RYAN'S PHONE EXPERIMENT SECTION

Yesterday, I added a new section to the youandblogSpace called, "Ryan's Phone Experiment." With Youand's focus on the great need today for more understanding between people, I believe the way Ryan Fitzgerald has captured the imagination of so many people can not be taken for granted or written off in any way by those who claim to care about human connection. I believe it is worthy of serious (fun) reflection, but in a way that also does not overwhelm the youandblogSpace. So you'll find the "Ryan's Phone Experiment" section just to the right.

Let's see what happens:)

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"The final frontier may be human relationships, one person to another." -- Buzz Aldrin, Astronaut

ANOTHER RYAN: RYAN STEVENS, TRACY

Today I received a note from a newsgroup friend, Deborah Littleton. The note contained this letter to the editor.

Tracy Press/ Wednesday, 25 April 2007

A letter from Ryan Stevens

EDITOR,

It’s hard to watch or read the news. It seems the whole world is aflame in bombings, massacres, shootings and unavoidable global tension. Even locally, it is impossible to escape the news of possible or impending calamity when we hear about local schools being locked down as a reaction to violent threats. I thought about why all of this is a reality while walking around town Friday, and I noticed how some people avert their glances away from anyone in an attempt to avoid exchanging a simple hello with a passerby.

All of this got me thinking. We’re all so horribly disconnected from each other. We’re all so fragmented. We divide ourselves along lines of faith, politics, geography and social class, and these lines seem to grow deeper and with more breadth, becoming increasingly more violent and full of invective as the days go by. And instead of celebrating and embracing our differences, we accentuate them and denounce others in an attempt to make ourselves look better by approximation.

---

Why can’t we all see that we can be united in our differences When you think of it, we are all similar in the fact that we are all flawed, we all have dreams and we all want to be happy.

Our flaws are forever confronting us. That’s life. Some people react to this by acknowledging their flaws and trying to better themselves. Others try to obscure their flaws by drawing attention to the flaws of others, cutting someone else down in an attempt to make one’s self appear taller. For far too long, we have been cutting each other down, leaving all of us stunted in the process.

It is time to end the fragmentation. It is time that we, as a community — whether it be a community in the sense of a city or a nation, a church or simply as human beings en masse — join to form a bond.

It is time we lifted each other rather than aiding in the collective fall.

Ryan Stevens, Tracy

What if we shared Ryan Stevens' words with as many people as possible?

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"The final frontier may be human relationships, one person to another." -- Buzz Aldrin, Astronaut

RYAN FITZGERALD (YOUTUBE) CLAIMS FIRST EVER YOUAND AWARD

-- click above to go to the Ryan Fitzgerald YouTube channel --

-- click on image to enlarge--

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"The final frontier may be human relationships, one person to another." -- Buzz Aldrin, Astronaut

"LONELY SOCIETY?" I THINK SO.

To think that if even 500 people made such a call to a stranger, but 5000?

Some great insights in - Josie Morris' post "Lonely Society?" over at "new persuasion: Under Currents." (click on read text to go there)

"Even though Americans seem more connected than every before with email , myspace, text messaging, and online chat rooms, in reality we are more disconnected than ever before. We lack the basic need of people we can count on when we need them the most. We talk to people halfway around the world yet don't know who our neighbors are."

Josie Morris mentions and links about a study published in American Sociological Review about the trend today towarad "social isolation." Here is a link to one of the study's co-authors Lynn Smith-Lovin on NPR:

I wonder how many of us called Ryan, because "we" needed human connection for ourselves or because sensing Ryan's loneliness we did it to help him? Or, was it perhaps a spontaneous cultural "mutual understanding" that we are all so lonely - Ryan needs a call, I need to talk, we all need a hug?

Or, might we be in the midst of an emerging cultural myth?

Might YouTube be what his mirror was to Narcissus? So interesting how young Ryan Fitzgerald (RyanTwin20), like Narcissus, is a twin.

Following the thread . . .

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"The final frontier may be human relationships, one person to another." -- Buzz Aldrin, Astronaut

ON THE EXPERIENCE OF RYAN FITZGERALD

If you read the Tags (below) and view the video again: I'm Here For EVERYONE! Give Me A Call! 7742531962 . . .

What is your PERCEPTION?

What is your EXPERIENCE?

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PREFACE: The intention behind this post is solely to contemplate on the phenomenon of human PERCEPTION, how we EXPERIENCE our PERCEPTIONS; and, how the interplay of individuals' PERCEPTION(s) and EXPERIENCE(s) can lead to misunderstanding.


What Ryan Fitzgerald says in this latest video:

" . . . also, I'm not gay. I don't know why people keep saying this. There's a lot of people trying to say that, but it's not true. I'm doing this to help people and for no other reason other than that."

