41 Matching Annotations
  1. Jan 2024
  2. Sep 2023
  3. Jun 2023
    1. We live in a society that emphasizes glamour and sex appeal. That is why most of us strive to achieve external beauty, but oftentimes we lose our uniqueness in the process.

      so this passage explicitly mentions "external beauty", BUT if we're to consider beauty in its truest essence, then i wonder if this statement is a bad thing. after all, beauty is essentially harmony and balance (which explains why individuals with symmetrical features are considered attractive). all of us strive for beauty, but in doing so, we may lose what makes us unique because beauty favors uniformity.

      this is fascinating to me because uniformity adheres to a standard, which is important for regulating randomness (opposite of this is pattern and we LOVE patterns because it is discernible which means it is safer), and fostering a shared understanding of the world. and this shared understanding of our world is really important to us as humanity. this is how we evolve together. this collective perception only happens through that concept of beauty (or form and structure, harmony and balance).

      nowadays, we shifted and value individualism more. this excessive individualism has promoted different perspectives on the world which contributes to conflicts. ultimately, extremes on both ends of the spectrum (uniformity or individualism) are detrimental, so striking this balance between them is crucial for progress and unity among people.

  4. Jan 2023
    1. eading evolutionary theorist David Sloan Wilson and influential economist Dennis Snower have long advocated for an improved understanding of economics as a complex system. Across a recent series of major articles, they argue for a paradigm shift away from the orthodox, neoclassical model of economics, which focuses on individual challenges to be tackled through decisions by individual decision-makers and views ‘externalities’ as a phenomenon to be ‘corrected’ through government intervention, in favour of a new multilevel paradigm, based on insights from evolutionary science.

      !- Comment : similar aims to - This goal of shifting away from "individualism" to mutuality is also aligned with a number of other perspectives including: - Bruce Jennings - Entangling Humanism - https://hyp.is/go?url=https%3A%2F%2Fhumansandnature.org%2Fentangling-humanism%2F&group=world - David Loy - https://hyp.is/go?url=http%3A%2F%2Fdocdrop.org%2Fvideo%2F1Gq4HhUIDDk%2F&group=world

    1. autonomy can shed the problematic individualism with which it has been saddled in the era of liberalism and carbon capitalism and can be reconceptualized as a practice of recognition that is dialogic and critically self-reflexive. As such, autonomy is a practice that recognizes and supports individuality but does not rest on an ontological foundation of individualism. And, needless to say, it does not rest on a foundational collectivist or totalizing ontology, either. Whereas other practices of recognition such as solidarity and care are directed outward toward right relationships with others, autonomy, I suggest, is a practice of recognition directed inward. Autonomy is reflexive: it affirms and attends to the moral standing of oneself. The autonomy of the person is required by both the concept of agency (acting for reasons rather than being forced to act by causes) and the concept of responsibility (neither praise nor blame are attached to behavior that is beyond one’s control). My working notion is thatautonomy is the recognition and authentication of one’s own capability to assume moral agency and responsibility in an interdependent world.

      !- distinction : between individuality and individualism

  5. Dec 2022
    1. Alexis de Tocqueville referred to this in his 1840 treatise on America as self-interest properly understood. In fact, the full title of the chapter from his book,Democracy in America, is, “How the Americans Combat Individualism by theDoctrine of Self-Interest Properly Understood.” His basic premise was that“one sees that by serving his fellows, man serves himself and that doing good isto his private advantage.”6
  6. Sep 2022
    1. This post is a classic example of phenomenon that occurs universally. One person devises something that works perfectly for them, be it a mouse trap design, a method of teaching reading or … an organisation system. Other people see it in action and ask for the instructions. They try to copy it and … fail. We are all individuals, and what works for one does not work for all. Some people reading this post go “wow, cool!” Others go “What…???” One size does not fit all. Celebrate the difference! The trick is to keep looking for the method that works for you, not give up because someone else’s system makes your eyeballs spin!

      all this, AND...

      some comes down to the explanations given and the reasons. In this case, they're scant and the original is in middling English and large chunks of Japanese without any of the "why".

  7. Aug 2022
  8. Jun 2022
    1. “As neoliberal citizenship sets loose the individual to take care of itself, it also discursively binds the individual to the well-being of the whole”

      What is preferable? I feel like we should start with the well-being of the whole and individuate from there; technosocial urbanism emphasizes applying tech to social issues, but why don't we set the bone before providing a crutch?

