The power of narrative made personal. If we aren't plucked chickens we are storytellers. The venue and media have changed, from oral tradition around a fire to photons sliding down fibers and fingers dancing on keyboards.
Narrative is a powerful and primitive force for humans, how we've always sought to impose structure and sense on events, from history to religion, to the mundane everyday and the trip abroad. Our brains crave narrative and invent it in a vacuum or as the interstitial bond between disconnected random events.
We can now own our public narrative and mythologize a heroic and extraordinary existence divorced from banal reality of paying bills and waiting in queues and going to the washroom and changing lightbulbs. Only the highlight reel makes it to prime time.
Social media are campaigns to seize control of narrative, to bring structure and synthetize relationships, to make sense of the world.
Predates print and electronic media, predates recorded history, a paradigm shift through Mcluhan's lens (always preferred his precursor, Innis).
Fascinating on a meta level, this comment being an example of its own thesis.
<rant>
Swiping felt like the death of dating apps. Dating has always been a numbers game (the more potential partners one interacts with and dates the higher the chances of forming successful relationships). Modern dating apps convert human relationships into catalog browsing, a simplified calculus of human affairs wired to a cash register.
All my LTR in IRL have started offline and with people I knew in some other IRL context. Online dating apps never led anywhere but the bedroom briefly then straight back on the app. That's just me, no knock on people who have formed successful relationships that started online. Or people who just want naked bedroom gymnastics. Or serial daters, or anyone for whom dating apps dynamics might actually work.
Would it be too cynical to posit dating app algorithms optimize around short term relationships to prevent customer churn? Users must be successful enough to continue subscribing to the platform but not so successful they cancel. Do we even get into OnlyFans 'creators' using dating apps as marketing channels (there are guides online instructing people how to do this, looking at you r/)? Is it too cynical to suggest that social media in general hijacked nascent online communities in the 90s in order to make the world safer for advertising? Anything grassroots and authentic was mowed down and paved over. It wasn't an online paradise, but it is now an virtual parking lot.
The major problem IMO is that the goals of the company (revenue) and the goals of the users (relationships) are misaligned. The companies are most successful when users are only marginally successful or given a proxy illusion of success, because that keeps the subscription revenue flowing. If two users meet and continue offline, bam, two users cancel (excluding poly folk). Companies exploit users' goals to bait them into subscriptions, trick them into surrendering private data, etc.
I feel this way about a lot of modern technology platforms. The goals of social media companies (adtech revenue) are misaligned with the users (community), so that these adtech nee social media companies are motivated to drive engagement even when there is a cost to online communities and society as a whole. Feeds of family and friends devolve into clickbait doomscrolls. Algorithms optimize on inciting rage, because rage drives engagement. It is a powerful emotion. Programmed by evolution us meatbags have our attention optimized towards potential threats. That rage spills offline into deeply divisive politics.
I've opted out of adtech. DuckDuckGo instead of Google. Last month I finally deleted my Facebook account after years of neglect. I'd only kept it to log on to third party sites but never actually used it for that even. I've started a broad retreat from much of the Internet and I don't think it is simple fatigue -- I've been online for over three decades. Monetization drives enshittification and it is has spread like a virus until most of the online landscape is infected. I feel that most sites and apps are only after my attention, my personal data, my money. 90% of the time if I want to look something up I go directly to Wikipedia instead of a search engine. I'm probably just going to pick Wikipedia anyway after I wade through all the ads and marginal sites in the search results. After all the paywalls. I use ChatGPT instead of searching for stuff like simple programming syntax -- sorry Stackoverflow, you were probably the least worst for years, but I'm relieved that AI is doing the work of grinding through dozens of pages to find a helpful answer.
I've subscribed to Coursera to fill the void so that if I am idle and pick up a device, instead of doomscrolling I'll learn something about machine learning. I've mercilessly cancelled most other online subscriptions, beating the lobster trap (easy in, hard out) and surprise renewals and the unsubscribe gauntlet (are you sure you want to cancel -- what about 90% off for the next 6 months?. I funnel that money into a monthly voluntary donation to Wikipedia.
