iavaj's Blog |
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As a moderator for several BP groups, the above image is NOT the one i want to project of myself to fellow members within the groups...
ooh noo, not that ever, not even my persona
when i joined BP back in 2003, it was out of curiosity (& convincing from fellow friends).. since joining i've never left, changing my page a few tymes to rhyme with the persona i wanted to project, much like how one would dress, & what you wear gives hint to what kind of person you are, but shouldn't & will never tell all of who you are inside.. So for people to know even more than what reflects from the outside, one would need to open their mouths & speak, converse, engage in dialect, interact, reveal of themselves, show concern of another, from there, the engaging parties form conclusions of one another, to either bond more so, or part ways in mutual respect... it's all in the meeting of the minds, not so? finding common ground, it's human nature- en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_nature spurred by motivation - en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motivation if you're NOT moved by these things, then take a very hard look into the mirror.. i typed the above to set focus on the title, as to 1st, let the reader get grasp of where i stand & what i feel, & what motivated me to post this blog entry... ------------------------------------------------- i'm always questioning how great or poor of a job i'm doing in any endeavor, i'd want to look good as a representative of myself, & for the employer of my position, i mean, you just "wanna rep" right, would not you?
as a BP group moderator, i've found myself questioning alot of things i'm doing, it's not an easy balance now, belonging to a group, wanting to interact, but always falling one-sided in the communication, that will in due tyme stifle your willingness to try future engagements in discussions, dwindling you to "watcher", just to check in looking for rule breaches & nothing else.. is it to be like this? if so, then that's a lonely world i'd want to change..
how are male mods viewed by fellow group members? through observation i see woman mods don't have the problem of being given wide berth in conversations, & most tymes get feedback when desire... less intimidating the woman? a lesson in human nature for me once again......
so, the things i've done to adjust in the groups i cherish; 1# not to so much volunteer info, i lessen this as to not come off as a show-off or know it all, (especially if they don't ask me specifically, just let another member give their insight, never know *who* knows *what*) though i don't see how assisting some1 with info they hadn't knowledge of to begin with, is coming off as such, but i'll rarely know how a person may convey it from their side of the monitor.. 2# so the above puts me in a hard place as looking as not as involved to a very active group owner, or being overly involved with my own agenda, to a not so active group owner... i'm just being myself when i roll my shirt sleeves up, that's me, but i have to realize as helpful as i'd want to be, i could be doing more harm than help, so i'll only now jump in when i see a lag on correcting a rule breach..
3# people that are open & receptive to others *offline* tend to be the same in *online* social settings. though i'm naturally an introvert, i can start a positive convo with any stranger off the break, be it a homeless person or thug on the street, pompous rich guy, or snobbish fly girl @ the happy hour.. i'll be no different when logging in to any social site, it's not hard for me.. but i realize not all are gifted to be free of their, what's the word, uum, sensibilities & cautions while relating to other online... there's this cloud of some sort that stops some men from general dialect from other men, & some women the same.. i should not be offended by this, it's the nature of the beast we call the world wide web, & there will be some level of guardedness present, always... i'm learning to turn it down a few fathoms & to *dumb my dialect down*, if i want to eat @ the same table..
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a particular thing i've noticed (speaking as a regular member of BP), an *aggressively active minority* turn off their *smart* & want nothing to do with in depth thinking... i mean the gravitational pull is towards the mundane; sex, flame wars, trivials that are easy to grasp & light in substance, *water cooler talk*.. this in turn, has it's effect on the majority of members who aren't as engaging as the more aggressive ones -> *REMEMBER, THIS IS A VIRTUAL ENVIRONMENT* a platform where ppl can digest what they see @ leisure, & draw their conclusions w/o rush......i've only noticed this on BP... we usually offline want to turn this off (*our smart*) when out & about (i do, & only turn it on (*my smart*) when it's needed for recall, to assist in something, ) but i do turn on my *smart* instantly when logging in to a computer, with all i associate using a computer for, maybe has alot to do with this, *computer=tool*, not *computer=appliance*, big difference.. i see using a computer & things done on it as *art*, while some others may see their use as *entertainment*... art can't be entertainment?, deep thinking can't be entertainment?, they're not a heavy as one would think, even talking tech on an IRC channel produce some of the most funniest jokes ever, common ppl blunders, joking on the nature of characters behind those blunders, the works.... here on BP, the culture is the opposite with this *aggressively active minority*, you turn off thinking when logged in, if it's past 4 syllables, tune that word out,- "if i gotta look the word up ina dictionary, we aint speakin da same language today" type stuff... lmao.... simple & brief, K.I.S.S. in it's extreme... one could fit in well, w/o typing a word.. i make an excellent observer...
