circle-of-confusion.net

A Larger context: toward critical thought

This blog used to be something else. I started it when, teaching a course called “Digital Imaging” at Skagit Valley College, I needed a better way to deal with images and discussion than the “Blackboard” software they were using at the time provided. I asked the school to set me up with something, and they referred me to a certain individual who I will not name. He never responded, so I took it into my own hands; I set up a flickr group with the unassuming (perhaps boring) title Photography/Imaging Groups, Skagit for the images, and this blog for the discussion. We put the course on ice. I will explain that below, because that has a lot to do with what the site is going to be. The flickr site is still going, and there are new people who’ve joined since the course went down even though the site has had no support at all; Many thanks to you! It looks great.

I think that my acting independently like this was not exactly ok according to the regulations because the colleges MUST CONTROL (to their grief and especially to that of the students, actually), but I don’t think they really had much in the way of regulations then. They do now. Anyway, I’m pretty much always in trouble, so it seems normal. Besides, I’m going to retire sometime during this coming year, and I’m too crusty at this point to take advice from folks with agendas imported from the industrial sector.

For a couple of years, this particular site “Circle-of-Confusion” has been mouldering in the grave, so to speak. I’ve done a very small amount of work on it now and then, but essentially, it’s been a mixture of leftover class materials and various other things, and not well organized. Having it available, and since I’ll no longer be using it for a class, I might as well make it my own, and I invite you to participate. There is a wealth of great material there; I just need to get rid of a lot of confusion.

The course was “Art 184″. Students signed on because they believed that they could learn how to use their digital cameras that they got for Christmas, or for other often inappropriate reasons. One had even taken it “to relax” thinking that art courses were, of course, for that. Were they ever surprised! I have noticed over the years that my students were not at all prepared for what I had for so long more or less taken for granted: I realized that My Students Can’t See. This was driven home with a lot of force when I asked my students “well, then, just what IS reality, anyway?” The answer I got was “We get to make it up for ourselves!” Everybody liked that a lot. So, a couple of weeks after a young man in the class became a first time father, I asked “Are you going to allow dirty diapers to be real?” The conversation then became a rather mindless discussion about diapers, veering sharply away from anything to do with the question about reality. Pulling it in line was a lot like levering a derailed locomotive back onto its track.

I saw this as an opportunity to explore the way our vision works. That, of course, means that we need to look at the assumptions that we carry unconsciously, which make it entirely impossible for us to see anything at all as it really is. In doing this, it immediately becomes necessary to look closely at the way the human mind operates; indeed, what IS it to be human anyway? So we looked at material from philosophy, anthropology, sociology, and history. We looked at cultural conditioning which, in our particular culture, is permeated with advertising and entertainment. In other words, we tried to get out of our unconscious context and into a larger and hopefully much more conscious one. We looked at Plato, at the strange and wonderful short novella Flatland by the Victorian mathematician Edwin A. Abbott. That invited a discussion of Abbott’s portrayal of women, who, in a world of two dimensional shapes were represented as simple straight lines - turns out he was chiding Victorian society about its values. We looked at material on the phenomenon of feral children and what they might show us about the basic nature of humanity. Many students simply couldn’t comprehend this, and many chose not to believe (in this way, they reflect the views of a large cross section of society). Oddly, one of those who couldn’t quite accept this idea had actually had experience with such a child, an orphan from Romania who had grown up penned with dogs. This experience was deeply troubling for him, but he had difficulty in translating into the larger context. This kind of thing is extremely hard for us humans; we are inclined to accept what we believe to be real as what actually is real. Of course, discussions of politics, religion, and what we believe (and how that belief originates) also ensued.

The aim of all this is to provide a context in which real education can happen; to that end, everything, no matter how troubling, has got to be open to investigation, and that investigation must be relentless. I fear that this sort of thing is far too disturbing to the Community College as we know it, and I daresay that it may be too disturbing to four year institutions and maybe even many, if not most graduate schools. Anyway, to my way of thinking, anything less is NOT education at all. Real education, in my view, actually can CHANGE a person, not just make them know more facts and proceedural routines.

