Finished Dibs & Glad I Did
This is about a boy who cannot play.
Wrote previous tumblr on early experience with Dibs - From the 1963 book Dibs in Search of Self by child psychiatrist Virginia Axline.
The 6 year old “Dibs” turnaround is astonishing. In 200 pages, he begins as seemingly terrorized, withdrawn kid who doesn’t interact or speak with others. He crawls around the periphery of this classmates at school, spending a lot of time under tables.
At home he is largely kept locked up in his room or even in closets his too-busy emotionally detached high achieving parents. to a creative, expressive, increasingly emotionally intact young man is astounding.
And all of this happens through guided play, led by Axline, and recorded throughout, so that the words you read in the are the exact ones spoken by both during their dozens of play therapy sessions.
I think everyone will relate a greater or lesser extent to Dibs. We’ve all had the feelings that torment him, though hopefully most of us in smaller, more manageable doses.
And the adult Dibs, as you’ll see, no doubt a very well formed, brilliant 168 IQ individual, is out there in the world somewhere doing his thing. I was curious and searched for “Who is Dibs” and got no where. Perhaps that’s best.
In the Future, Maker Bots Make Things and Shape Identities
You’ve heard of these things right? They’re like dot matrix printers that print objects in 3D. Whatever you can design you can print, allowing for certain size limitations of course.
But what will it mean for retailers … yikes !!! And what will it mean for future generations when such a god-like capability is a commodity? Let’s start you out with this:
It strikes me that for better or worse, a world of 3D printing may have some remarkable implications for “identity” in a society in which people define themselves by the stuff they own and display. In our society you don’t just wear skinny jeans, a v-neck, and an iPod playing Foster the People. You wear those things so that people know that you are the type of person who would wear those things. Our rooms, especially the rooms of youth, are filled with identity markers. So what happens when most of those things are made by you?
Hmmm, I don’t know, you save a lot of money, don’t drive to the malls or get as many shipments from UPS or Fedex?
Of course, there’s a potential narcissistic dark side, beyond the expense of 3D toner refills. But there’s also a potential upside too:
[With a] slight switch and orient[ing] yourself to the world, rather than to the self, a virtuous cycle emerges. The world is suddenly not full of choices with which you identify, but possibilities for play … serious play oriented toward serving the world.
Interesting stuff. Most of these identity issues are so ephemeral and abstract. But here, identity is a custom 3D object you can hold in your hand or where around your neck.
For a little more, here’s the whole article, from Professor Wesch on the Digital Ethonography blog.
The always-connected, always-in-meetings culture of 201X is making it hard to think, let alone concentrate and create. Introvert evangelist Susan Cain is questioning some of our assumptions about the benefits and drawbacks of more inward vs. more externally focused folks.
See this from a recent NYT article:
One explanation for these findings is that introverts are comfortable working alone — and solitude is a catalyst to innovation. As the influential psychologist Hans Eysenck observed, introversion fosters creativity by “concentrating the mind on the tasks in hand, and preventing the dissipation of energy on social and sexual matters unrelated to work.” In other words, a person sitting quietly under a tree in the backyard, while everyone else is clinking glasses on the patio, is more likely to have an apple land on his head. (Newton was one of the world’s great introverts: William Wordsworth described him as “A mind for ever/ Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone.”)
Image credit: Akshay Moon on Flickr.com
Saw this Bruce Springsteen tribute last week in Boston’s famous Paradise Rock Club, through whose doors passed many if not most the world’s greatest bands including U2, REM, Dire Straights and the Clash when they were starting out.
I’ve been a big Bruce fan since college days, though have never seen him in concert, where he’s famous for pouring his heart and soul out for 3 hours or more every time.
The thing is, the not-Bruce, Matt Ryan and his E Street replica band, hailing not from New Jersey but Vegas, were so damned good and so spot on, looking, sounding and acting as close to the real thing as possible, that I was completely lost in the show. Sang along and shouted, lost my voice, and walked home in a joyous sweaty daze.
And I wasn’t the only one. Paradise was totally packed, and the crowd was transfixed from note one of song one, Candy’s Room. From a set list that included 26 songs, others that had the place totally going crazy were:
- Prove it all night
- Darkness on the edge of town
- Atlantic city
- Tunnel of love
- Jungleland
- Rosalita
- Spirits in the night
- Tenth avenue freeze out
But what was confusing me during the show, and ever since, was the question of who we were cheering for. Maybe it was Matt Ryan and crew, who clearly expended a huge amount of energy getting the songs down just right and then delivering them with huge force and precision.
It also seemed, pretty often, like we were cheering directly for real Bruce Springsteen, and that was made even more apparent when Matt said it was a great privilege for him and the band to be able to play Bruce’s wonderful, powerful songs.
So what’s going on when you are swept away by a cover band? Who’s really in the room? And how much of the music is being supplied directly by your brain versus what’s generated by the actors/performers?
In large part, the audience didn’t need the band that night. We were already gone, gone, gone. But we wouldn’t have been there, and couldn’t have reached the heights we did without a continuing kickstart from Bruce in the USA.
I know I’m not breaking any new philosophical or metaphysical ground here. It’s just that this was a very close and intimate brush with a living legend, and he wasn’t even in the room or on a screen.
So who is the real Bruce? Is he the still muscular 62 year old man, born in New Jersey and still walking and talking and performing out on the world’s stages? Or is he the guy in our heads? Like John Lennon, Jimi Hendrix, and everyone else whose music has planted itself so deep in us that it now lives free and clear of the artist.
All that to say, I’ve been playing my albums and Youtubing Bruce non-stop since the show, would still love to see real Bruce live (though will hardly see him in the giant halls he’s been playing for a long time). And after a break, would gladly lay money down again to see Matt & co. conjure him up so brilliantly.
— anon in boston, feb 2012
Great TED video: “The Quest to Understand Consciousness”
“Who’s There?” Good Question!
A long time ago Walt Whitman said he was a multitude. Poet Edward Dyer, a long long time ago said “my mind to me a kingdom is.” Now see this from the great Why We Reason blog: Who’s There?: Is the Self a Convenient Fiction?
I love the waterfall metaphor, even if it doesn’t get you all the way home:
According to the British philosopher Julian Baggini in a recent TED lecture the illusion of the self might not be an illusion. The question Baggini asks is if a person should think of himself as a thing that has a bunch of different experiences or as a collection of experiences. This is an important distinction. Baggini explains that, “the fact that we are a very complex collection of things does not mean we are not real.” He invites the audience to consider the metaphor of a waterfall. In many ways a waterfall is like the illusion of the self: is it not permanent, it is always changing and it is different at every single instance. But this doesn’t mean that a waterfall is an illusion or that it is not real. What it means is that we have to understand it as a history, as having certain things that are the same and as a process.
Strange, but somehow just right.