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let's face it; there are some uptight & stiff people in life, add a virtual environment where text is the main means of expression, & you'll have bullets that may hit walls, their points of meaning, good or otherwise, may miss their target... my approach to this as a mod: humor, laughter is good for the soul, but for you to hit your target, tactfulness is of the most importance, insightfulness & humor are the underlying points in my text, most tymes those bullets don't strike home till days, or weeks later, have someone laughing @ the dinner table, long after they've read it... other tymes, it as instant as the 1st alphabet read...
BP is a social network 1st, if any intimacy comes, the general human relations must be met 1st & foremost, it's not always black or ither white, right or wrong, left or right, up or down.. it's human nature, which is as quirky as predicting where lightning would strike in a storm.. just like reading & comprehending a person in the flesh (face to face) you go off clues, but, how everything's interpreted, is predicated off the receiver of the message, & the delivery of the messenger, it's never perfect, it relies on the patience & clarity of the messenger, & the openness of the receiver... no defensive listening or offensive talking, it's mutual on both parties, to come to an understanding...
***stay tuned for updates & revision***
EthnodiversityPosted
Ever heard of this "Ethnodiversity"? I ran across the word while scouring sources to link the African diaspora with open source prejudices.. One site caught my attn: ** Linux and Ethnodiversity ** www.linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3
those of you that frequent this site, that know of me through my username iavaj, or know me in person as well as virtually on this site, tend to label me as well rounded on technology, especially in computers, those that have the pleasure of knowing & interacting with me in person know me as a joking guy, i can hang @ the party, spark life into it, then fade away as though a memory.. Very few know the dwellings in the back of my mind; the passion, the hope, the humanity of us as a whole, i rarely speak on these things as i find them as intimate as an affair, & that's kept close to the heart in private, not to be flaunted on the street corner...
until now! lol
peep this piece of text very closely, to help me paint my picture:
** I believe in something which doesn’t have a common name. ** I believe in the importance of preserving cultures, something I call ethnodiversity. "Many people understand the importance of biodiversity. An ecosystem with a great diversity of life forms is adaptable to changing conditions. If a virus sweeps through and removes one type of tree, for example, a diverse ecosystem can rebalance itself – some other species will usually change, in time, to fill that niche. In biology, genes control the traits of species, and slowly, variations in the genetic makeup of a community allow for adaptation. If a species cannot adapt to change, it will not survive. The same is true of an ecosystem. A diverse ecosystem can lose a few members and still retain the ability to adapt. In a famous analogy, an airplane can lose a few rivets and still fly – but if you keep losing rivets you are courting disaster. An ecosystem with too little biodiversity can no longer adapt to changing conditions, and is susceptible to total collapse. That’s why we have environmental regulations that seek to preserve endangered species and habitats – it is in our own long term interest. Preserving biodiversity has more immediate benefits, too. For example, there are bacteria in certain hot springs in Yellowstone National Park. They have the genes to deal with problems that we do not face, and so they may harbor the basis for new drugs. It is important that we protect all members of an ecosystem. How does this apply to cultures? Just as an ecosystem is composed of many species, humanity is composed of many cultures. Each species in the biological realm fits a niche and provides something for the survival of other species, and similarly every culture today fits a cultural niche. Every culture that exists has survived because it provides a solution to the challenge of survival in our world today. They fit the context in which they find themselves. But the world is changing, through technological and scientific advances, through climate change, through the forced contact of cultures in a crowded world, through the gradual evolution of culture itself. Cultures need to respond to those changes or they may cease to exist. How is it that cultures respond? If we see the rise of crimes involving handguns in our culture, we look at related cultures and see what their crime rates are, and see if they have a different way of dealing with handguns. If they are successful we can try out variations of their idea in our own culture. These ideas are the cultural analog of genes. Richard Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist, has coined the term “meme” to represent a cultural idea. So cultures can take memes from other cultures to find solutions to their own challenges and continue to survive in the face of changing circumstances. What if there were only a few cultures in the world? There would be only a few sources to look at when dealing with challenges. Cultures do come up with new ideas on their own, but each culture is predisposed to move in certain directions. Some ideas may never occur to some cultures. To increase our own odds of survival, we should do everything we can to preserve other cultures. We need to preserve the ethnodiversity of the planet. What does this mean we should do? How should we act in the world? For one, just as we require corporations to consider their impact on the environment when they propose cutting down a forest for a corporate campus, we need to consider the impact on other cultures when a corporation wishes to expand around the world. What does a McDonald’s franchise do to the culture of a country that has never seen one before? We may be unwittingly undermining other cultures. Second, our foreign policy should reflect the importance of other cultures, and not try to force them to imitate our culture. This doesn’t mean we should leave other cultures totally alone – it is through our interactions that civilization as a whole moves forward. But the existence of other cultures is essential for our own long-term survival. In addition, sub-cultures often develop on their own within a society. We should rejoice in the new life they represent, the new contributions to society. We should examine them to see what they say about our society as a whole. We can learn from them, too. We need to do more than “just get along.” We need to not just tolerate other cultures – we need to value them. For the survival of everyone, we need to promote a diversity of cultures in the world. We need to promote ethnodiversity. This I believe."- _______________
i am NOT the author of the above, hence the "quotations"
but it's added to help me make a point of simmiliar nature. If you're reading this now, you've access to one of the most taken for granted pieces of technology today; the computer.