This is about critical thought. By this, I do NOT mean “Critical Thinking” as is defined in the materials that faculty members at Skagit Valley College are supposed to adopt in our curricula. I need to quote the definition exactly, and I will edit this as soon as I can to do so. For now, allow me to paraphrase: Critical thinking is expressly defined as the ability to discern authenticity of information WITHIN A DISCIPLINE! Wow! Where did they get that? It is a very bad joke.

Critical thinking requires that one stand outside not only of the discipline, but even outside of the society of which it is a component part. It is necessary to stand outside of oneself. The task of critical thought constantly enlarges, because every layer of assumptions, when stripped away, reveals for someone who has the vision and courage to see it, a new layer of assumptions beyond it. In this sense, education is an endless process.

My goal has been to give students an opportunity to develop a taste for the search and hopefully, to get really hungry. I never conceal from the students that I don’t really teach. I just ask questions. Teaching is impossible because I don’t know anything and there is nothing really to know; this contradicts the whole idea that education is about a “subject”. In certain areas, indeed it is, but I’m not teaching rocket science. My job as a student (which is the role I share with my students) is to constantly uncover new layers of ignorance in myself, which of course, gives me lots of skill in asking unbearably irritating questions but never to provide answers. I don’t teach, but the students can learn, if they have the courage to do so. It is up to them.

So, I’m going to drop the charade of teaching altogether and invite like minded people to join with me in this forum. I’ll still be at the college for an as yet indeterminate (short) period; it will be over by one year from today, though, if not sooner. I’m going to put a darkroom in my trailer and hit the road. They make satellite modems, don’t they? I have an appointment with some trout.

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You can change the grid; in fact you may need to do so.

Search the blog for “grid”; here’s what I got — http://circle-of-confusion.net/?s=grid&submit=GO.

Down in the “body of the results” you will find a movie. It is a short little thing. It shows how to change the proportions of the grid.

Of course, you can make a new grid if you wish, having say, maybe 6×9 boxes, or whatever. It is more trouble.

Up at the top of the search results you will find discussion of using layers to populate the grid boxes. You have a box, which you can tell what the rectangle’s dimensions are by using the Magic Wand tool. Select a square. In your “info” box (under the pull down menu at the top, come down to “info” and click) you can determine the proportions, and the precise size of the selected area. Here’s the example:

Since we are working with a screen image, we know (don’t we?) that the resolution is 72 dpi.
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(dpi=dots per inch. that means, that each square inch contains 72 pixels wide by 72 pixels high.
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So, let’s say we want to insert a square into the grid. I just went to flickr, and found Karina’s mirror. In order to select a portion of this image for a square in the grid (of course, you are using one of your own images for this) I would need to copy the image from the screen. I could either do this by down loading the image, or simple copy it to my clipboard.

Here’s how I do that:

I hold down the command (apple/cloverleaf) key on the mac, or ctrl key on the pc, at the same time as I click on the image. I select “copy…” as indicated, and the image is copied into my clipboard.

Once the image is copied, I can go to the “file” menu at the top or the page, pull down to “new”, and the new image will be shown only with a blank frame. I can paste the image in, using the paste command under the “edit” menu (shortcut is to hold down the command key on the mac or ctrl on PC) and press the “v” key. This pastes the clipboard into the frame).

Here’s what we have, and I’ve drawn arrows to show how we set the shape selection tool to copy a grid formatted shape, which, as we know, has to be 1:1 in aspect ratio (width to height) in order to fit into the grid.

legend:

Orange arrow, points to the geometric shape selection tool. You have either a rectangle, a circle, or a line as options here. This shows the rectangle. If you hold this down, it will allow you to select other shapes (not useful for the grid, though).

Red arrow. We don’t want the selections edges to be feathered, because that would make the edges blurry. For this purpose, they need to be sharp.

Brown arrows. Select “fixed aspect ratio” and here, because the grid square is 1:1, we select 1:1.

The red square in the middle includes a selected area that we will place into the grid.

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Copy the selected area, create a new document (file–>new or cmd-n), and paste the selection into the new frame.

