Posts tagged “Reader Review” include a few top articles from my weekly reading. Their topics may vary, but their quality and provocation quotient won’t. Enjoy.
How Othering and Social Bias Impact Minorities’ Work Advancement
As Thorpe-Moscon says, “the experience of “otherness” is broader than any one demographic category.” But no, it’s not all about an employee “feeling different” or “feeling valued.” Some issues aren’t about mere perception; they’re about fact.
The facts of difference and the realities of inclusion and value do not depend on how sensitive an individual might be. They are instead directly related to the organizational structure and practiced values of the institution and the policies that flow from each: as an structural issue, they merit structural responses.
Building diversity initiatives around the perception of change rather than actual change is not wise.
Why You Might Want to Check Your Phone’s Location and Wifi Settings (And Who’s Getting Paid Because You Don’t)
This WSJ article highlights companies doing similar work but through mobile technology. Turnstyle Solutions, Euclid Analytics, Verizon, and Apple all now pull users’ location data from devices’ geo-location feature or from wireless broadcasting. They then aggregate that metadata to build up a view of where people go, how often they gather, and what activities or lifestyles they are involved with.
Salient:
Aj Tin, a university student and customer at Rsquared Café, was surprised to learn that by logging into the Wi-Fi at the coffee shop, he was enabling Turnstyle to track his movements and offer other local businesses an aggregated profile of his activities. The disclosure form tells consumers they will be tracked, but not how aggregated personal information will be distributed. “Privacy is cheap,” Tin said.
Individualized, cookie-based advertising makes businesses the most happy and they will and do pay pretty money for the option. “Brute-force” demographics-based advertising still works—just not as consistently.
For the most part, we consumers also prefer the outcomes of individualized advertising. We complain about commercials on regular broadcasting because they’re usually irrelevant to us: they’re based on who advertisers think we are based on what we happen to be watching in a given time slot.. We don’t mind ads as much when they’re based on what we’ve bought in the past, activities we do, or who we’d like to believe we are.
And individualized marketing works: our demographic categories don’t require us to watch a show or go to a certain location, and not everyone in a category has the same interests, concerns, or “pain points.” But we watch and go and do because we choose to; our choices arise out of who we are and the experiences we’ve had. Advertisers want to move away from marketing based on passive category to marketing based on active choice. We will let them do it, and they don’t care how long it takes for us to adjust to the idea without fear.
Socially, we’re still figuring what “privacy” means, and what it’s reasonable to expect from our governments, companies, religions, and clubs.
On Practicing Inclusion—Beyond Words and Accepting Change
An editorial about how ableism impacts disabled people who shouldn’t have to beg for accommodations and enabled people who assume spaces should be centered around them. Plenty to think about.
Have you caught yourself grumbling about having to change how you do things to make others more comfortable? Have you been on the other side of that grumbling? Tell me a story about it in the comments.
Paths to Success: Whose Advice Should You Take?
“You discover who you are by acting naturally.” —Alan Watts
You’ll have noticed a lot of voices in the personal development coach choir, especially those aimed at young professionals,d from 99U and Switch and Shift. This week Paul C. Brunson offered a list of habits he’d picked up from two billionaires. The list includes some great advice about nurturing your relationships and habits of association.
We wake each day on a quest for personal validation that we apparently believe is found in someone’s definition of success. We then presume that rote replication of the habits of the supposedly successful will directly correlate to similar degrees of success in our own lives.
While appealing, this logic fails—for two primary reasons:
1) You’re not them.
2) They’re not you.
Maurer writes: “When we cultivate our own unique significance through a perpetual cycle of self-examination, education and practice, success becomes a natural byproduct.”
I agree. Onward and upward, but not as an imitation of another. Onward and upward as yourself.
I came across these paragraphs today, from one of the last columns The Atlantic‘s Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote on New Years Eve 2013.
I don’t believe the arc of the universe bends towards justice. I don’t even believe in an arc. I believe in chaos. I believe powerful people who think they can make Utopia out of chaos should be watched closely. I don’t know that it all ends badly. But I think it probably does.