you may refer to it as "myspace", "facebook", "blackplanet", or just plainly "da internet"... Some of you may have gotten to see more utility from it as a cookbook repo, a server, or both.. some may not find ANY use of it when it lacks an internet connection and/or non workable browser...
well, i'm typing this as a hack attempt, to the mindset of those reading this, an attempt to get people to think more deeply & passionately about the "tools" they're surrounded by, & on the path of doing so, to pick up as much enlightment as a mind could hold..
an un-networked, hard driveless, out dated, computer holds within itself a vast wealth of knowledge, just through sheer interaction, the disection of it, examining it's pieces, learning of the materials it's made of, & it's source, the who came up with the way those pieces interact with another piece to make the whole of the computer up... It's an adventure in itself.
but, this is just the hardware aspect.. what of it's software?
some of you at this point of the reading are thinking- "is the point you're trying to make all about a computer? a thing that has not one ounce of importance in my life, that i could do without? ooo fuk off!"
no, it's not about the computer itself, but what it represents, & how it ties to our "minorical" (yea i made that word up) presence in society at large.
i point your attention to a "minorical" operating system in the scheme of corporate tech sway, that's faced years of prejudice (like we minorities, in society), but still manages to hold a big impact on the scheme of corporate sway (like we minorities do in society)..
i turn your attention to gnu/linux
think of linux as the minority in the world of corporation, where Microsoft rules the day (on the surface), & behind the scenes, linux is running a majority of the internet, it's the glue that binds it; the tell-tale sign, is in an internet address, any one!, the forward slash = / you see in the adress, tells the tale, that linux is really running the show (microsoft commands use backward slashes = \), not the language of the 'net
free as in beer, (like liberty, & expression, not cash moreso), easy to see every inch of code, that makes it's kernel up & the utilities that run on top of the kernel free to modify, enhance, share, sell, have total control over it... minorities in every country in the world, dream of having this same freedom, of liberty of life, blood hs been shed for those liberties, lives taken, or given, because people felt strongly enough to make those sacrifices for others after them.
it takes some strong passion to comprehend this, it takes deviating from ways that comforted you, deviating from views tha keep you in the comfort zone, deviating from the "selfish me" & not including your fellow human that shares the Earth with you.
staying in this comfort zone is easy.. it's less work, it frees you to be un-accountable for your fate. _________
how would you rule the world as a minority? would you rule with the baggage of revenge? with a "it's my turn" attitude?
hmmp.. ____________
the point i'm making is about long term survival, & this new word i found Ethnodiversity let me pull some quotes from a site www.linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3
"Throughout world history, contributions to the things that make our society worth being called civilization -- literature, science, art, music, social innovation -- seem to have come in a vastly disproportionate measure from people who were not at home in one national culture only, but in several, or that belonged to another culture than the mainstream one in their country. Think only of the contribution the Jews made to European art, science, architecture, and social innovation; or the influence of the African slaves and their descendants on North American -- and thus Western -- musical culture. An alien entity tuning in only to Earth's music radio stations could easily conclude that the dominant continent on this planet is Africa!"
"Numbers don't mean that much. It is important to understand that a nation is more than a piece of real estate. Sure, the real estate is needed to anchor a nation's existence -- but nationhood is about language, culture, and way of life. And the language is the gateway into a nation's culture and way of life. Heck, it is even a gateway into a way of thinking! Knowing only one language -- English, let's say -- tends to impose certain patterns on one's ways of thinking. Knowing one more language inevitably widens one's perspective, especially if the language does not belong to the same family. I know from experience: When I moved from The Netherlands up North to Sunny Suomi, I was confronted with the need to learn this weird, alien, Finno-Ugrian tongue. Ah well, at least the alphabet was Latin, and the spelling phonetic and utterly predictable. I learned to read Finnish texts aloud so that my listeners understood them even if I didn't..."