Now we have this:

Using the “image size” command under “Image” in the pulldown menu, we can see that the image is 1:1 in aspect ratio, and 72 dpi (screen resolution). We need it to be .958 inch, also at 72 dpi. If we were only to change the 0.792 to 0.958, with the “constrain proportions” checked but the “resample image” box unchecked, it would change it to the larger size, but would reduce the resolution. We don’t want that. So, in order to get what we need, we must Check the “resample” box. This will result in the width and height remaining locked together (since the “constrain proportions” box is still checked) but will disconnect them from the “resolution”. We can then have .958 at 72 dpi (same as “pixels / inch).

Here’s the picture:

Notice that the width and height in pixels (top numbers) indicate that the image has gone from 57×57 pixels to 69×69 pixels. In doing so, we must accept a loss in quality. It helps to use the “sharpen” filter under “filters–>sharpen–>sharpen”. Like this:

Now, “select all” (cmd or ctrl+A), and paste into the grid square as a layer.

You can move the top layer (see the layers window on the right?) by using the “move” tool (upper right tool on the toolbar over on the left) to place the new image where you want it.

Do the same with other images. What you will have then is a stack of layers. You can move them around with the “move” tool to go where you want them, and you can rearrange them into any number of possible combinations.

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There are no right or wrong answers, and you are not expected to agree with me (even if you think you know what my point of view might be — which is very unlikely). Remember; you are not to accept anything I say unless you actually experience it on your own. It is entirely possible that your experience may not agree with mine.

When we encounter something new, we are faced with having to deal with it in some way. When you get an assignment to read a story like Ape Cave, and because it is an assignment it has a certain special urgency about it, you have to figure out what to do. Perhaps you remember. Was your first thought something like “what am I going to do with this?” — and a subtext: “how am I going to eliminate this problem that stands in front of me?” You have a problem. You need to solve it. It won’t go away until you do solve it.

Once you have responded to the problem, and have written your response, you have eliminated the need to think about it any more. In other words, so often in the life of a student, or a person in other walks of life, the issue really boils down to getting rid of something. Something you have to do. Something that intrudes on the usual train of distractions (which we generally glorify by calling them “thinking”).

We look at what the (in this case) story is. First, we need to place ourselves in relation to it. For most people (if not all of us), we have to figure out what the parts of the story are and where we stand in relation to them. In this story, there were two groups of people. The narrator and the friend is one group; the people coming through the cave is another. The cave itself is the setting. We can pretty much all relate to the setting. Try to visualize, as you actually might experience it yourself, the dark, the cold, the boulder strewn cave floor, the dampness, the silence. We have all been in the dark, in the darkroom, or even just at night. That is not particularly a problem.

The people are more of a challenge. Do you identify with one of the groups, or with the other? Or neither? Or both? In identifying with one or another, most people will take on what s/he imagines must be the appropriate point of view and more or less adopt it. I suspect that most of you would identify with the narrator/observer; that is how the story is set up, and there is a tendency for the other group to have a sort of objectified aura; as if they were, in some sense, inferior. Or, you could possibly try to see it from the point of view of the noisy group. You might, especially if you are a parent, find a strong identification with them. You might identify with them and feel some anger at being spied upon.

Our minds do not seem to work under our conscious control. They can’t. There is far too much for them to do, and the boss is out to lunch. What do I mean by the last part of that statement? Minor White often said that our eyes prevent us from falling into manholes — some of the time. (He also said that the fact that photographers rarely actually fall into manholes suggests that they have guardian angels).

Have you ever been in an art museum, looking at a painting? Here’s an example:

It is puzzling. There it is, and you look at the id tag, and it says:

So, what goes on in your mind? Uh….uh….uh….

So you stand there looking at it. After a while, and you don’t even know how long, you find yourself in front of the next painting. Where have you been? Planning the menu for dinner on Friday night when friends are coming over? Worrying about the test in Psychology? Trying to figure out where you are going to go for your next vacation? New boyfriend/girlfriend? Maybe you have parked too long and your car might have a ticket on it? Or maybe it suggests another painting that you saw once, and so, while looking at Kline, you are actually thinking about DeKooning.

Where have you NOT been? You have NOT been seeing the painting. Admit it. You haven’t been there. And when you were in front of DeKooning, you weren’t really there either. And when you are making dinner on Friday, you won’t be there either. And when you get to the car, you will either see a ticket or not, and it will simply change the direction of your distraction. As soon as you get in the car and start it, you are reading some script or other. We attribute attention, fully integrated conscious unified thought and action, ability to do what we may wish to do etc, to ourselves. If we allow ourselves to think otherwise, it threatens our existence in a way. We feel a need to be perfect in a way, and to have holes in our perfection as glaring and monstrous as the ones that are really there, is NOT acceptable — to ourselves. So we deny it.

