You Want to Make a Difference? Go to Cambodia
(or someplace like it)
Ten thousand baby boomers turn 65 every day in the US. Some of them are not in a position to retire. Some are. Some of them are not in good shape, physically or fiscally, even if they are able to retire. But some are. Some would just as soon not do very much, not much more than golf or gardening anyway. Some would like to do more than that. Some have a little energy left, along with a little wisdom, and they say they’d like to make a difference.
Of course some people who aren’t even retired baby boomers want to make a difference. They might be trying to do it through their job, or by volunteering in their optionally investable time. But retired or working, wealthy or marginal — it’s not easy to figure out how to make a difference, or what that phrase even means.
Maybe it’s like the idea of Quality, hard to define but you know it when you see it. It also feels kind of me-centric. The difference to be made is presumably something that will be beneficial to others. And I want it to be my actions, specifically, that bring about or at least help bring about the beneficial change. So while there is something altruistic going on, the difference-making is also meant to be personally fulfilling, which I think is easily understandable. Being the one to bring about the good thing doesn’t mean getting credit for it, becoming famous, or even being rewarded. I think for most people who say they want to make a difference, the reward is intrinsic. We just want to know we did it.
Do what? End war? Alleviate poverty? Almost anything worth working toward is not only Really Complicated, it’s probably impossible. Making a difference requires focus, stepping back from the Big Picture and selecting one aspect. This project. This neighborhood. This group of people. It can be difficult to make the right choice. Projects look different once you are deeply involved with them than they did when you were on the outside looking in. Plenty of people who think they’ve found a way to make a difference become disillusioned. They drift away from the project they selected as their chosen vehicle and begin to wonder if it’s actually possible to make a difference in the complex and interconnected world we live in.
Everyone doesn’t drift away. Some find just what they were looking for. But many do not, and many others never quite get started. I got started way before I retired. I took jobs that I thought would be supportive of causes and directions I believed in. I volunteered with organizations whose goals matched mine. I cannot think of any case in which I did not become disillusioned to some extent. No one had been lying about the goals, but what I could not see from the outside was the way the imperatives of the organizations I had joined up with were the real priorities, with the stated goals necessarily secondary.
This kind of hijacking is well known. Many people grasp the dynamics that put the organization’s survival before the ideals. It’s part of what makes it so hard to get into the whole making-a-difference biz. I have not figured out how to avoid this inevitable tendency for working indirectly, by helping an organization stay afloat, instead of working directly at difference making. I think it’s baked into the process. And it’s usually not what we had in mind.
Home vs Away
You don’t have to leave home to make a difference, but my current opinion is that it helps. In part, it’s the old you’re-never-a-prophet-in-your-own-land phenomenon. The boss will always listen to the outside consultants, even though the inside experts were saying the same thing all along. We implicitly assume a new perspective is a more useful perspective.
It’s more than that though. People like it when someone comes from someplace else to help out; well, they like it but they are also wary. Are these outsiders doing it for themselves or for us? Can they even find a way to be helpful? Judgments are suspended. If outside helpers stick around for a while and show no signs of being rip-off artists, they acquire a type of leverage that can make them very effective. If outside helpers are sincere, people appreciate it and say so. If outside helpers work hard, it helps make everyone want to work hard. Once they’ve put in some time, outside helpers’ ideas will be listened to. People who want to make a difference can develop leverage right in their own home territory too, but, in my opinion, it’s more difficult.
That said, it is also true that all away-from-home situations are not equal. Whether you are from China or not, China is an extraordinarily difficult place to make a difference right now. The government there is very strong and it has a plan. Individuals or organizations which try to make a difference in a way that deviates from the plan are usually thwarted. Making a difference is also difficult in the United States right now, although for different reasons. Extreme polarization means that any action will automatically generate an oppositional counter reaction.
In general, I think it’s easier to make a difference in a small, less-developed country than in a large, more-developed one. There is not as much resistance to contend with, not as much to get in the way of the difference you want to make. There are exceptions of course, but size and status provide a reasonable first-level filter.
