So You Wanna Get in Touch With the Artist Within?

Do you remember that girl or boy in your class who draw really good that they made your drawings look as if they were toddler scribbles? On a second thought they really were so, but anyways, was not that such a bummer?

It is not that you suck at drawing, like your drawing teacher used to tell you, but it is only that you use the wrong brain mode. Now, if I told you to draw a human being, the chances are that you will draw the same exact sticks man whom preschoolers draw. These scribbles were most probably what preceded the first alphabet, if not the first spoken language, and some of them are certainly universal.

Preceded the first alphabet: It might be that the first alphabet was an evolution of scribbles. You can scribble a man (or a woman, that would be a sticks man with boobs, long hair, and, in modern times, a skirt) but you can not scribble "town" or "good" in away that everyone else can understand. So we had to find a new way to convey our thoughts. And that is when we started writing or may be even speaking.

Convey our thoughts: This means that your scribbles are symbols, just like "a", or "!". They are abstract representations of the real world when your brain is running in the analytical mode. To be more accurate, they are the transition between the visual and the analytical modes of thinking, albeit more analytical than visual.

Visual and analytical modes of thinking: When we are born, and before learning a language, we think in pictures. It is not like we stop thinking in pictures completely after that. Actually, your ability to predict the trajectory of a thrown ball is not analytical at all; predicting it analytically means solving a set of differential equations, a skill that you can not develop before hitting your 20, unless you were a math prodigy, and even when you can, the method is too slow and cumbersome to catch the ball in time.

Your dreams are "visual thinking" as well. But it seems that we, as babies, soon face a very complex life, and thus seek reducing this complexity by reverting to analytical thinking, which strips an object of all its unnecessary details, reducing it to a word or a scribble that corresponds to a thought in the back of your head! (Before we developed spoken languages, it seems that adults kept thinking visually, but then, how complex their world was? Predators, prays, water and honga honga? Google "the great lakes of East Africa", these are our natural habitats, the shores around them of course)

Reverting to analytical thinking: and that is to be blamed for your scribbles. When you want to draw a human, you will always draw that stick man (or woman if you were a pervert or feminist). What you need to draw, is lines, spaces, colors, depth... etc, and not a man. But it is easier said than done. Now look at the following statement and try to see it as lines only, stripped of its analytical information content:

"Green cats are cool!"

It is very hard, not impossible though. And if you started imagining that each letter is another object (e.g. the "r" looks like a street lamp) then you are still doing it wrong, but you are on the right way. You should see them as lines, and spaces. It is hard because we are so used to operating in that dull analytical mode of thinking which tries to pick on analytical information (e.g. meaningful patterns) from anything it sets "eyes" on, and reduce it to that. But you can do it.

You can do it: Practice! Look around you and try to see the visual elements in that monitor, and not its function or name. If you are a parent who want to teach her kids drawing, then 8 is the proper age. Why 8 and not any younger, because before that they are still busy crunching the world around them into "words", and can not process certain visual elements, yet.

So acquiring the ability to switch between these alternative modes is the first step, substantial step, nevertheless. Next, take some drawing classes or read a book, you are not expecting me to teach you everything about drawing, or are you? ;)

Why Entrepreneurship? Why not Microfinance?

I do not claim being an economy expert, but, I think I understand the basics of such a complex phenomenon, or at least I understand the fact that a free economy is self feeding with some inertia, which means that once it starts falling down it will fall to its death unless some, usually deliberate, interventions are made.

Forecasts for Jordan economy, shortly after gaining its independence and joining the UN, were gloomy, and the country was expected to crumble down soon due to its “sever lack of resources”. But that was not the case. We found our own resources in the form of Jordanians working in rich oil states nearby, and financial support from other Arab countries, to help the Arab state with the longest borderlines with Israel in its military conflict.

In the 80’s the economy in Jordan was doing exceptionally well until the end of that decade, when it was discovered that the source of this fantastic performance was not real economic growth, but loans from the World Bank, leading, along with other factors, to the financial crises during the early 90’s.

The point is our economy was always highly dependent on the money that our expats in the Arab gulf sent back to their families, and the large doses of cash injected into the market every while and a then, through loans or foreign support.

But it seems like these are not quit sustainable resources and are hardly controlled by our own policies; The oil rich Arab countries are creating their own qualified workforces, and applying policies geared toward reducing capital migration to other countries, while the world is sinking into the biggest economic depression ever. So the only way out is Entrepreneurship? Or is it?

The term “Entrepreneurship” found its way to the Elite strata in Jordan as a byproduct of the sudden wide scale exposure to the Western culture, facilitated by the advent of the internet and exported books at the beginning of this decade. It stayed inert for sometime, and later was solely confined to the activities of “DART” club in PSUT.

Recently, it was brought under light after the beginning of the contemporary harsh economy period in Jordan. It has been hailed as the only way out, by its proponents. Hype is to be expected, no doubt, but not to such extreme degrees, for Entrepreneurship is the story of the 10000 who drown, for every one who crosses the river and see the sun on the other side.

The economy of a country can never depend on such a type of gambling, but lets assume for the sake of the argument that it can. Entrepreneurship is the commercial exploitation of niches that technology opens for us, and technology does not come by chance you know, it builds on R&D, which in turn builds on the proper infrastructure with Universities at the core.