Our tendency is that we would see the painting for just long enough to make a decision about it that “sets” it in relation to ourselves. “I could make a better painting than THAT!” — end of story. NEXT! Off I go to Mexico and I’m lying on the beach with a margarita. Our brains have the capacity to trap impressions and divert them.

So, enter the Toast. Why do you suppose I want you to look at a stupid piece of toast for 20 minutes with no music, no pets, no distractions? Because I want you to actually LOOK at something and actually see it. It wouldn’t matter what you look at, really, but what could be more neutral than a piece of toast? Especially if it is burned to make it unappetizing.

Most people are very reluctant to do something that simple. They want to read something in to the toast, turn it into symbolism, find within it big important things. When we do this, we can’t see squat. It is actually necessary to train yourself to see. To see, you need to be clear.

Of course I am entirely familiar with this. I have had, and continue to have the same delusions. I try like mad to catch them, but sometimes, I too, am deceiving myself.

Regarding paper assignments, etc; in the world of students, it is usually seen as more important to look impressive. So, strategies are often devised to make one’s self Look good. I’ve done that; everyone I’ve ever known in school has done that. But that is not to learn, to change. To really grow, in your education, is to let that sort of thing go, altogether, and approach new experiences from the point of view that they really are new; that you don’t already know the answers.

And of course, you will have teachers who expect the other stuff. Loads of BS. You will know them when you see them, and give them what they want. I hope. Life is full of theater. Just not here in this class. You would have no place here if you are too good to be ignorant. Why do you suppose we go to school? To get a sheepskin that says “I told you so!! I AM perfect. Now you have to believe it too!”

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You can go to your image on the Flickr site; there’s a button above it that says “blog this”. Actually, you can post any image from flickr to the blog that way, subject to license restrictions. You will also need permission to post to the blog.

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Students often want to know what they SHOULD do.

Bear in mind that when you work toward a “should” you are working toward a result. It is implied in the imperative “should”. “Should” implies that you need to consider yourself constrained by some convention or other, or by someone else’s opinion. I know how strange it must seem to be told “You SHOULD not use the word “SHOULD”, but that’s what I’m telling you. In addition, I don’t want the word “should” to be avoided by constructing workarounds that imply the same thing. In fact, I want you to erase “should” and ALL of its synonyms from your mind.

How do you do this? It’s both harder and easier than you probably think.

First, recognize that your “assignment” is NOT to make a picture, a PRODUCT, but to work in PROCESS. How would you know if you were doing this? If you are working toward a result that is in your mind, you are, by yourself, imposing a “should” and constraining yourself. If you are working in a PROCESS MODE, you will do something to the image through the agency of some feature of Photoshop, and you will see that operation’s result. At that point, you have three options. 1) You can accept the result 2) you can reject the result using “undo” under the edit menu, or 3) you can modify the result using “fade ..” under the edit menu. In addition, you could reject the result by undoing it, then create a new layer identical to the image you are working on (you can do this by dragging the “background” layer to the bottom of the layer box, where there is a little page icon. It will produce a layer above the “background” layer called “background copy”). Then, working on that layer you can repeat the operation, modify it if you wish by changing its opacity and its “blending mode”. We’ll go into Blending Modes later, but by all means, play with them to your heart’s content before we do.

Do you see the difference? With something in your mind that you are trying to produce, you will try and try to “make it happen” and that is a sure way to drive yourself totally insane. Instead, by “letting go” and giving yourself permission to PLAY with it, you try things without a visualized “outcome” and you are then free to discover.

Later, you will have ample opportunity to apply what you have learned to previsualized imagery, if you truly wish to do so. Now, however, you are developing an intuition. People usually mistake intuition for something mysterious, but it is not. Intuition must be given a basis in fact and experience in order to have what it needs to operate upon.