I guess it comes down to ad tech burnout. Tired of monetization. Tired of algorithms optimizing on outcomes beneficial to corporations and even detrimental to me. I'm not seeking experiences online anymore, too many billboards in the way.
Writing this I realize my online experiences had devolved into a litany of crappy marketing tactics. It's almost funny that the first thing a lot of companies seem to think about with generative AI is automating customer service with chatbots, saving money by having less authentic engagement with customers. Predictable and perfect. It's also hilarious that all the content scrapers are screaming about genAI scraping their scraped content. It's the online content ouboros eating it's own AI generated tail.
This is what happens when we seek to monetize all human experience. We need new algorithms, new metrics, new gods, another drink ...
</rant>
#adtech #corporatesurveillance #monetization #trollingisthenewmarketing #notabot
Anyone actually recommend the book from which the article is taken? I also tried to read the wa v. ga blog post on the site to get a further sense of the author's approach, but the server returns an out of memory error (from a blog post?!).
I've been in Tokyo now 18 months, took private lessons twice costing about $2,000, and feel I learned 10 words. That's $200/word. I joke with people I stopped taking lessons because learning Kanji would bankrupt me. Japanese just doesn't stick in my older and very Western brain. It doesn't help that my office does business in English and one can get by in Tokyo with minimal Japanese and a lot of pointing and gesturing. The glacial progress becomes discouraging.
I tried Rosetta Stone. It takes the same phrasebook approach as the first textbook I was given, Nihongo Fun & Easy, which was neither. The textbook at least had short sidebar discussions of grammar and somewhat useful phrases. I had no idea where I'd get to use the phrase "The children are swimming," that Rosetta offers.
The 8020 article was the first discussion of particles that actually made sense. When I'd asked teachers about particles before the answer was usually something like "Don't worry about that yet, just memorize the phrases." If the remainder of the book is in the same vein I'd pay twice the asking price. I flipped through parts of Nihongo Fun & Easy after reading this article and it suddenly made much more sense. I wasn't staring at a list of phrases I was supposed to memorize and slowly reverse engineer the language, but could deconstruct the basic sentences.
It's much easier for me to learn construction, and use the break down of other sentences to construct my own, even if the rules fail sometimes and lead me to construct sentences no native speaker would utter. That's the other 80% of language idiosyncrasies that takes time.
I don't expect to be fluent in Japanese any time soon, however moving past "sumimasen kore onegeihshimasu" while pointing at a menu item would be awesome.
I really recommend the Japanese For Busy People books, I learned tons from them quickly. They start off very basic (obviously), but they explain the grammar in a really good way, and progress into more advanced topics as you go along. Make sure to get the kana versions, not romaji!
For learning Kanji, the most efficient option I've found is Remembering the Kanji by James Heisig. It's a bit of a long-term investment, in that it takes a while for them to really pay off (you don't learn the readings/sounds until book two, the first one is completely focused on the meaning and writing of the characters), but in the long run I think it's a much better option than for example the books trying to teach you the characters by showing you their similarity to the things the represent.
I strongly recommend a method of language learning called TPR (Total Physical Response).[1][2][3] It is by far the fastest and easiest way I know of learning vocabulary and grammar.
In a nutshell, with TPR the teacher gives the student a command in the target language, demonstrates the action the command is asking for, repeats the command and finally the student copies the action.
For example, if English was the target language, the teacher could say "sit down", then sit down themselves, then once again say "sit down" and the student would copy the action by sitting down.
This can then be repeated for "stand up", for "pick up the fork", or any arbitrarily complex and sophisticated command.
As you've no doubt noticed, the commands are given in grammatically correct sentences, in context. Grammar is not explicitly taught, however. It is implicitly taught and implicitly learned.
What makes this method work really well is that when you learn words and grammar, you're not doing it with just your mind and maybe some visual cues, you're using your body and doing so in a specific physical context (the place where you're learning), associating what you're learning with parts of that place. It's somewhat analogous to using a memory palace to learn, only without any extra effort of constructing the palace or imaging placing things you want to learn there. With TPR you actually physically interact with the things you learn in that space.
