[FRIAM] The danger of a single story

[Steve Smith]

Jon -

Thanks for this expanded conception/treatment/insight into "scope" which 
also invokes point of view, cultural embedding/embodiment, etc.

Saul Steinberg's iconic "View from 9th Ave" never gets old for me and 
provides an excellent geopolitical/social metaphorical source domain for 
thinking about these issues.

I believe that being *visual* creatures, it is "natural" that things 
reduce in importance/relevance in a 1/R (distance) relation.   In the 
immortal words of the American Iconic Indian Fighter ("Genocidal 
Maniac"), "don't shoot until you see the whites of their eyes!"

The fact that such distance (euclidean as well as non-euclidean as well 
as network) is a heuristic for "otherness" seems very much implicit in 
life itself, most familiarly among visual creatures, less so for audio, 
and even less so for chemical (smell/taste) and least for tactile (if I 
am not touching it, it doesn't exist?).

Implicit in Chimamanda's single story about not-single-stories is that 
there are other dimensions to distance than the 
physical/kinshipLinguisticNetworks that "distance" us from one another 
(people, animals, geography and other life-forms).   I don't know what 
to do with this awareness exactly, but it seems to leaven or balance the 
*judgement* against those who appear myopic in their apprehension of the 
world.  It is somewhat about priorities.

In my rant/rave about emergent collective consciousness, the ability to 
apprehend "Other" at a "Distance" more better is an adaptive trait, yet 
we also cannot afford to let that overwhelm circumstances like 
"relevance" for which proximity is a mild proxy.   It is about dynamic 
(re)prioritization I suppose.

- Steve

On 11/9/21 8:11 AM, Jon Zingale wrote:
> A TED talk with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie on scoping, classification, 
> and "the danger of a single story":
>
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9Ihs241zeg&ab_channel=TED 
> <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9Ihs241zeg&ab_channel=TED>
>
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