  9. Apr 2022
    1. the brain stores social information differently thanit stores information that is non-social. Social memories are encoded in a distinctregion of the brain. What’s more, we remember social information moreaccurately, a phenomenon that psychologists call the “social encodingadvantage.” If findings like this feel unexpected, that’s because our culturelargely excludes social interaction from the realm of the intellect. Socialexchanges with others might be enjoyable or entertaining, this attitude holds, butthey’re no more than a diversion, what we do around the edges of school orwork. Serious thinking, real thinking, is done on one’s own, sequestered fromothers.

      "Social encoding advantage" is what psychologists refer to as the phenomenon of people remembering social information more accurately than other types.

      Reference to read: “social encoding advantage”: Matthew D. Lieberman, Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect (New York: Crown, 2013), 284.

      It's likely that the social acts of learning and information exchange in oral societies had an additional stickiness over and beyond the additional mnemonic methods they would have used as a base.

      The Western cultural tradition doesn't value the social coding advantage because it "excludes social interaction from the realm of the intellect" (Paul, 2021). Instead it provides advantage and status to the individual thinking on their own. We greatly prefer the idea of the "lone genius" toiling on their own, when this is hardly ever the case. Our availability bias often leads us to believe it is the case because we can pull out so many famous examples, though in almost all cases these geniuses were riding on the shoulders of giants.

      Reference to read: remember social information more accurately: Jason P. Mitchell, C. Neil Macrae, and Mahzarin R. Banaji, “Encoding-Specific Effects of Social Cognition on the Neural Correlates of Subsequent Memory,” Journal of Neuroscience 24 (May 2004): 4912–17

      Reference to read: the brain stores social information: Jason P. Mitchell et al., “Thinking About Others: The Neural Substrates of Social Cognition,” in Social Neuroscience: People Thinking About Thinking People, ed. Karen T. Litfin (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006), 63–82.

  10. Mar 2022
  11. Jan 2022
    1. in Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America,” which has a chapter called “How the Americans Combat Individualism by the Principle of Interest Rightly Understood.” Despite our ambient certainty that it is natural, Tocqueville describes individualism as a newfangled phenomenon. The word “individualism” itself entered the English language largely through translations of his work. Somehow, our leaders are educated into the error of dangerously discounting this “enlightened self-interest” (also a term Tocqueville invented). 

      Alexis de Tocqueville coined the ideas/phrases "individualism" and enlightened self-interest.

  12. Oct 2021
    1. The Bauhaus began with the metaphor of a church and the Lyonel Feininger depiction of a modern cathedral as a symbol for a new faith in the synthesis of art and technology.

      The fusion of art, technology, and spirituality has been the foundation of my thinking as a designer as I have explored design practice, design education, and design philosophy.

      We mistakenly focused on physical artifacts without fully realizing—and questioning—the values that were being embodied in architecture, built to reinforce our habits and behaviours into social, economic, and political systems. Technology has enabled us to scale, accelerate, and amplify these systems to envelope the globe.

      We have been engaged in social architecture, a form of metaphysical design. It has been a form of colonization that has been built on individualism, specialization, and authoritarianism.

    1. Social: learned helplessness (individuality)Economic: trained incapacities (specialization)Political: bureaucratic intransigence (authoritarianism)

      The neoliberal world order is designed to serve a colonial system of capitalist extraction that only benefits the 1%.

      • Social: learned helplessness (individuality)
      • Economic: trained incapacities (specialization)
      • Political: bureaucratic intransigence (authoritarianism)
    1. Academia: All the Lies: What Went Wrong in the University Model and What Will Come in its Place

      “Students are graduating into a brutal job market.”

      The entreprecariat is designed for learned helplessness (social: individualism), trained incapacities (economic: specialization), and bureaucratic intransigence (political: authoritarianism).


      The Design Problem

      Three diagrams will explain the lack of social engagement in design. If (in Figure 1) we equate the triangle with a design problem, we readily see that industry and its designers are concerned only with the tiny top portion, without addressing themselves to real needs.

      Figure 1: The Design Problem

      (Design for the Real World, 2019. Page 57.)

      The other two figures merely change the caption for the figure.