Be sure that you save your work frequently and when you get something that you think is particularly useful, save the next work cycle under a modified filename. That will preserve the entire work up to that particular “state” (that is a term from traditional printmaking, meaning a print of the “state” of a plate prior to the final edition.). Then, you go on working and again, when changes are significant, save that cycle under another modification of the filename.

If you work on relatively modest sized images, you won’t clog your hard drives, but it is true that this is a memory hogging way of working. However, there are lots of benefits. When I work this way, I could easily produce an entire show of one single image in MANY variations.

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AA Gallery, from Arbus to Adams:

Utata:

Purge:

The Curator:

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Here’s the url for the blog page on Flickr. This should take you to your blog page directly.

You will be asked what type of blog you have. It is a “Wordpress” blog, and the type is “MetaWeblogAPI”.

To setup your blog, you will need to select a layout. Here are the pages that allow you to select the types of layouts. I have marked the links with red arrows.

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A group of students once asked me whether I had ever been to Ape Cave. I had never
heard of it. They gave me directions to get there and told me they would be there on
Saturday.

The cave is south of Mt. St. Helens. I went there with a friend, thinking we might meet
them there, but somehow, we missed them. We had brought “headlight” flashlights and
I had brought my camera and some portable flash equipment.

The cave is a long lava tube, probably the longest such structure in the hemisphere. It
is called “Ape Cave” because it was discovered by a youth outdoor club called the
“Apes”. There are actually two parts to the cave; each is about one mile long. If you
look at the pictures on the sites mentioned (and a search will find others), you can see
that the tube is quite narrow, but the width varies from place to place. It is rather cold
down there, and dark. Really, really dark. The interior’s floor varies from strewn
boulders to relatively flat and comfortable. There is a very well established trail, worn
smooth by the feet countless hikers. Off the trail, it can be quite rugged.

At one end, there is a concession which rents Coleman lanterns, which people carry
with them as they hike through the cave. The lantern lights it up pretty bright. Without
the lantern, with just the headlights, our vision was by an essentially axial light; that is,
the light was very close to the axis of our vision. In this light there was quite a strange
luminescence that expressed as a texture of light wiggly lines, like strange bright
jewelled worms, on a black field. It is some kind of a plant growth, possibly a fungus.
The lanterns would not reveal this wonder. We didn’t go far into the cave because my
friend didn’t want to brave the depths. We didn’t know that it would be like a
refrigerator, and had not brought warm enough clothing to spend a long time down
there.

I proposed that we go over to the edge of the cave in a wide section, as far as we could
get from the trail and turn off our lights. Doing so, we plunged ourselves into absolute
darkness and silence. Having spent so many years in darkness as a color printer, I
wanted to experience darkness in a different way, without the presence of so many
pending work orders. Darkness in a very large subterranean space, unbroken and
solitary, but with another person. That was unusual for me, because in the darkroom I
work alone. It was terrific. I have a strong motivation toward experiences of myself in
unusual places, inside myself and out. This was one of the best so far.

How long did it last? Well, not very long, because soon we began to hear a distant
sound, which gradually grew louder. Sounds began to become clearer, and
differentiate. Their source began to reveal itself as a group of people. I guess we were
expecting this. Gradually, a dim light began to grow from our right, and a small party
came through, talking, with their lanterns. They passed. The light dimmed and the
sound gradually diminished, finally extinguishing altogether. Several other groups came
through, each time illuminating the eerie interior, then gradually disappearing. Like a
train going through at night, the sound emerging from nothing, peaking, then diminishing
again to nothing. Each time, we were again swallowed by the dark and the silence. No
one saw us. They were all focused on the cave ahead, and didn’t think to look toward
where we stood silent, our lights extinguished.

This went on for awhile, and then hearing the sound begin again so far away, we
listened carefully to its growth. This time it was different. There was an unusual density
to the sound, combined with a distinctly increasing chaotic quality. As it approached, it
got more and more chaotic, a crescendo of chaos. The light grew, as did the sound.
We wondered. What on (or under) earth could this be. Louder and louder, it became
almost deafening, and intensely agitating.

As the light grew and the sound grew, individual voices began to emerge and then we
saw the comedy unfold. It was perhaps two or three families with several lanterns.
There were a whole bunch of children, complaining and crying. Somebody was eating a
sandwich. One or two adults were smoking cigarettes. “Dad, why did you bring us
here?” “I hate this place! It’s boring!” “I want to go home!” “I’m tired!” “Carry me!”
Adult reply: “SHUT UP!” “You are grounded for a week!” etc. etc. We couldn’t believe
it. It was too amazing.