Speaking the language of numbers, we, as a country and not Jordanian scientists in USA and Europe, publish only 2400 papers per year, with very little technological significance, and our R&D expenditures are among the lowest in the world (UK's R&D expenditure per capita is roughly 40 times ours).We can expand the analysis to include the dynamic attributes of technology, which given the level of our experience as a nation in technology production, will not be in our favor.

Put in another way, this whole “Entrepreneurship is the holy grail of the Jordanian economy” is rhetoric in nature, and builds on naïve assumptions. How much does Entrepreneurship, not innovation, contribute to the economic growth, or income per capita, whichever is greater, in the country it contributes the most? Fractions?

So what about micro financing? A small company can be registered for as much as 1 JD now. This can be a good starting point. And while its contributions to economy's growth are of marginal proportions as well, it still grants some income distribution within the society, which is something that had been neglected for quit sometime, and with the rapid economy growth in the last decade, the inequality in Jordan had been aggravated like never before.

Very few civil organizations are working toward empowering the underprivileged in the society, and may be even less are seeking empowerment on an economic level. The whole concentration is on empowering the already empowered, while leaving people in rural areas, or to be more accurate who are not Western Ammanis, languishing in tribalism and the likes.

I would really like to thank anyone who is promoting Entrepreneurship, for they love Jordan by actions and not songs, but they should also be more realistic about their pursuit, and adjust the resources they are expending on it, appropriately. While I really wish that we get to see more and more initiatives like “Zikra initiative“, for such initiatives works toward narrowing the chasm between the rich and the poor; which should be assigned a much higher priority, if you ask me.

[Conflict of interest: I had my own adventures before in entrepreneurship, which ended before getting on the boat, so my objectivity is not granted here]

A Critique of the Jordanian Blogging “Scene”

Unlike in Syria and Egypt, where the blogging movement was to some extent an extension of a relatively active political life, the Jordanian blogging movement found its roots in a rapidly developing IT sector, and a growing “Elitism” in the society, be it of the intellectual or materialistic flavor. This, I am afraid, had resulted in a somewhat impotent blogging movement on the developmental and political levels.

Reforms, according to Marx, and more importantly common logic, start when specific forms of consciousness begin evolving and subsequently pervading the society. Social media as a whole, and blogging in particular, have the potential to accelerate the forming of such types of consciousness if not give them the impetus to start. At this point it would be appropriate to turn into musing about two distinct, but strongly connected levels of consciousness; personal, and societal.

My experience as a young man tell me that youth in Jordan take personal consciousness for granted, and that is, in my opinion, a special case of a more general pitfall that human beings are prone to. I will not talk much about the problem itself, as I think what I already wrote is pretty much self explanatory, but I want to point to a very simple fact; blogging is a very efficient modern way when it comes to developing consciousness on a personal level.

When you translate what is going on in your mind into written words, you are immediately becoming aware of your thoughts from a more neutral point of view. It does not stop here. The feedback you get in the form of comments, and the “out-of-personality” experience you go through when you read one of the posts or comments you wrote sometime ago, will force you into developing some sense of self scrutiny.

A societal consciousness, on the other hand, would be trickier to define. To avoid losing the main focus of this article I will instead point to certain prerequisites that should be satisfied by a blogging scene if it is to serve in awakening and spreading a type of this consciousness. The first is accessibility. This is restrained by two unrelated constraints: internet availability and the language. I will only comment on the later by saying that posts written in Arabic are more likely to contribute to the forming  and evolution of any kind of societal consciousness.

The second prerequisite, second only in order but by no means in importance, is the society awareness of this medium’s uniqueness and capabilities. I am concerned that for the majority of those who are involved in social media, it is perceived as a mere extension, or substitution for the traditional forms of media, in the sense that it is still serving, mainly, as a medium used in propagating and documenting events of interest for people, with a bit of commentary.

I will attribute this, partially, to the charming effect of certain elements that made the whole of social media as a news medium more convenient, less mechanical (or more personal), and more courageous in comparison to the timid forms of media we had been familiar with in Jordan, which resulted in eclipsing the real potential of the this medium in the process. This was exacerbated by some Arabic news website and blogs that quickly rose to fame, and I am afraid that the forms of demagoguery these had contributed thus far had done more damage than helping in this regard.

If blogs are to help in establishing and sustaining this societal consciousness, people should be aware of its cerebration abilities, as much as they are aware of its propagation and storage capabilities. And while I believe that personal consciousness of the bloggers will definitely precede the societal one, I would be extremely cautious to say that the societal consciousness will naturally flow from the personal one. In all reality, I do not even think that social media, the way it is practiced in Jordan, will contribute, by natural means, to building any forms of consciousness, neglecting the very fact that only a fraction of people in Jordan are aware, in the first place, of the existence of such a medium.

In the light of this critique, which is limited by my experiences and cognitive abilities, I would like to invite any entity that is positively interested in social media in general, and the blogging scene in specific into joining efforts, or working separately, whichever is more convenient for them, on restructuring the whole thing in a manner that gives it the necessary freedom to evolve into a major component, if not the backbone, of the personal and societal consciousnesses.

That, I bet, will constitute the first few substantial steps toward building a Jordan that we all want to see and be proud of.