      • Figure 1: The Design Problem
      • Figure 2: A Country
      • Figure 3: The World
  13. Sep 2021
    1. liberty of conscience

      "Liberty of conscience" is a phrase Roger Williams uses in a religious context to denote the freedom for one to follow his or her religious or ethical beliefs. It is an idea that refers to conscious-based thought and individualism. Each person has the right to their own conscience. It is rooted in the idea that all people are created equal and that no culture is better than the other.

      This idea is strongly tied to: freedom from coercion of conscience (own thoughts and ideas), equality of rights, respect and toleration. It is a fundamental element of what has come to be the "American idea of religious liberty". Williams spoke of liberty of conscience in reference to a religious sense. This concept of individualism and free belief was later extrapolated in a general sense. He believed that government involvement ended when it came to divine beliefs.

      Citation: Eberle, Edward J. "Roger Williams on Liberty of Conscience." Roger Williams University Law Review: vol 10:, iss: 2, article 2, pp. 288-311. http://docs.rwu.edu/rwu_LR/vol10/iss2/2. Accessed 8 Sept. 2021.

  14. May 2021
  15. Apr 2021
    1. when we need advice or counsel we'll ask individuals with direct relevant experience rather than a pre-defined group at large. Back to basics, back to individual responsibility, back to work.

      Is this not strange? Humans need other humans to work together well, to bounce ideas off each other.

      If the purpose of this is to reinstate 'individual responsibility', this sounds more like a way to backtrack blame rather than a possibility to dig out as much value as one can possibly excavate.

    1. Thus,understanding adolescents’subjective success perceptions and developing autonomysupportive learning environments would enable educators to be more responsive tostudents’perspectives and to tailor their success-based language in more meaningful,relevant, and psychologically healthy ways.

      Note

  16. Mar 2021
    1. Hornsey, M. J., Harris, E. A., & Fielding, K. S. (2018). The psychological roots of anti-vaccination attitudes: A 24-nation investigation. Health Psychology: Official Journal of the Division of Health Psychology, American Psychological Association, 37(4), 307–315. https://doi.org/10.1037/hea0000586

  17. Oct 2020
    1. We need to debate what kind of hypermedia suit our vision of society - how we create the interactive products and on-line services we want to use, the kind of computers we like and the software we find most useful. We need to find ways to think socially and politically about the machines we develop. While learning from the can-do attitude of the Californian individualists, we also must recognise that the potentiality of hypermedia can never solely be realised through market forces. We need an economy which can unleash the creative powers of hi-tech artisans. Only then can we fully grasp the Promethean opportunities of hypermedia as humanity moves into the next stage of modernity.

      Great ending. These words are as true today as they were 25 years ago.

  18. Aug 2020
  19. Jun 2020
  20. Feb 2019
    1. By colorizing their photographs, they become less abstract. They are no longer just representing something old, a historical event that happened so many years ago. Marina Amaral

      We're almost always moved more by the individual than the aggregate. This is also what made the recent photo of the Yemini girl so moving and valuable.

    1. individualistic, devoid of the community

      Individualism vs. collectivism cultures

    2. too individualistic, devoid of the community feeling

      This begins to take aim at the tension between individualism and collectivism, a "me vs. we" scenario with great implications in social society, as well as in the intellectual realm.

  21. Sep 2018
    1. From here comes the emphasis on progress (its possibility and desirability, not its inevitability), on taking personal charge of creating better futures rather than hoping or praying for them to be brought about by supernatural forces, on reason, technology, scientific method, and human creativity rather than faith.

      The author further increases the gap between transhumanism and religion by stating that transhumanism goes against relying on faith which is the core value of most religions. furthermore we can come to a conclusion that the concept of transhumanism requires absolute dedication of individual people to progress.

  22. Sep 2017
    1. linear

      [unlike linear] nonlinear temporality is a feminist proposal to resist liberal individualistic modes of doing politics. Organizing politically in a nonlinear temporality involves creating situationist feminist politics; nonlinear activism is one that does not construct origins but mobilizes different political consciousness and creates many subject positions.

    1. whole is greater than the sum of its parts.”

      When I lecture in Intro to Socy, I spend a great deal of time on this statement to help them grasp the fundamentals of the sociological imagination. While network theory may seem like common sense, it directly challenges the ideology of individualism and pull yourself up by your bootstraps. If you accept that others influence you, then you have to begin to accept the realities of privilege and discrimination. This can often be too much cognitively, particularly for privileged students who prefer to think of their benefits as wholly earned. SNA reveals how inequality is produced and reproduced.

