Any Port In A Storm. february 2021

 So, I just really figured out why it is that I am more comfortable in crises than in ordinary circumstances, and its a good reason, as maybe all real reasoning is, but that;s a different matter. The reason I am more  comfortable with crises situations, and maybe why I attract folks in them, is at least two fold. In crises, we become hyper aware to cause and effect, and communication that may be relevant to either harm or resolution. As such, we both listen better, or more critically, and we have a greater urge to communicate.  This reads as people seeming more transparent, open, and receptive than they normally are, which leads to the second reason why I am more comfortable in crises - that I am not yet very talented at gaining others trust and inviting them to open up.  I think of an analogy in the saying "Any port in a storm" and how an outlier port frequented and bustling during the stormy season may not have many boats come in when sailing is smooth, and how such a port may take its clients for granted, and not really know how to be properly welcoming and as hospitable as business in a common port may have to  be to compete for clients with others.  I think the analogy fits me.  When friends ghost me and even long time friends don't call until someone gets sick or passes on, they take for granted that I am supporting and come quick, but when things improve, I am often left high and dry to fend for myself in my circumstances, and found if anything unsettled for being alone, or saccharine and overattentive - neither of which normalize things, but drive the analogy even further from routine interaction.  I think being calm when left alone, and welcoming and supportive while not overbearing (so long as it can be avoided) may be a good step to improve this, as may be not investing too heavily in needy friends who only come in when they need some understanding or a shoulder to cry on.  Setting up boundaries and abiding and communicating them may be even more lonely at first, but I need to change and grow just as much as anyone, especially if I am to be of good service, in both clear and stormy weather. -XV, Feb 2021.

Reflection on Emotional Intelligence Questionaire Results, for Psychology of Personal Effectiveness, Summer 2017

My total score of 135.6 on the emotional intelligence questionnaire is 3 Standard Deviations above the average, meaning I have superior emotional intelligence skills.

Your opinion regarding your score based on the feedback you received. While I did get a solid EI score, the shortcomings in my results were consistent with those in my day-to-day, and surprisingly so.  While I can tend toward being receptive of other's ideas and adapting to new circumstances, leading these changes through a happy hope for success, and not just coping as needed and in crises is not a strength I have.  Where I am good at seeing through a mess, I lack and fail to inspire confidence when things are well.  No surprise that fostering relationships is not one of my strengths. 

Believing in myself more by analyzing previous successes when I have believed in my abilities and led others will help me focus and relax into succeeding more, and into inspiring others better when things are not going bad.  Taking this quiz does help me recall my strong and weak points, to make better decisions about both my capacities, and how I can improve and be more effective with others, and for myself. 

Hope Acts not Dreaming

The "American Dream" is a fallacy.

You don't have to start at the bottom. You don't have to work your way up, from customers, guest, clients, captains, resources, chairmen, etc. etc. Happiness is not a Metric to be analyzed and sold in company memos and resourcing propaganda.

Happiness is Ethical, not Capital.

Find me, with the language and motivational resources and inner desire to contribute to life, to our being, in such a way as to be humble, to earn little, and call me miserable. I may be at peace, and I may inspire calmness, love, hope, and acceptance to all I encounter.

Find me, blessed with position and affluence from my very beginning, and praised, piling honors upon myself to sell my brand and increase my empire and legacy, all the while anxious about images and concerned first and last for my own interests alone, and others falsely as they may further my goals, and laurels and awards will shower me as I take credit for every good fortune that follows, believing it all the fruit of my own efforts...

Happiness is Ethical, not Capital.

Happiness is not a resource to be parsed and calculated. It is -while a means- an end, in persons. This we can see in gratitude, in selflessness, in restrained and loving humility, in the fear of giving offense, in consideration, in selfless sacrifice... in long-term efforts for constant, growing, and often unheralded rewards in others. All for the good, noticed and not.

Not everyone can be whatever they want. Sometimes, essentials not up to "Desire" or "Passion" or Hard-Work" or "Determination" are simply not present when they need to be. Clear example: none of these will get 10 lbs of things in a 1 lb bag, nor 3 hours work in  30 minutes.  While we may estimate need and capacity in error sometimes, an even better example: an old woman needing to catch a bus on-time after walking an hour, when the stop is supposed to be 20 minutes away, and the driver left 10 minutes early. "Anything is possible"... Really? The American Dream?..

