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WORDS
Paulo Freire, Brazilian educator and social theorist:
“Liberation is thus a childbirth, and a painful one. The man or woman who emerges is a new person, viable only as the oppressor-oppressed contradiction is superseded by the humanization of all people. Or to put it another way, the solution of this contradiction is born in the labor which brings into the world this new being: no longer oppressor nor longer oppressed, but human in the process of achieving freedom.”
Excerpt from Pedagogy of the Oppressed, translated by Myra Bergman Ramos (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1972.) pp. 50.
Georg Simmel, German sociologist and writer:
“Faithfulness refers to the peculiar feeling which is not directed toward the possession of the other as the possessor’s eudemonistic good, nor toward the other’s welfare as an extrinsic, objective value, but towards the preservation of the relationship to the other.”
Arlene Goldbard, American CCD practitioner, writer, social activist, and consultant:
“That community artists occupy a distinct professional category has seldom been recognized in any official way in the United States. Here, they are most often seen as part of the professional category “artist,” which is remarkably unburdened by professional ethics or expectations…Add the fact that most community cultural development practitioners are deeply skeptical of institutions, and it seems unlikely that professionalization of community artists per se will become a focus in this country for some time, if ever. It’s doubtful (and understandable) that U.S.-based practitioners would welcome any development that increases bureaucratization or regulation. But this difference widens the gulf between practitioners in those parts of the world where professional recognition has been granted and U.S.-based community artists, whose self-definition sometimes makes a virtue of necessity, prizing an ad hoc, unfettered, guerilla style.”
Excerpt from New Creative Community: The Art of Cultural Development (Oakland, CA: New Village Press, 2006), pp. 160-161.
Jared Diamond, American academician and author of Guns, Germs, and Steel:
“One of the things that enabled Australia to survive in this remote outpost of European civilization for 250 years… has been their British identity. But today their commitment to a British identity is serving Australians poorly in the need to adapt to their situation in Asia. So it’s particularly difficult to change course when the things that get you in trouble are the things that also are the source of your strength.”
Quote from a TED Conference presentation, February 2003
Malcolm Gladwell, Canadian journalist:
“There is a concept in cognitive psychology called the channel capacity, which refers to the amount of space in our brain for certain kinds of information…As human beings, in other words, we can only handle so much information at once. Once we pass a certain boundary, we become overwhelmed. What I’m describing here is an intellectual capacity–our ability to process raw information. But if you think about it, we clearly have a channel capacity for feelings as well…To be someone’s best friend requires a minimum investment of time. More that that, though, it takes emotional energy. Caring about someone deeply is exhausting…It’s a function of the way humans are constructed.”
Excerpt from The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference. (Boston, London: Little, Brown and Company, 2000 ), pp. 175-177.
Chris Abani, Nigerian writer and former political prisoner:
“I really believe that we’re never more beautiful than when we’re most ugly, because that’s really the moment we really know what we’re made of… My humanity’s more like a window. I don’t really see it, I don’t pay attention to it until there’s a, you know, like a bug that’s dead on the window. Then suddenly I see it…”
Quote from a TED Conference presentation, February 2008
Barbara Ehrenreich, American socio-political critic and essayist:
“In the psychological language of needs and drives, people do not freely and affirmatively search for pleasure; rather, they are ‘driven’ by cravings that resemble pain. To this day, and no doubt for good reasons, suffering remains the almost exclusive preoccupation of professional psychology. Journals in the field have published forty-five thousand articles in the last thirty years on depression, but only four hundred on joy… Thanks to psychology and the psychological concerns of Western culture generally, we have a rich language for describing the emotions drawing one person to another — from the most fleeting sexual attraction, to ego-dissolving love, all the way to the destructive force of obsession. What we lack is any way of describing and understanding the ‘love’ that may exist among dozens of people at a time; and it is this kind of love that is expressed in ecstatic ritual. Durkheim’s notion of collective effervescence and Turner’s idea of communitas each reach, in their own ways, toward some conception of love that serves to knit people together in groups larger than two. But if homosexual attraction is the love ‘that dares not speak its name,’ the love that binds people to the collective has no name at all to speak. Communitas and collective effervescence describe aspects or moments of communal excitement; there is no word for the love — or force of need — that leads individuals to seek ecstatic merger with the group.”