I’m also not a cynic. I think that those of us who reject divinity, who understand that there is no order, there is no arc, that we are night travelers on a great tundra, that stars can’t guide us, will understand that the only work that will matter, will be the work done by us. Or perhaps not. Maybe the very myths I decry are necessary for that work. I don’t know. —Ta-Nehisi Coates
As part of my prep for a panel this February about the future of Seventh-day Adventism, I’ve been reflecting on the oft-quoted Martin Luther King, Jr. statement that the “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” It’s from a 1965 speech he gave in Montgomery, Alabama, just one month after the assassination of Malcolm X (El Hajj Malik El Shabazz). King affirmed the crowd on the desegregation and Civil Rights Act victories, but also looked forward to other issues: voting rights, anti-poverty work, employment access, and continued non-violence.
In the past I’ve argued for all three of MLK’s premises: (a) that there is an arc to the outworking of human activity; (b) that this arc is long, spans generations, and favors the patient; and (c) that this arc bends toward justice, toward improvement, toward wholeness. The beauty to this perspective is an assurance that, contrary to appearances, things will work out in the end: there is an ideal future ahead—a heaven—if we will only persist and insist through the inertia of the present.
Since 1965, though, the “bends towards justice” phrase has dropped into cliche. To those like Coates who’ve graduated from King’s Christian idealism, premise (b) appears obvious: humans have been figuring out what a healthy society takes for a mighty long time, and progress on most fronts takes lifetimes even as it includes setbacks. But premises (a) and (c) don’t fare so well when analyzed afresh. There’s no objective proof for a pre-determined blueprint, and while humans seem to be becoming less violent overall, justice and wholeness haven’t proven to be inevitable alternatives to the abuse and division that seem so common. The belief that they are inevitable and/or can be coaxed out of the ether with our cultivated determination is somewhat like functional self-deception, a mantra that keeps activists working for the changes we advertise and argue for.
There’s a line from the Bhagavad-Gita that I’ve been resisting for about a year now and that came home to me when I read Steven Pressfield’s book, The War of Art a few months ago:
A professional schools herself to stand apart from her performance, even as she gives herself to it heart and soul. The Bhagavad-Gita tells us we have a right only to our labor, not to the fruits of our labor. All the warrior can give is his life; all the athlete can do is leave everything on the field. (emphasis added)
This insight isn’t about salary or compensation: it’s not about labor rights or fair pay or anything so straightforward. It’s much scarier than that. It’s a head-on challenge to the prophet’s closeted wish that he’ll see the outcomes for which he strives in his lifetime, that he’ll be vindicated, that the scoffers will finally get it, and that a well-earned flush of smugness can finally flow through him.
But it’s rare that we get that pay-off. We work and live in hope that our work will be proven valuable, that the challenges are worth our effort. Because we hope, we can be disappointed; we work in love with and for communities we love, and so we can be heartbroken. Even if there is no arc, no bend toward justice, and no guarantee of success, we work anyway. Even if there is no arc, we live as though there were.
The dreamers, the strivers, the change-seekers—we’re the stout-hearted children of Atlas. Our load isn’t the celestial sphere, though: it’s a cluster of night visions and daydreams, dreams of an inhabitable future.
We know that that future is not inevitable.
And we work anyway.
The dreamers are the saviors of the world… Humanity cannot forget its dreamers; it cannot let their ideals fade and die; it lives in them; it knows them in the realities which it shall one day see and know.
Composer, sculptor, painter, poet, prophet, sage, these are the makers of the after-world, the architects of heaven. —James Allen, As a Man Thinketh
The Farnese Atlas upholds the celestial sphere. Image credit: Gabriel Seah (c) 2006
Somehow, what was supposed to be an “electronic cottage” has become an “electronic sweatshop.” It’s not just surveillance—it’s that many employees who telecommute only occasionally end up doing far more work than before their “emancipation.”