What a great metaphor. These people had brought themselves to the cave, truly a
wonderful place to experience and see, and had made sure that they wouldn’t see it.
They had rented the lanterns, and the lanterns cast a bubble about them. They
couldn’t see the luminescent patina on the walls; their light was too far off axis. They
went all the way through the cave with the screaming kids, the cigarettes and
sandwiches. They had packaged themselves in a darkproof box.

What they had was what they had at home. Maybe it was even worse.

Copyright Larry Bullis, 2004 —All Rights Reservcd

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Here are a couple of links to sites concerning “Ape Cave”

http://vulcan.wr.usgs.gov/Volcanoes/MSH/ApeCave/description_ape_cave.html

http://www.oregonl5.org/lavatube/apeflow1.html

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One tendency we humans have is that we so often seem to know, deep down inside, that everyone else is probably really together and totally with it; it is just ME who actually really sucks. And, whenever somebody else says or does something, it proves once again, for sure, that my opinion of myself is correct.

I had the fabulous luck to have known Imogen Cunningham, one of the most colorful photographers in the history of the medium, of which she was a fixture for about half of its life. She was over 90 when she died and had been photographing for 80 or so of those years. She made her living as a portraitist throughout her long career.

Someone asked her whether she ever showed her proofs to her clients. “Oh heavens NO!” she said. They are only interested in one thing, really. They look for the one picture on the page that confirms their suspicions that they are really and truly ugly. When they succeed in finding it, they can’t see anything else and then they will Never order prints!

We really don’t like ourselves very well.

After all, you know, we are SUPPOSED to be really cool all the time. In fact, we demand of ourselves that we be perfect but I know damn well that I am not. You are not supposed to find that out. I do everything I can to LOOK perfect, while knowing, inside, that for sure, I am actually a miserable worm.

There is this remarkable disconnection between what we present to others, and what we know of ourselves. It produces some really odd, no, I might say Weird results. It is like we each have an inner being and also an outer being. I can not see my outer being as you do, nor can I see your inner being as you do. You cannot see your outer being as I do, nor can you see my inner being as I do. Yet, we think we are communicating! It is no wonder people are always killing each other. It would be great if I could be like Scooter, my cat. He has no problem with this kind of thing.

For example. If you and I are looking at each other’s images, I am thinking “Your images are so fresh and lively. Mine are so boring. Clearly then, I must suck. This proves that I suck, beyond a doubt.” So I say “nice pictures! What kind of camera do you use?” And then, the subject changes and pretty quick, I am talking about myself again. I have to do this because I need to convince myself that although I may suck inside, on the outside all you can see is, well, maybe not quite perfect, but approximately perfect. Little do I know that inside, you are saying “His work is so fresh and lively. My pictures are so boring. Clearly then, I must suck. This proves that I suck, beyond a doubt.” So, you say “nice pictures! What kind of camera do you use?” And then you go on talking about how great the camera is. The camera is very useful because if I have a better camera than you have, well, that gets you off the hook. That’s why my pictures look better.

Well, that is irrelevant, because better cameras don’t take better pictures. In fact, anything that you or I can say is irrelevant. Here’s what is going on.

When we make pictures, the eye is connected directly to the brain, and the vision that each of us has is conditioned by the vast number of experiences we have had during our lives. These are different for everyone. When I make a picture, it is my vision that is operating, and that vision reflects MY life and its content. When I see your picture, it is another life, one that I’m not already sick of and bored with; one that seems so lively and fresh. Not that there is anything wrong with my life, though I believe we are all very critical of our lives. The fact is, though, everything I see – indeed, my WAY of seeing – is oh, so familiar, and there aren’t many surprises and the ones there are usually aren’t really positive. It is no small wonder that your work seems fresh. Same with you, when you are looking at my images.

Now, there are those thoughts. Come on, admit it. The amount of time that anyone spends actually SEEING something is minuscule, compared to the (in this instance) 15 minutes you have to sit there. We might see something and then, what happens? We start thinking about the party next weekend, or that cool girl or guy we just met, etc. It is possible that something we see triggers the thought, or some intrusion, but even without any particular stimulus, we do fine in becoming distracted. We are experts.