No. This "American Dream", "YOLO", "Unlimited Opportunities" thinking is a LIE. The have's are attributed what they do not wholly deserve, the have-nots the illusion that economic might makes right, and that anyone can do this - like modern Disney movies- if they just believe!  Well, beliefs can be wrong.  Here we confuse what happiness is, with what economic means can provide, and affluence with appreciation.  Confusion upon confusion.

We can all be happy to one extent or another once we accept our circumstances and our abilities to strive from within them, with an attitude of gratefulness for the ability to share the benefits of living and thriving along the way, as-we-can.

We can all be ethical. We can't all be icons.
This, if anything, is the American reality, that surpasses our dreams:

we can be good and do good, wherever we are.

xv 2015.06.10
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PERSONALITIES (NOT) FOR HIRE

PERSONALITIES (NOT) FOR HIRE

You are not going to hire personalities which will challenge or solve problems endemic to your hiring, training, and status-quo regimen as overseen by your human instrumentality-resources-capital-relations whatever department. By this mechanism, your company will only be as good as your model employee statistics, as-allowed by your HR structured algorithm hiring-filter, and no better. The one thing this guarantees before any other, is the security of your corporate status-quo, not as idealized, but as-is. As-is your HR direction and habits. As-is your "model" desired employee abilities, aptitudes, tolerances, and narrowness. As-is your company, not as-it-will-become.

Different personalities provoke different dynamics, tolerances, aptitudes, approaches, results, yes - but also capabilities; complementarity and harmony. Give a child only one toy, one quality to play with at a time, and require them to replace it with one other when they tire, and you do their growth and imagination a great disservice! Their mind will no longer draw creative connections between dinosaurs and dolls, between war, polemics, evolution, change, predation, harmony and disharmony, advancement and decline. They will imagine a soldier or barbie doll, or a dinosaur being a dinosaur. The connections between things that tie all things together, and their comparative qualities and worth - the complements - fall by the wayside.

In agriculture, distinct qualities are also mutually beneficial: years ago, there were many varieties of banana widely available in the US, and widely grown. When one crop was harmed, another crop more resistant to the illness would thrive, and vice-versa. Prices and availability were more stable due to this more stable, if variable, supply. Now, most all banana farming has diminished in favor of a few crops, firstly the Johnson banana. What happens to this one varietal is incredibly important due to the limited varieties grown now and, should a major illness befall this crop at some point in the future, as often occurs, we will be hard-pressed to fulfill the Johnson's supply in our markets. Nature allows variety for good purpose. We'd be wise to adopt this lesson.

Among bee colonies and populations, this lesson is also true. Most all bees are female, workers and their queen. Drones are male, and necessary for all the colony to survive. The queen, neither drone nor worker, also works her duty for the good of the whole. When one invasive species of hornet invades bee colonies in Japan, immune to their sting, several varieties may diminish, but one with a higher body temperature tolerance has adapted a behavior to defend itself: the workers will cluster over and around the invading hornets en-masse, buzzing their wings at such velocity as to raise the internal temperature of the cluster above the tolerance of the hornet so that it dies, while keeping that temperature just below the survivable limit of the bee. This distinction and unique learned behavior has allowed this variety of bee colony to endure something that has devastated others productive colonies, at a nominal cost to the colony per-event compared to other colonies being completely predated by these hornets.

As to our ideals: there is no perfect batting average. When we confuse what inspires us with what we are and have been, and filter our potential accordingly, we do something uniquely different to ourselves than what has occurred to allow us such a perspective. We limit ourselves to only the success of the past, consolidating our efforts into only the known, while neglecting our preparedness for the unknown. Where we so often draw from life experience to solve business, interpersonal, service, and capability problems, we would trade these unexpected capacities in for what we know has worked in the past, but what we can not know will work in the unforeseeable future. Even the best planner can only see so far, through so-many variables and possibilities!

Here is the distinction of advice and advising: how dangerous it is to go all-in and headlong into the future based on only our limited perspective and interpretation of the past! Just because we /think/ can filter what we allow to affect us, should we? What do we stand to lose in the process? How can we know?? The difference between faith and certainty, even potentially false certainty, is trust, and openness. Limiting who-we-become to only what we know, when the future and our disposition in it is ultimately unknowable, is the height of presumption.