Another great thing is that a TPR teacher need not have any special training in education or really even in the method. TPR takes maybe a minute or two to explain to anyone, so you can recruit helpers from any friends or acquaintances you have who know the target language and are willing to help, though if you want consistent lessons and dedication you'll probably want a professional tutor or teacher anyway.
TPR focuses on learning to understand, in emulation of the first step of a child's language learning process. Children first learn to understand, then to speak, then to read, and finally to write. TPR helps with the first part.
When I taught my tutor this method, he told me that I was by far the fastest of his students to pick up vocabulary, and he wound up switching completely to teaching with this method. It was really effective for me, and I highly recommend it.
TPR has its limits, and it can't be used for all aspects of language learning, but it's fantastic for getting your language learning bootstrapped really quickly.
I'm not quite sure what you're saying. Do you mean you feel like you're only one bad break away, emotionally, but rationally you know you're not? Or do you mean you still are actually one bad break away, for some reason?
I grew up in a stable working class family where I was encouraged to study, and feel the same way. Why do all articles like this assume it's related to an upbringing in poverty?
Feelings dictate how one acts. Even if you can fail, if you feel you can't, that is going to affect quite a bit how you approach things, or if you approach them at all.
1) Culture must evolve with other elements of the company and at certain stages of growth and transition a company may need to intentionally hire to provoke and shape cultural change. Your change agents will be getting flak from many directions and your role may be to cover them and defend their advances.
2) This sounds like entrenching the status quo, risking stagnation. Every company I've ever worked at had some enshrined and virtually unassailable principles and practices. Celebrate the heretics and iconoclasts. It takes a strong internal center to speak out against groupthink and cultural norms. Make thoughtful challenge to the principles a principle (i.e. it cannot be a notwithstanding clause that supports blanket circumvention of other principles). Institutionalize periodic reviews.
3) The company and culture may change out from under some employees. An amicable and blameless split is best, including not blaming yourself. And every new hire constitutes some risk. So much hiring practice aims to minimize that risk without measuring or understanding the cost. It's easy to see and feel the effects of a bad hire, almost impossible to perceive the lost opportunity of a false negative.
Sometimes failure was not avoidable and there are no lessons to be learned to avoid similar situations in the future. Move on quickly, don't dwell.
4) Sounds like the Wobegon Corporation. Supporting cultural evolution is tough, often evolutionary and glacial rather than revolutionary and seismic. Your star performers in a micro-organization may be ineffective at the next level of scale because success then requires a different set of skills. Objective evaluation, effective performance and career management are tough problems made more so in a transitional company.
The culture that supported the company's previous stage needs to adapt for the next. Cultural change requires both people changing and changes in people. Elements of a company's culture will not scale. In organizations of which I've been part recently I've been promoting organizational Agility (capitalization intentional) in which Agile practices are applied to processes and structures, which adapt in response to internal and external forces. Cultural lock in retards progress.
WRT OP, these changes are necessary to support the company's current and continued growth, and I would avoid ascribing sinister intent. The company is changing in ways that don't match your personal work style, in which case it may be time to ask if you can adapt to this new reality (which may mean changing role or function within the company, rather than simply letting momentum carry you forward in your existing position) or look for a different company better aligned with your sweet spot (and do so in a way that is a positive experience on all sides, and don't wait to the point where you are acting out of frustration).
Change means new opportunities, possibilities to be teased out of your current situation. If a role exists or can be created that better suits your strengths, have a conversation with your manager and propose some changes, even as an experiment, "What if we tried ....", with an agreement to meet on a set time frame and evaluate results and pivot or course correct.
Narrative is a powerful and primitive force for humans, how we've always sought to impose structure and sense on events, from history to religion, to the mundane everyday and the trip abroad. Our brains crave narrative and invent it in a vacuum or as the interstitial bond between disconnected random events.
We can now own our public narrative and mythologize a heroic and extraordinary existence divorced from banal reality of paying bills and waiting in queues and going to the washroom and changing lightbulbs. Only the highlight reel makes it to prime time.
Social media are campaigns to seize control of narrative, to bring structure and synthetize relationships, to make sense of the world.
Predates print and electronic media, predates recorded history, a paradigm shift through Mcluhan's lens (always preferred his precursor, Innis).
Fascinating on a meta level, this comment being an example of its own thesis.