My friends, this is an aspect of the HUMAN CONDITION. It is the very ground upon which we stand.

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The US Bureau of the census estimated that on October 1, 2004, the total world population would be 6,395,935,316. We would have then 6,395,935,316 opinions about any particular subject. Or about what anything is. How about it? That is more than 6 BILLION. Now, as I revise this on December 31, 2007, the same agency reports that its estimate of the world population is now 6,640,917,686. As you can see, it has increased a lot. I won’t redo all the math, because I’d be very busy; the figures below should make the point. If you would like to see the updated figures, here’s the link:
http://www.census.gov/ipc/www/popclockworld.html

Of course there are groups, some very large, who may all agree on any given topic, but it is highly unlikely that any two persons would agree on everything.

Each of us is then 1/6,395,935,316 of the earth’s population. In percentage terms, every swaggering narcissist, every corporate CEO, every college professor, every student, every homeless person, every Schlemiel (Yiddish for a person plagued with bad luck), and each of us on the whole planet, regardless of who we might be, represents 0.000000016% of the population of the world. If all opinions are of equal value, to be fair, don’t you have to at least entertain the notion that the other 6,395,935,315 opinions are of a value equal to yours? So, to you, maybe you like a picture of a fast car. In another culture, despite the pernicious homogenization of tastes and thought worldwide, someone might likely prefer something else. It is pretty hard to guess what that might be now; tastes and opinions still vary widely.

If you can’t allow others’ opinions to have weight equal to your own, you must think that you are special. If so, how could you go about substantiating that belief? If you can’t, you are living in La La Land, but probably we all live there, because each of us is centered in the self.

I did some calculating and found that if I had a whole lot of Mac Pismo laptops identical to the one I am typing on now (I know, it is ancient, from 2000), and if I were going to be ONE SINGLE PIXEL on the screen, there would need to be 116 x 116 or 13,456 of these laptops to have enough pixels available in their screens at 1024×768 pixels per screen (786,432/screen) to approximate the world population. If you take the standard dimension of a football field as 6400 square yards (including about 10 feet into each end zone), and the world population at 6400000000 allotting one square yard per person (that is not much space to conduct one’s life, now, is it?), it would require 12.5 football fields. If you were to reduce the available area to one single football field, each of us would have about 1/800 of a square inch in which to live and conduct our affairs.

Now, each pixel, each 1/800 square inch — is the CENTER OF THE UNIVERSE in its own OPINION because that is its frame of reference. So, should we give it any particular credit for having opinions? Taking it out of the abstract, and placing it on ME, my capacity of opinion is about 1/800 of a square inch on the football field of the world.

I am in danger of the tight end stepping square on me. So much for my precious opinions.

NOW, In MY OPINION: opinions, yours, or mine, are worth just about that much. Since they are encapsulated judgments, they are dualistic; that is, they hold themselves up as being “true”, which means that the opinion of some individual in ours or in some other culture, is “false” by subjective definition.

Opinions get us in trouble. People are killed by opinions. Usually, that is, — other people’s opinions. Other people would be “us” for a lot of people in the Middle East right now.

Here is a question: What is the difference between opinions and beliefs? Is there any?

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Anyone can read this blog. That means, actually, anyone in the entire world who has a connection to the internet. I hope that the entire world will do so.

This is a big deal. Astronauts in the Space Station can read it. People in Central Asia, in China, up in the Andes in Peru, and people on remote islands in the Pacific. Villagers in remote parts of the arctic regions can read it. The internet is now pretty much everywhere, especially now that there are so many satellites are orbiting the earth.

It used to be really hard to communicate, and all this is very new to us old relics. As a child in the 1950’s, I listened intently to a short wave radio. Receiving Radio Moscow, programs from the BBC, powerful short wave stations in South America, Radio Australia — all this seemed thrilling. Now, we get all of this on our computers.