Even the greats have off times, and redundancy and controlled failures are part of all efficient designs in the real world. The only thing guaranteed by homogeneity, be it in corporate-culture hiring practices, agriculture, evolution, or learned behaviors, is susceptibility of the whole to the problems of the few, as determined by those controlling the odds. Odds are, what is first being controlled is the perceived, and not actual, integrity of the system - before the crises, plagues, hornets, or whatever eventual unplanned event comes.

Inteligent variety and adaptability are crucial to healthy communities. The difficult makes us tough by learning to endure, the comfortable consoles us and allows the calm and capable to relax. The unplanned, external, and uncontrolled cannot be insulated indefinitely from the whole, and when it comes, the whole will be better served and more capable by it's inclusion, not exclusion, of many varieties of people and players in many positions.

Selective discrimination is good for some things, but not for all things. It is malignant when planning for the unknown, which is always around the bend.

-xv. 04/2015.

Digital Anthropology is Here

Digital Anthropology is Here

Digital Anthropology is an important new field of study deserving increased recognition. The Information Age phenomenon of information-overload is relentlessly advancing in a new way, one that our ancestors could never have adequately prepared us for. “Knowledge is power” is now “Knowledge is endless”, and endless consumption is exhausting. Things like endlessly cross-referenced wikiwalks, endless music and podcast options, endless online interest groups, etc. - options, if virtually limitless in quantity - are then necessarily limited by our own finite human capacity to partake in them. The myriad ways in which we do this, and in which we share in these experiences, are the subject of this new field of study known as Digital Anthropology.

Digital and Cyborg Anthropology are two aspects in this emerging crossing of fields that study how social media, electronic communications, telepresence, interactive robotics, big data, and emerging technologies influence and are influenced-by anthropology both in our relationships, and in our own identities, respectively. These emerging fields essentially study the living of modern man as-identified-with all of his ever-expanding means of presence and communication. Digital Anthropology defines and supports this exciting evolution in human culture, and merits increasing attention as a field of research just as our capacity to relate to others also increases.

The Ethnography of Digital Anthropologists –that is to say, the field-work of documenting and understanding cultural phenomenon- tends to have similar methods as to traditional forms of anthropology, though with new tools for the same purposes:

Unlike a traditional anthropologist who might go to another country, city, or place to do their research, the digital anthropologist must travel through the Internet to locate the field site. And just as a traditional ethnographer has their set of tools (tape recorder, field notebook, videocamera, kinship diagrams) the digital ethnographer must have a set of tools for understanding and recording the digital space. Screencapture software, website archiving tools, servers, blogs and content management systems are common tools of digital ethnographers. They are the equivalent of the audio recorder and journal. (Case)

Personally, I have ever been surrounded-with and have identified with in-groups and out-groups, in every aspect of my life: I am a son of immigrants though not an immigrant, an English speaker whose first and family tongue was Spanish, a faithful believer enrapt of the simplicity of the natural world, an introvert always appreciative of social graces and the sharing of beauty. In politics, in race, in language, in religion, in interpersonal dynamics, I have always been either caught-between or embracing both sides of most dualities. Now, seeing how advancing high technology in-my-lifetime ever-more encroaches from the disparaged realm of rocket-scientist pocket-protector nerd-dom, to the now polished and refined image of always-connected cyber-geekery by way of Apples and Androids, I am fascinated by this phenomenon unprecedented in human history of exponential connectivity. As the rowers keep on rowing, and they show no sign of slowing, and as the zeitgeist of power moves ever into the field of connectivity (if not always with a humane awareness), I throw-in my lot to studying and advancing our adapting to these ever-expanding means within our limited natural and cultural abilities.

I first considered my interest in psychology rather narrow, as the individual is always present in many groups, and groups are often divided against one-another, drawing stark contrasts between themselves that we as individuals so often identify with. Being an online student, I have seen every day how social media such as text messaging, facebook and twitter are becoming not just more a part of daily life, but also a factor affecting daily life via news reports on trends, and how big-data is being ever more used for everything from marketing to census-data and health-care. We have always identified with our effects, from philosophy, to law, to religion and politics. Now that our effects and abilities are extending well-beyond our physical presence, the bridging fields of electronic communications and anthropology are necessarily interacting more and faster to keep up, with an information age phenomenon that none of our ancestors could have properly equipped us to deal with. Our modern society is suffering growing pains to adapt.

Even within the world of Anthropology and social science, how best to formalize and expand the methods and character of Digital Anthropology has been a topic of discussion. While the Digital Anthropology Interest Group (“DANG, for fun”) has become an established interest group that is both within and without the American Anthropology Association (Thompson, Some DANG history: Who are we and what are we doing here?), even if they should participate within the structure of the Association at all has been something of a concern, since there are plenty of means available for those with this interest to communicate their research and findings. Working within established structure, if not solely within, is one way DANG has decided to best be of service to their goal of Open Access of research, and though the interest group is exclusive to AAA members -as-an-interest-group-, they also share and blog online to meet this goal, as well as to animate the AAA, as Matt Thompson of DANG puts it “kicking and screaming into the twenty-first century”:

We want a different publication regime that includes Open Access principles and more recognition paid towards legitimating online activities for hiring, promotion, and tenure; we want everyone from the rank-and-file to Big Name Professors to join us in using net platforms for teaching, research, and communication.

These changes are not going to happen on their own. The AAA is not going to see the light unless WE flip the switch. Instead of giving up on our admittedly stodgy professional association, I am suggesting that we get inside the damn thing and take it over.

If the primary focus of this interest group lies outside the AAA then we shouldn’t organize under the AAA in the first place. If everyone is envisioning a collective that joins forces with international, cross-disciplinary organizations embracing all the net has to offer in linking everything and everyone in a new and truly global anthropology… fine. But then we’re talking about a whole other ball of wax. In that case the AAA would be a burden and we should just bypass it entirely.

If people want a AAA interest group then we’re going to have to be much more circumspect in what we actually do. As a AAA interest group our energies must be directed towards (1) fomenting change within the AAA, to bring it kicking and screaming into the twenty-first century, and (2) serving the AAA membership, so that those of us who are wired can share our expertise and that others might be educated on why the issues that matter to us are important.

Is this parochial? Indubitably. Is this going to change the world? No, its only going to change our small part of it. But you gotta start somewhere, right? (Thompson)

In similar fashion to the ongoing work of Digital Anthropology and related emergent fields in understanding and learning about how we use and identify with technology more and more, Digital Archaeologists are reviving one of the earliest open-access online social platforms from twenty years ago, in 1994 Amsterdam, the Digital City:

This rudimentary social-media platform, launched in Amsterdam twenty years ago and known as the Digital City (or by its Dutch acronym DDS), was one of the earliest virtual public domains and a precursor to the modern Internet. But the software that kept it buzzing with activity until 2000 is now virtually lost. The challenge of retrieving and preserving this and other web artifacts has given rise to a new profession: web archaeologist. 

“If we don't do anything, then an important piece of digital cultural heritage will be lost,” says Tjarda de Haan, the first official web archeologist at the Amsterdam Museum. She is leading a far-ranging effort to rebuild the Digital City for virtual tours by future generations.

When DDS opened in 1994, it was one of the first social media platforms in the world, the first Dutch virtual community and the world’s first public-domain virtual city. Conceived as a virtual space for independent groups, from artists to culture organizations, the hub grew from 10,000 members in 1994 to 400,000 by 2000. (Teffer)

Digital Anthropology is here. It has arrived as celebrated and intrusive to all that has come before it as the Information Age, Refrigerated Transport, Television, and the Railroad. Be it in the study and reviving of its earliest forms for posterity, or its vanguard in ushering in a new age of global understanding, Digital Anthropology is here to stay. It is best we take notice.

Works Cited

Case, Amber. "Digital Ethnography." Cyborg Anthropology. 25 04 2014. Web Article. <http://cyborganthropology.com/Digital_Ethnography>.

Teffer, Peter. "In Amsterdam, web archaeologists excavate a digital city." The Christian Science Monitor 29 03 2014. 25 04 2014. <http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Europe/2014/0329/In-Amsterdam-web-archaeologists-excavate-a-digital-city>.

Thompson, Matt. "Digital Anthropology Group: Are we sure we want this thing inside the AAA?" 29 02 2012. Savage Minds: Notes and Queries in Anthropology. anthropology community weblog. 25 04 2014. <http://savageminds.org/2012/02/29/digital-anthropology-group-are-we-sure-we-want-this-thing-inside-the-aaa/>.

—. Some DANG history: Who are we and what are we doing here? 17 08 2012. 25 04 2014. <https://01anthropology.wordpress.com/2012/08/17/some-dang-history-who-are-we-and-what-are-we-doing-here/>.