Blog Assignment #8: Brainwashed

http://changethis.com/manifesto/show/66.01.Brainwashed

“Acknowledging the lizard” is about acknowledging that a part of us is deathly afraid of making fools of ourselves and being laughed at. By letting it control our actions, our creativity is stifled. We must acknowledge the lizard so that we can ignore it.

The “Connect” lever is about how today’s economy and world has access to social media that brings us closers together and takes us farther across the world than ever before. Where we grew up isolated, we can now reach just about anyone. We must take advantage of this ability to connect.

The “Be generous” level is about giving before we receive, or without the traditional idea of ‘I give this and you give me that.’ We can create and give away our creations to support others or just get ourselves out there, and through supporting each other this way we can all profit from it.

I think that, while these blog assignments are occasionally thought-provoking, they are assigned in the traditional school-fed way and many if not all students today treat it as such. They are assignments that could possibly be done on paper or in a way that didn’t involve posting them publicly to a blog, which may give the illusion that we are “connecting” and “being generous.” However, the only people likely to see these blogs are our teaching assistants, and we are not being generous, we’re just trying to turn in assignments in order to receive a grade so we can pass the class. That is how school works, similarly to jobs and receiving money. More money from a job is roughly equivalent to better grades in school, and in our “brainwashed” way we will do what is necessary to achieve it without always fully putting ourselves into what we do. Write blogs, receive credit. For us to take advantage of the “connect” and “be generous” levers with our blogs, we would have to be placing them somewhere truly public, where others are sure to come across them and read them, not a freshly made blog that no one is likely to even stumble across, let alone read. But for us to do so would require acknowledging the lizard as well, since we may not always want others to see how we respond to these assignments. However, even in this case the receiving a grade incentive is still there and possibly the only reason we attempt these blog assignments. That may be something we just have to live with for a while yet, while our education system catches up to today’s advancements- if it ever does.