It all happened in an amazingly short time. Here’s an example: There are photographers who work in archaic photo processes such as platinum, gravure, gum-bichromate prints, cyanotype, carbon, etc., as well as some who actually have invented new media. The old processes enjoyed a lot of popularity in the latter half of the 19th century and into the 1920s. Some persisted even a bit longer. Then, they fell victim to the relatively straightforward and readily available silver-based processes that most of us know. Silver processes are more convenient, but the older processes had other qualities which provided other visual and tactile (look up the term “haptic”) possibilities. Some artists are attracted to these media because they find them beautiful, historically fascinating, or whatever.

It must have been around 1993; I was participating in a mailing list group online called “alternative photographic processes”. This was a small group of very congenial folk who kept up a lively conversation about what they were doing. We all appreciated the opportunity to talk things over. Prior to the formation of this group, for which we had to thank the new “internet”, each of us had felt pretty isolated. We never dreamed there were others doing these strange and abandoned processes. People we had only known through rumor suddenly appeared and were amazingly available.

We weren’t really prepared for what was about to happen. AOL joined the internet. Suddenly, there were hundreds of people communicating on our list. They were all over the world. People in Singapore and Spain doing Bromoil? Platinum in Hong Kong? And the nature of the group changed, overnight, from a highly cooperative and congenial community, to one that was highly competitive and often even downright hostile. Fights (”flame wars”)broke out online. People who were overly aggressive were expelled by popular vote. Others might be expelled for reasons that weren’t very rational. It got downright nasty. On the other side, though, there were lots of people now, and they started getting together, in Bath, England, in Lisbon, Portugal, in New Mexico. It got so unpleasant that I dropped; not that it wasn’t still interesting and worthwhile, but I was too busy to give time to something that involved so much politics. I haven’t been back, but some of the old group are still there, and despite the rivalries, a lot of good has come from it. I learned a great deal from this experience.

One thing I learned was how important it is to be thoughtful and courteous online, and the potential gravity of failing to be so.

So, we have here a very powerful tool. In using it, the fact that what we do here is wide open to the view of the entire wired world must affect the way we present ourselves. It raises the stakes. When you feel inclined to post a snapshot of your dog, for example, it might give pause… Who’s going to see this? Well, possibly native people above the arctic circle may see it, for whom the dog, historically, has a very different meaning (even though, today, they are more likely to get around on a snowmobile). People living in yurts in Central Asia can view it. High in the Andes, people may be looking at your pictures, even if they can’t read the text — but don’t count on that; all over the world, more people use English as a language to communicate across linguistic barriers. Astronauts in space can view your photographs, as well as the entire small population of the continent we call Antarctica, and those, as well, who live on remote islands thousands of miles from any continent.

Sobering? I don’t mean to frighten you; just read what is on the many thousands of blogs that are online already. I understand that many thousands of new ones come online every day. Much of it (probably most of it) is not particularly impressive. Often, it is quite personal and modest in its ambitions, but also, there is a lot of truly serious or otherwise worthwhile material “en blog”.

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Questions are always welcome, and never “too dumb to ask”. If you don’t ask, that’s dumb.

I would hope that before you ask, though, you think about it for awhile and frame your question carefully upon the basis of the knowledge that you already have. In other words, be scrupulous in asking the VERY BEST QUESTION that you can. If you don’t, someone else, in answering, has to cover the basic ground that you could have explored in the explanation, and nobody likes to do someone else’s homework. Also, it is almost always painfully obvious, and it gives the impression to everyone that you are looking for a free ride. Besides being non-productive in terms of your success in the class, that is just plain NOT FAIR, because writing for this class is amazingly time consuming. Both for you, and especially, for me, because I like to expand upon your wonderful question and develop what amount to “lectures” — that is where I get my course materials.

Don’t hesitate (LONG) before asking, but be sure, before asking, that you have done your own preparation. When you have truly explored it to the point where you feel you cannot go farther by yourself, then, ASK. Everyone will appreciate the quality of the question. Others in the class may be able to answer, and I always appreciate it when they do so. If correction is needed, I’ll provide it. There is a limit to the amount of time I can spend with this, and so I need your help. If I don’t feel that you have thought about it enough, you will get an answer such as “Think about it some more, and ask a question that starts where you really are, not below your level.” If you think that the course is a lot of work, try to remember that I have to put in many times the amount of time that you do, and I teach five other classes. I try real hard to be patient. I appreciate whatever help I can get.

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