Where to Hide? Part 2

In “Where to Hide? Part 1”I talked about finding people online without much information to go by.  The story to follow  talks about the ‘other’ direction; being found.

It’s early 2008, the world is still in order and people go to work at Lehman Brothers:  I had a conservative client who apparently was close to circles that where close to the pope… kinda one, or two degrees of separation.  This just to make the point in what way the client was conservative.

I was working as a media consultant for the CEO. After a few months Clock Wise’s role was to be expanded into producing video content.  Since it was a sizeable budget Clock Wise needed to be vetted.  With nothing to worry about, I foresaw no problems.

Where to Hide? Part 1

I’ve written a bit about on-line privacy in the past months, and how can one ignore the topic with the N.S.A. scandal and the Snowden leaks.  In this and the next post I want to share a story each of on-line privacy issues from opposite directions.

 

The first and most recent story begins with a conversation I had over dinner with a guy who told me about his ex (which wasn’t all that “ex” as it turns out, but that’s a hole other topic and not for this blog). From the conversation I had gathered the following information:

Happy Birthday America

This is my first Independence Day as an American citizen. I have lived half my life in Switzerland and the other half in the US, or more precisely in New York, which by all accounts is not like the rest of the country. At my swearing-in ceremony a few months back quite a few people asked me how I felt as an American: I feel like a New Yorker and always have. Being an American is something I have to get used to.

New York was love at first sight. As any true love we’ve had quarrels, made up and deepened our relationship. 9/11 wounded New York deeply but also sealed my commitment to this city as a place to thrive, live, learn and love. I love New York for its energy, its grit, its people. New York passes no judgment. All nations, colors, levels of madness, cultures, religions, fads and neuroses live here in an unbelievable hodge-podge. Everybody is ‘other’. Every ‘other’ is the ‘normal’. What is there not to love?

Now that I’ve officially upgraded from New Yorker to American I can vote, I moved from “you” to “we”. I’m not an outsider looking in, commenting, I’m now on the inside and I can say “we” when I have an opinion. I can also apply for grants I previously did not qualify for… Most likely I will be called for jury duty the moment I register to vote.

Happy Birthday, America. My wish for you is to leave your teenage years behind and grow up to be a fiscally and politically responsible country, one that values educating future generations and goes out into the world to be a nurturer and not an oppressor. I’ll be watching closely and participating in my civic duties.

Learning a Culture

‘Culture Learning’ is a topic that will hold my interest endlessly; not only because linguistics and how we communicate fascinate me, but also because I am a cultural transplant myself. When I talk about culture I mean language, conventions, traditions and rituals, as well as the sub textual behaviors of a civilization: communication in its broadest sense.

The popular philosopher and critical theorist Slavoy Zizek talks about how we are embedded in ideology and defines identity as follows: “Identity lives in the space between invention and reality.” (Slavoy Zizek, “How are we Embedded in Ideology”, Prague 2007).

What is reality, or said differently, what is truth? Truth is the sum of a society’s conventions. There are rules and meta-rules, which are unknown knowns, call them habits or unspoken conventions that set the parameters for moving flawlessly through a society. It is a social network of implicit rules that tell you how to deal with the explicit rules.

Immigrants come into a new set of rules that are the makeup of their host society. Some rules are obvious, some are not. Assimilation and integration starts with learning of the explicit rules. But the meta-rules or implicit rules we only learn over time by trial and error, by using our intuition and assessing situations and reactions to us.

When too many people do not know the implicit rules of a society, the context for these rules weakens. Once the rules lose their context, they collapse. That is what ‘fear of the Other’ really is – a fear of losing one’s own truth.

Truth - Part 2

“Identity lives in the space between invention and reality.”

What is truth? Truth is the sum of a society’s conventions. There are rules and meta-rules, which are unknown knowns, call them habits or unspoken conventions that set the parameters for moving flawlessly through a society. It is a social network of implicit rules that tell you how to deal with the explicit rules.

Immigrants come into a new set of rules that are the makeup of their host society. Some rules are obvious, some are not. Assimilation and integration starts with learning of the explicit rules. But the meta-rules or implicit rules we only learn over time by trial and error, by using our intuition and assessing situations and reactions to us.

When too many people do not know the implicit rules of a society, the context for these rules weakens. Once the rules lose their context, they collapse. That is what ‘fear of the Other’ really is – a fear of losing one’s own truth.

[Watch 90 absolutely fascinating minutes of Slavoy Zizek’s discourse in Prague (2007) on “How are we Embedded in Ideology”.]

Reality by detour of Identity and Truth

We have arrived at the topic of reality – again. As a doc filmmaker reality has always been the ethically most relevant topic, but what IS reality? Take it a step further: what is reality and what is fiction and where do they become a lie?

As I’m thinking about Identity a lot these days such banal questions as: “Who am I?” or “What is my reality?” pop up all the time. “Which me is real?” Is it the Facebook profile, my adventurous and sexy Avatar on Second Life, the somewhat overbearing producer, or the sloppy me in the lobby sneaking to the mailbox hoping to remain unseen? My nephew announces he has the best score in the world (!) on Nintendo, because Nintendo tells him so. In the world? Yes, in HIS world.

If I don’t know any better, am I lying? I think you are lying if you are claiming to have done something you have not done. Run the marathon? Sure, but actually I didn’t sing up I just entered the race at mile 2 and left just before the finish line as I can’t cross it without an official bib. To me, with my Swiss background that is an outright lie to say that you ran "the Marathon" under those circumstances, to my Latin friend that’s a minor detail no one is going to lose sleep over. Is my friend lying, or is he well within the ethical boundaries of his culture and not lying? It’s a question I cannot decide, because emotional me decides differently than pragmatic me.

There is no absolute Identity, there is no absolute Reality and there is no absolute Truth. What do you think?

Identity and the Other ll

As I’ve been digging a bit deeper into “Identity and the Other” (ITO) I have come across some interesting, thought provoking and then hair-raising theories.
Eugenics for one – [from Wikipedia: Eugenics is the "applied science or the biosocial movement which advocates the use of practices aimed at improving the genetic composition of a population," usually referring to human populations.] It seems beyond preposterous and you might have guessed right, after WWll the whole idea of Eugenics much supported by the Nazis found a well-deserved and immediate death knell.
But think about where in your life you have witnessed or been involved with the ‘thought value’ of Eugenics. Has your best friend been in an interracial relationship to the horror of her family? In theory we are all very open minded and very generous with whom we befriend – how open are we when it comes to inviting an “Other” into our families and have them be part of our off-spring? What if your daughter showed up with a young man (or woman for that matter) of a totally different background – culturally, ethnically, socially?

Identity and the Other

It just occurred to me after rereading Ryszard Kapuscinski’s “The Other” – that the fear of the other is fear of looking at oneself. Without the Other the self would need no defining and the more we expose ourselves to the Other the more multifaceted and interesting and vibrant we become. What a great way of looking at it.

Or put it this way: our own identity only exists through the existence of “other” – otherwise there is no reason to define yourself if there is no ‘setting apart FROM’.