ideas may be popular, but if there isn’t enough support from populations in states with a high number of electoral votes, then the candidate loses.

Being a popular loser is something that past candidates have some experience with at the national level in the United States, and because of this two-tiered system, the electoral process has always been relatively free from the chicanery and corruption that sometimes rules in plurality, or parliamentary based systems.

The thing that drives the difficulty in living with the outcome is partially the media. We get the media system that we have built, and in the United States, it is a system based on short attention spans, emotional hijacking, and spreading of rumor as fact.

But we allowed that system to be built.

The other thing that increasingly drives anger, and dissatisfaction with electoral outcomes, is the fact that as the United States has become more fractured in its media consumption of facts, there has been the corresponding rise of tribal like behavior. This type of behavior, instigated by a click happy media structure, creates a perfect storm of disaffection and unrest, that goes beyond the outcomes of election days.

And it will go beyond Tuesday as well.

[Opinion] The Quality of Mercy Doesn’t Scale…and Never Will…

From the Coliseum to Facebook, there has rarely been any mercy from the mob watching the participants in the arena.

The reason the writers of the Constitution favored a Republic over all else, was that they believed the mob was a dangerous, unpredictable force that moved without logic, rationality, reason, or mercy. And then the horrors of the French Revolution proved them correct about human nature.

In modern times, we have psychological and sociological surveys, assessments, and experiments, that show that when it is possible for individuals to stand-by, and watch degradations happen to others, people will. This is called the Bystander Effect.

In modern times, we have psychological and sociological surveys, assessments, and experiments, that show that when it is possible for the mass of people to suffer the injustices of the moment as long as those injustices do not personally affect them in any way, people will. This is called social proofing.

In modern times, we have psychological and sociological surveys, assessments, and experiments, that show that when it is possible to go along with others en masse as an event of any kind happens, because that even happening confirms a belief deeply and long held, people will. This is called confirmation bias.

The quality of mercy comes about when you know someone personally; when you are connected to their story intimately; and when you empathize with their struggle in a real and powerful way.

The quality of mercy cannot scale.

The outcomes of mercy—justice, forgiveness, reconciliation—can scale, but the actual quality of mercy comes along in an individualized process that cannot be scaled, and must instead be seeded, from one person to another.

No matter whether you’re among the mob watching in the Coliseum, or among the mob engaging on Facebook.

[Advice] On Influencers

Influential personalities and brands online are about to become even more influential as the years go by.

And mediators, lawyers, and negotiators should take note.

Influencer advertising is tricky to navigate, whether you are trying to partner with the peacebuilding neighborhood association with a vibrant Facebook community or the pop singer Rhianna.

Influencer marketing is only going to grow larger in the coming year for the very same reasons that social media is influential now: Individuals trust other individuals more than they trust brands. In the field of mediation and peacebuilding, where trust is a huge deal, influencers and thought leaders such as Bernard Mayer and Kenneth Cloke bring their substantial influence to academic programs, academic writing, advocacy and other areas.

However, as the influence of those individuals begins to fade, a new generation of influencers is rising in the ranks of mediation and peacebuilding professionals, such as Patricia Porter, Brad Heckman, Cinnie Noble, and others who have begun to leverage social tools and the wide reach of the Internet to make a dent in the peace building universe.

For the ADR professional with limited resources to be able to connect with larger names in the peacebuilding world, there are a few things to remember when considering using influencers to advertise your content, your services, your philosophy, or your processes:

Does the influencer’s brand link well with my brand promise?

Carefully considering how an influencer’s brand (which may range from Bernard Mayer all the way to Kim Kardashian) complements the strengths and reduces the weaknesses of the peacebuilder’s brand promise is key to developing a long term relationship with the influencer. Influencers are people first and foremost, and peacebuilding professionals should be about building that relational knowledge ahead of jumping into a branded relationship.

Is the influencer’s audience an audience that I want to be addressing as a peace builder?

Depending upon who the influencer’s audience is (and audiences range in taste and structure from the 1,000 followers the neighborhood peace builder has on her Facebook page, all the way to the millions of fans and followers Jon Stewart has) the peace builder has to decide carefully if that is an audience worth talking to. The fact of the matter is, every audience that a brand influencer has is not appropriate for a peace builder to talk to, nor is every audience open to hearing a message about peace.

Does the influencer’s message help or harm my message?

Every influencer talks to their audience in their own way, using words, images, symbols, and other forms of social cuing that inexorably tie that audience to them.

Some influencers are less savvy than others, but that does not mean that they aren’t sophisticated communications professionals in their own right.

 

[Podcast] Earbud_U, Season Four, Episode #1 – Chris Strub

[Podcast] Earbud_U, Season Four, Episode # 1 – Chris Strub, Social Media Engager and Connector, Part 2

[Podcast] Earbud_U, Season Four, Episode #1 – Chris Strub

[powerpress]

Welcome back to the fourth season of The Earbud_U Podcast!

The nostalgia for the perceived security and safety of the Industrial-TV complex dominated world of work and human interaction, is almost deafening.

The nostalgia mostly comes in the form of complaints about the work ethic of the current generation by a generation feeling left behind, and discounted.

Our guest today, Chris Strub is back from the second season of The Earbud_U Podcast. He defines putting in the work and redefining what the new work ethic is, by building a new way of working, using tools that allow him to grow his impact, and actively demonstrate the changing nature of the work ethic conversation.

When work ethic (or nostalgia for an imagined time in the past when people worked “harder” than they do now) is discussed, it’s often framed in the context of “paying your dues.” That mythical state of working hard, being unnoticeable (except for the work that you do), making no demands upon the work structure, and showing appropriate deference to the life experience of people older than you.

In a communication world with digital tools that are reshaping everything from shopping to working globally, “paying your dues” can begin at the age of 15 doing things that

  • Don’t scale
  • Will not appear on a resume
  • That an employer will never know about
  • And will bring the person passive income that can be leveraged after ten years…at the age of 25.

You know, at the moment when the “you should be ‘paying your dues’” conversation begins to happen, directed by superiors, co-workers, and others who didn’t have the digital tools that the 15 to 34 year olds have at their disposal right now.

Work ethic still exists. We just haven’t figured out a new way to calculate its value.

Listen to the podcast and take the multiple opportunities out there to connect with Chris today: