Learning is Change

But, I want to know why we continue to let pictures be only that.

Today, I stood and held my son, kicking and screaming, while my
extended family joined mine for an hour with a professional
photographer near to the spot where my wife and I met. We posed in
four different locations, all the while trying to convince my son to
look at the camera and not cry. I think we may have managed it once.

While the photographer took pictures with a digital camera, I couldn’t
help but think that the whole process was something that could have
happened 50 years ago or more. There was nothing more going on than a
shutter clicking and a moment being frozen in an artist’s lens.

What more could there be?

I thought about that a lot. I tried to come up with what the moment
was missing. And I think it is this: context.

I want those pictures to contain the details about how both of my
brothers are mere months away from their wedding days. I want them to
be injected with how much weight my younger brother and mother have
lost. I want them to tell the story about my grandmother seeing her
great grandchildren (my children) for the first time. And more than
anything, I wanted there to be the impetus of all of this: the time I
walked up to my wife in the dorm cafeteria and told her that her
choice to not eat meat was pretty cool. Those stories are in my head,
but my children won’t know them.

Even if I retell most of them in detail to my kids, they won’t see how
it affected those pictures. They won’t see that the context of those
images can be just as beautiful as the images themselves. They may not
even remember their great grandmother. And for this, I wonder just why
we take pictures the way that we always have.

I have previously written about my interest in tagging everything, but
this is different. I don’t want to tag the pictures with these things.
I want them to be a part of the process. I want to spend the time
telling to stories of each image that we take as important so that we
may remember it as such. Tagging really is about assigning meta-data
to objects, but I want the data to be a part of the object. I want the
context to be the process of taking a picture. I want the camera to
collect the story and the photograph at the same time.

Rather than saying “cheese” (or “Chiefs” as we say in our football
loving household), we should be speaking a meaningful word or idea
that brought us here. The camera should capture those and then delve
into the context of each.

Because each of those photographs will be printed in the same way that
they have always been printed, we should be able to create the print
of the context as well. Let the story be the frame. Let the history be
the outermost edge, making the image appear all the more in focus
because we know who the people are. We know them better, and more
importantly, future generations will know them.

I believe that if we don’t change some of the way that we photograph
our world, the history of “us” will be lost. While I know that we are
doing some of this by tagging faces and places, or by tweeting out a
message with a picture, I think we may be missing just how important
the deeper past should be. Without the frame, we have not moved ahead.
Without the story, we are just sharing the same photographs by a new
method. Anyone have an app for that?

Posted via email from The Throughput

But, I threw books out of the classroom window. It wasn’t high up and I had no intention of watching them drop. I just wanted them to soak up the snow on the ground outside and I wanted the teacher not to have access to them. I was that vindictive and irregular. After two weeks of being out in the elements, I pulled the books back into the classroom and I put them on display in the back, flaying out the pages that were rippled from the immense amount of moisture that they had consumed. I got thrown out of class for that one. We may have even met in the principal’s office for it too. They may have talked about how I wasn’t reaching my potential and how I still had a chance to pass the class if I turned around my behavior.

I had no intention of doing that, though. I was throwing books out of basement windows. I wanted to fail. I wanted it so bad that the last quarter of the course earned me a 4.7 percent. This is a grade that you have to try for. There are more free points than that in the average middle school exam. I used a protractor to make designs on my quizzes. I read Jurrasic Park. There is something to be said for this kind of relentless wish to sabotage everything. Nothing good, really, but surely something to be said. It was a time that made sense only because I thought I knew just how little Middle School counted in life. I thought in was gaming the system in order to create a shortcut. I’m not sure what to, but the shortcut was at least going to be easier than doing everything that I was told.

So, I threw books out of a basement window. At the moment, I cant really think of anything more futile that that. The problem is that I may still be doing it.

This level of sabotage is really only reserved for those who know what they are doing, and I do. I am trowing the resources at my disposal out of the window just to see what the effect will be. I throw away tons of business cards that I get because I can’t be bothered to send a follow up email. I put off actual work because I convince myself that answering introspective questions is more important. I work on because I know that I will get too many things done, too quickly on my laptop. I sometimes ask questions in emails rather than going and investigating the problems myself.

I think that the key here is that I am tossing all of these things out of a basement window. There is no risk and It is just too easy. In push out my responsibilities into the wide world and then pull them back in only when they are unrecognizable and unusable. I do this so that I can claim victory over the things that other people have asked of me or the things that I have asked of myself.

In some situations I am still aiming for the 4.7 percent because I know that relying on my actual talents will make it seem as though I actually care. Which, of course, I do. In college I had to take Spanish. I made hundreds of flashcards and memorized all of the tenses of verbs. I owned a number of Spanish/English dictionaries and I consulted them from my fifth floor dorm room, never once considering dropping them out the window. I cared what grade I got and it showed. I was no longer interested in trying to be considered individualistic or eccentric. I was okay with achievement. I’m not there with my current work. I feel as though I am still in middle school with being productive all of the time. I know that I should be able to tell the difference, but I believe that there is just something about the glorious nosedive that is still very appealing to me. I take a bow and ask for forgiveness and then try to pick up the pieces of what was once a great opportunity.

I think I may need someone to notice that I am doing these things. After all, isn’t middle school all about getting attention. Maybe that is what this book is all about, too: the quest for attention so that I can fail at the other things I am doing. Perhaps it is the appearance of work, like reading Jurrasic Park, that allows me to pass on by without having to really worry too much what is expected of me.

Or, perhaps I am just trying to annoy the status quo into changing. It is equally likely that all of this attention getting is my way of saying that I crave the changes in my environment that will allow me to grow. Even more like my college Spanish classes, perhaps it is that the stakes need to be raised and the environment shifted just enough to make it worthwhile to try. Am I working toward 4.7% because no one has given me a reason to do otherwise?

In a word, yes.

In two words, yes but…

Yes, but there is no graduation standing in between my life now and my life a year from now. There are no major events that will allow me to make concrete changes. It is, and will ever be, my choice to either make flashcards and prepare for what is to come or sit in the back of the room and send out my resources into the elements.

Posted via email from The Throughput