    1. people’s behavior and emotions are affected by the people that they know, the people that those people know, and so on – in other words, by the social network which an individual is integrated in

      This is the essence of sociology. And is the fundamental challenge to the logic of individualism and neoliberalism.

  23. Dec 2016
    1. The main thing I want to say is that the problem with the left is that it’s obsessed with the problems of the individual. What they have neglected is power. It’s so important in our time, and in the discourse of right-thinking liberals, and right-thinking radical artists, the word power is practically never mentioned—it’s as if it doesn’t exist. But, actually, power shapes your world so much. That’s what I was trying to show in the film, that even on the echo chamber you occupy on Facebook, there are bits of code written that are shaping what you’re given. That’s power. There are computers shifting money around. That’s power. We’ve just got to try and bring it in focus. But because we’re so locked off to questions of the individual, we’ve lost sight of the questions of the collective, and that involves power.

      Power as an attribute of the collective, individualism is a movement toward the dispossession of power.

  24. Jun 2016
  25. ou-expo.nicklolordo.com ou-expo.nicklolordo.com
    1. , I think I would have wept over it. Somehow, now that it has happened actually, and to me, it seems far too wonderful for tears.

      I really enjoy this idea, for some reason, as something so unfathomably sad has happened to Dorian, as if his life were a novel (hmhmhm) and he finds it too amusing to be bothered by. Wilde demonstrates the surreal reality that plagues life and continues somewhat of a commentary on how precious one's life is, and how it must not be wasted on conforming when one does not see fit.

    2. “Dorian, Dorian,” she cried, “before I knew you, acting was the one reality of my life. It was only in the theatre that I lived. I thought that it was all true. I was Rosalind one night, and Portia the other. The joy of Beatrice was my joy, and the sorrows of Cordelia were mine also.56 I believed in everything. The common people who acted with me seemed to me to be godlike. The painted scenes were my world. I knew nothing but shadows, and I thought them real. You came,—oh, my beautiful love!—and you freed my soul from prison. You taught me what reality really is. To-night, for the first time in my life, I saw through the hollowness, the sham, the silliness, of the empty pageant in which I had always played. To-night, for the first time, I became conscious that the Romeo was hideous, and old, and painted, that the moonlight in the orchard was false, that the scenery was vulgar, and that the words I had to speak were unreal, were not my words, not what I wanted to say. You had brought me something higher, something of which all art is but a reflection. You have made me understand what love really is. My love! my love! I am sick of shadows. You are more to me than all art can ever be.

      Sibyl's dialogue here promotes Wilde's idea that within marriage passion for doing what one loves is lost as Sibyl's recalls her love for acting, and joyfully casting it away in awe of her engagement, blind to the loss of her own passion.

    3. The real drawback to marriage is that it makes one unselfish. And unselfish people are colorless. They lack individuality.

      Wilde utilizes this dialogue to convey a message on individuality when Harry expresses his views on marital commitments, and how they strip one of them. Perhaps this is Wilde's way of addressing the societal expectation of marriage, and presenting the case that in most instances, those married loose themselves to the marriage once life has been consumed by it.

    4. Because to influence a person is to give him one’s own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtues are not real to him. His sins, if there are such things as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of some one else’s music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him. The aim of life is self-development. To realize one’s nature perfectly,—that is what each of us is here for. People are afraid of themselves, nowadays. They have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty that one owes to one’s self.

      Wilde uses this dialogue to convey his theory on the meaning of life. "People are afraid of themselves nowadays" is Wilde's call to the oppression of individuals by society. Wilde opens the concept of living as one sees fit - their true identity. This dialogue probably cause issue from early critics of Wilde's work, as it holds a somewhat secular message.

  26. Aug 2015
    1. Individualism–

      Customisation: the “personal” era. What with “personal learning networks” and everything “self-”. Does sound like a major trend. What’s possibly most interesting, though, is the framing. To some of us, the term “individualism” may carry some negative connotations. It could be fairly neutral, in a context like this one, or deemed positive (prefixed with “rugged”), but it’s an interesting choice, here.

    2. Not usually fond of these listicles, but the classification makes sense.

  27. Jun 2015
    1. Such is the case with every company in Silicon Valley, though you never hear it in their creation myth.

      Because those creation myths are aligned with the cult of the individual in American culture. We tend to value individual accomplishment over collaboration.