Cambodia
Cambodia is a very small country that was so far down its arc is almost necessarily on the ascendant. In other words, it is in the exact opposite situation of the land of the free and the home of the brave. Change can happen more fluidly in a small place on the way up from unthinkable lows.
In Cambodia, the public school hours have been low relative to neighboring countries. A recently mandated increase creates opportunity. How to fill the new hours? Local organizations have good ideas and need help making them happen. That’s where the right outsiders can make a difference.
I recently traveled around Cambodia with two complete 360 degree video set-ups, recording famous places like Angkor Wat as well as everyday life in the cities and the villages and the open countryside. I showed little segments of Cambodia in a VR headset to hundreds of Cambodians and the percentage of delighted people was 100. That was fun. But the real difference-making was teaching kids.
A pilot program for using some of the new hours of school to integrate Art into the system was just underway. People from Cambodian Living Arts who are leading the program saw 360 degree videos as a way to get students excited right at the outset. I ran two workshops, let the students do their own recording, and then showed them how to edit. I left one complete set-up behind.
Seeds were planted. They still need tending. A few more visits, a few more people. The idea is to grow something there. I think the Johnny Appleseed model of making a difference is a nice idea but it’s unrealistic. I guess if you can throw out millions of seeds a few of them might grow into an orchard, but who can actually do that? Nature can afford to be profligate, but most of us can’t. So if I want the difference I’m trying to make to be sustainable, I have to stick around and do more until something I helped start can stand on its own and doesn’t need me anymore.
The opportunity to make a difference that I more or less fell into in Phnom Penh is not a unique situation. There are plenty of places on a mild upswing where the nets are looser and ideas can be made real more quickly. Teaching kids is all about leverage, especially if you can teach them to make something they need and it turns out to be the difference you had in mind.
A Note on 360 Degree Videos
I think 360 degree videos, even 2D non-stereo low-resolution videos, are one of the gateways to richer VR experiences. The ones I make are low-end. They look like 1980s-style VHS videos, but they work. Nevertheless, some critics say 360s are “not real VR,” or worse, that, “they are blocking real VR.” These claims are important, even if it is not entirely clear what is being claimed by the use of vague terms like, ‘real VR.’
What 360 degree videos are capable of, right now in 2017, gets to the heart of how I think about making a difference that could really matter. I believe it is a question of what you see as the essential defining characteristic of VR. If you think the essential characteristic is Interactivity, then 360s are not real VR. If you think what defines VR is Immersion, then 360 degree videos are real VR, at some point along the spectrum of immersiveness.
I am in the Immersion camp. I am already accustomed to Interactivity in a wide variety of my media experiences. To me, it is the Immersion I feel when I am in the headset that is unlike anything, unlike any other medium, where the content is framed and distinct from me. The presence that I feel in someone else’s world creates an intimacy that is immediately noticeable. People smile a lot while they’re in the headset with the 360 degree videos I’ve been making. I think new kinds of stories can be told, and more of us can be seen and heard.
It doesn’t take much to make the brain believe it’s in the middle of some place that it knows it isn’t. The video doesn’t have to be high resolution; in fact, there is research to suggest that after a certain threshold, resolution can work against immersiveness. It’s nice have depth and mobility and spatial sound design, but they are not required to establish a sense of immersion. A $300 camera and a $20 headset can do it.
The craft, or maybe even the art, comes in learning what makes 360 video compelling — what camera placement, what camera motion if any, what kind of situations pull people in? And that’s just the beginning. How can 360 degree video segments be sequenced to tell a story? How does immersion in the places that make up someone’s world affect our appreciation of their life narrative?
I think stories can make a difference. I think telling stories about ourselves that are deeply felt and true can show what we all have in common and help overcome the ways we are divided. Stories are used against our species as a whole when we are told The Others are not human like us and they are out to get us. We can overcome those false narratives. We have to. The story I am currently telling myself is that 360 Degree Videos can help make a difference by introducing a new media element with its new themes into the cultural mix.
Feel free to get in touch if you would like to discuss the Cambodia project.
