THE ACT OF LISTENING / Brand Identity, Film, Digital Design
We all were back to school, to classes at technology tech. Just as we graduated, along came social media. We were faced by facebook, twiter by twiter, jammed by instagram. We had to go back to school again.
There was a time when a person, had a fairly idea of where would belong in the great sweep of the cosmos. You could go to school, and your work book congregated the geography of your material existence: Manuel Gonzalez, Madrid, Spain, Europe, Western hemisphere, world, universe. Simple, straight forward.
Then along came the internet, the great dislocator. Suddenly we where connected to and directed by unknown forces never before seen in nature. Suddenly overnight there were algorithms, urls, smart phones, laptops, life streaming and podcasts.
Social media was hailed as the greatest advance in modern liberal democracy. It democraticly transformed everybody with access to a computer or a mobile phone to an instant expert on everything.
We could be our own private radio station, newspaper or magazine, we could write and publish, whatever we wanted. It could be stuff that was true, or stuff that was simply made up, which turned social media on a swamp of trolls, racism, begatory, xenophobia, fake news, and the old right.
That created the phenomena of the filtered bubble that protects us from views that differ politically or culturally from our own. This social bubbles are actually shaping new realities, we only see and heard what we like.
The global village has been replaced by digital islands of isolation that are drifting further apart each day. This limits our chances for any kind of sensible conversation with anyone with ideas, opinions, perceptions different from our own.
It limits our understanding of difference. If we see only what we want to see, or read only those opinions we agree with, we become smaller, as citizens and as human beings.
Hearing a story from someone you might think is very different than you on the radio, in the car, or with your headphones, and recognize that there is a little bit of yourself in that person has tremendous potential to build bridges of understanding between people and hopefully some day to move the needle on, helping us to recognize the power, and grace and beauty on the stories we will find all around us when we take the time to listen.Stop&Listen is all about that, all about listening and the ideas that we can learn when we listen to people and to places that we almost never heard.
Listening is an act of generosity and also a path to discovery.