"Computer sovereignty? Talking about diversity in the context of free software, it's not just about ethnodiversity. The notion of diversity as freedom lives and prospers in Linux. Let a hundred desktops blossom! People are different, so whyshouldn't software be. Besides, freedom works. Funny to think of Linux and freedom as manifest destiny, as illustrated by the emerging binary compatibility standard for Unix -- something the big vendors with their expensive consortia never achieved. Now, for the first time in history, it's being done, courtesy of a "bunch of hackers", thank you very much. Freedom works for hatching world-class software, but just as well forevolving mature, workable standards. If you're content to just have the trains run on time, you won't even achieve as much as that. Freedom is no luxury. And freedom breeds diversity, which is not a sign of weakness -- quite the opposite. That's just the same error that all dictators make, to mistake the rough-and-tumble of democratic discourse for a display of weakness."
"We have in fact started to use certain concepts analogous to those in biology -- we talk of linguistic habitats, diversity and so on. The small, indigenous peoples' languages are perfectly adapted to their needs, local environment, way of life. Reflecting upon the value of diversity, we should also realize that a language is a crystallization of many hundreds of generations of labor and of understanding the world around us. It is like asking whether the work and world view of our ancestors have any value. Of course, they have."
and a quoted comment:
"It is not just language which creates need for different user interfaces. __________
just a lil something something to ponder, i had to put it into type, i love this site, i see it's potential, but i'm leary of the main attraction; the discussions that border so close to the bedroom, with everyone in pajamas, the jump off of an orgy could happen any minute, or could lead to one, with a giant moniter blazing all the mindless gossip one could ever go away with... fuk dat, i got better convo rotating drug sales in project hallways when i was younger... fukkin boring
is this all the majority of us can inspire to be comfortable with?
*negro phobia* murdered *critical thinking*, because *selfishness* wanted the throne, to make sure *ethnodiversity* would never see the light of day..
let's get back to the root of ourselves in society, instead of existing around the soil -
**Technology and the African-American experience**"Race and technology are two of the most powerful motifs in American history, but until recently they have not often been considered in relation to each other. This collection of essays examines the intersection of the two in a variety of social and technological contexts, pointing out, as the subtitle (borrowed from Brooke Hindle's classic 1966 work Early American Technology) puts it, the "needs and opportunities for study."
oh well, if the picture can't be seen @ such a small scale forget about painting it on a larger one..
-j'vai
parallel propsPosted
takin' some tyme out, a hard look just to reflect we share the same birthdate, let's see how we connect may 19th, but we passed each other in '65 you went out unexpected, as i, came in, to be alive you went out, by the hand of your own kind the reasons our people still ponder, what possessed his mind you aren't forgotten my brother, not by a long shot you hear? you're recognised on the calender today, the 5th month of the year they've named streets after you, in many a neighborhood in my old one, your name dons a long stretch of boulevard you made it in the books, as a man to stand his ground many a people stood, as you controlled mics with sound the people listened, when you said "let's take it no more" eye for eye, we got guns too,we'll make them also roar let's find our feet, & let's strengthen our backs put belief in our hearts, fill it with whatever it lacks no more hiding in fear, we have right to walk proud as any other man on earth, & we can say it loud the tymes has changed much today bro, you got a few schools named after you, using highly technical tools negroes are educated! & utilizing the world all over the place! teachers, financial brokers, a black woman flew into space! my negroe, we sitting in the senate, we command whatever our minds can have my negroe, we got a black prez right now, residing in 1600 penn ave! i bs you not, most of us are using our minds God made good he gave but still, shyt's happening, that'll make you turn over in your grave the fear's been reversed, our youth go more to college but many more, fall victim, to cunning trick knowledge today's youth, don't know a proper tailor they've lost their belts, & cuss like a sailor in front of our elders, long gone is the respect from back in the day, when a proper tongue we were to expect our upper class, have mimic'd society's suburbs down turned noses up @ the projects, they even find tyme to clown those that lack the books & money, to make good their future for them it's day by day, the roof over the head, the stomach to nurture my negroe, there's this new drug call crack, split our azzes in two our women lost their integrity, & the men did too it broke something up, more valuable than worldly riches it shook our family structure, & left it in stitches made some of us prey on, & cannibalise our own kind for the gain of temporal shine, @ the expense of a lost mind it hit us @ the core, a millennium to right it all back we look hopefully to our youth, to set this thing on track the glue to our future, let the old heads guide them right should they just listen, to the mistakes we made, many a night i could go on & on, but i don't want to bore you just having small talk, & to you & i, a happy birthday too just paying some homage, i remember you malcolm x remembering things you said, about this world that's complex -jvai north staarPosted
nestled in a seat & laughter, surrounded by folk
j'vai
'tudePosted
*came into a world with so much to give
mirror me blkPosted
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