Excerpt from Dancing In The Streets: A History of Collective Joy. (London: Granta Publications, 2007), pp. 12-14.
James Surowiecki, American journalist and author of The Wisdom of Crowds:
“One of the things that happens if you spend a lot of time on the internet, and you spend a lot of time thinking about the internet, is that it is very easy to fall in love with the internet. It is very easy to fall in love with the decentralized, bottom-up structure of the internet. It is very easy to think that networks are necessarily good things, that being linked from one place to another, to being tightly linked in a group, is a very good thing. And much of the time it is. But there’s also a downside to this, a kind of dark side, in fact, and that is that the more tightly linked we become to each other the harder it is for each of us to remain independent. One of the fundamental characteristics of a network is that once you are linked in the network, the network starts to shape your views and starts to shape your interactions with everybody else. That’s one the things that defines what a network is. A network is not just the product of its component parts… it is something more than that. It is, as Steven Johnson has talked about, an ‘emergent’ phenomenon. Now, this has all these benefits. It’s very beneficial in terms of the efficiency of communicating information, it gives you access to a whole host of people, it allows people to coordinate their activities in very good ways. But the problem is that groups are only smart when the people in them are as independent as possible. This is sort of the paradox of the wisdom of crowds, or the paradox of collective intelligence; that what it requires is actually a form of independent thinking. And networks make it harder for people to do that because the drive attention to the things that the network values.”
Quote from a TED Conference presentation, February 2005
Garrison Keillor, American storyteller and radio host of A Prairie Home Companion:
“Storytelling is an art that one enters into for all the wrong reasons, but it doesn’t really matter. We get into it in order to show off, and also to engage the interest of women, but if you stay in it and are lucky enough to stay in it for a while you realize that it is a premier performance art in which the purpose is to gain intimacy with people whom you will never ever know. To become intimate with strangers is the purpose of storytelling. Intimacy is a great luxury for young people your age, but as you get to be my age it becomes a necessity of life without which you cannot possibly live.”
Quote from a performance given for The Moth (via Podcast), November 2008
Lawrence Lessig, American law professor, author of Free Culture, and founding board member of Creative Commons:
“So this is remix, right? And it’s important to emphasize that what this is not, it is not what we call, quote, piracy. I’m not talking about nor justifying people taking other people’s content in wholesale and distributing it without the permission of the copyright owner; I’m talking about people taking and recreating using other people’s content, using digital technologies to say things differently. Now, the importance of this is not the technique… because of course every technique you’ve seen here is something that television and film producers have been able to do for the last fifty years. The importance is that that technique has been democratized. It is now anybody with access to a 1500 dollar computer, who can take sounds and images from the culture around us, and use it to say things differently. These tools of creativity have become tools of speech. It is a literacy for this generation. This is how our kids speak, it is how our kids think. It is what your kids are as they increasingly understand digital technologies and their relationships to themselves.”
Quote from a TED Conference presentation, March 2007
Eddy Von Mueller, American professor of film studies at Emory University:
“What is most surprising to me, though, about this high-tech boom in the movie trade is how little we hear about its potentially negative side effects. This is surprising because in other cases and contexts, in discussions of other industries, we are generally very ready to spill blood, or at least a whole lot of ink in the cause of human workers threatened by encroaching technology…
The new paradigm rapidly achieving ascendancy in the commercial film industry is one in which a new class of high-tech workers, using new technologies of the moving image, primarily implemented in post-production, are displacing and in some cases entirely replacing skills and services previously provided by others during production…
It may be to some extent true that CGI represents and unlocking of imagination, a liberation of fantastic ideation of the cinema; an image liberation so absolute that there is no longer any hope or any horror that can allude captivity on film. But this mode of film production also enacts a capitalist fantasy of absolute control over the means of production.”
Quote from a speech given as part of the Life of the Mind Speaker Series, a podcast (via iTunes), September 2008