A few days ago, "Youand: the art of mutual understanding" awarded Ryan the first ever, "Youand Award." (Ryan has yet to claim it.) I said, "Just spoke with Ryan. He's not only legit, but coming from a very good place."

Since Youand has everything to do with mutual understanding for its own sake, I thought Ryan's simple gesture to lend an ear to another, with no agenda, was a great example of Youand in action. The huge outpouring of response to Ryan's offer was both inspiration and affirmation of the great need today for ways to improve the quality of our human relations.

With the mainstream media shinning such bright light on Ryan's beautiful gesture I missed a few details of his original offer. Or, was it that my own need for meaningful human connection influenced my perception? Over the next few days after his original simple 49 second video, two other video posts of his have followed.

In each of Ryan's next two videos he makes special mention about his displeasure that people think he is "gay." And he says that he can not understand why anyone might think so. Or, why they might think that his intentions are not without agenda.

A Youand approach recognizes that one's PERCEPTION in not "reality." And, that each person has their own EXPERIENCE of their own PERCEPTION, which also is not "reality." That for example, two people can observe the same event, each have their own PERCEPTION of that same thing, and each have their own unique EXPERIENCE of that same event.

This outlook is not unique to Youand. The Roman Stoic philosopher, Epictetus said: "Work, therefore to be able to say to every harsh appearance, "You are but an appearance, and not absolutely the thing you appear to be." And then examine it by those rules which you have, and first, and chiefly, by this: whether it concerns the things which are in our own control, or those which are not; and, if it concerns anything not in our control, be prepared to say that it is nothing to you."

Ahead, you'll see screen shots of Ryan's first two YouTube video posts with detail views of the the bio and tags sections for each post.

-- first post --

click on image to enlarge

-- second post --

If you read the Tags and view the video again: I'm Here For EVERYONE! Give Me A Call! 7742531962 . . .

What is your PERCEPTION?

What is your EXPERIENCE (thoughts, judgments, conclusions, opinions, labels, feelings, values that come to mind)?

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"The final frontier may be human relationships, one person to another." -- Buzz Aldrin, Astronaut

RYAN FITZGERALD IS THE BEST! WINS THE FIRST EVER YOUAND AWARD! $100

Just spoke with Ryan. He's not only legit, but coming from a very good place.

"Youand: the art of mutual understanding" is awarding Ryan Fitzgerald the first ever Youand Award, in recognition of Ryan's outstanding example to the world for the great value of listening to our fellow human beings. Mutual Understanding for its own sake. Congratulations Ryan! For leading the way into the final frontier!


On YouTube, one cell of a generous offer

By Lisa Wangsness, Globe Staff | April 23, 2007
© Copyright 2007 Globe Newspaper Company.

Ryan Fitzgerald , an unemployed 20-year-old who lives with his father in Southbridge , considers himself a guy who's easy to talk to.

Late Friday night, he made that a whole lot easier.

Seized with a desire to "be there" for -- well, everyone -- he posted a video with his cellphone number on YouTube, urging anybody anywhere who wanted to talk for any reason to give him a call.

"Girls, guys, whoever you are wherever you're from talk about whatever," the spiky-haired young man told the world, looking earnestly into the camera.

By yesterday afternoon, he had gotten more than 5,000 phone calls and text messages from around the world. This morning at 5 a.m., the free "weekend" minutes on his T-Mobile service were scheduled to run out.

"I haven't quite figured out what I'm going to do about it," he said. "But something needs to be done, because I'm going to end up with a $20,000 phone bill."

Fitzgerald said he was inspired to act by a video of Juan Mann , whose "Free Hugs" campaign became world famous after video clips of Mann hugging strangers appeared on YouTube. Fitzgerald said he wanted to try a twist on the theme of random human connection.

"Some people's own mothers won't take the time to sit down and talk with them and have a conversation," he said. "But some stranger on YouTube will. After six seconds, you're not a stranger anymore, you're a new kid I just met."

Fitzgerald wasn't the first to broadcast his phone number to hundreds of millions of people. Luke Johnson , an Arizona man with shaggy blond hair, posted his number on YouTube in September, just to see how many calls he would get. (The answer: more than 138,400 and counting, according to Johnson's latest voicemail recording.)

But Fitzgerald says his mission is different from Johnson's -- it is about genuine human interaction, he says, not sheer volume.

Unfortunately, however, Fitzgerald later discovered that his phone company -- unlike Johnson's, which offers unlimited free minutes -- offers no such plan. He said he could not find a plan anywhere larger than 6,000 minutes, which he said he would easily exceed.

But Fitzgerald does get unlimited weekend minutes. Afire with excitement over his new project, he said, he stayed up all night Saturday talking to people -- from Maine and from Utah, Germany and Mexico, from Alaska and Denmark. About 70 percent of the callers, he said, wanted to shoot the breeze for a few minutes about their plans for the day, and to inquire about his.

Others preferred to wade into deeper conversational waters -- about 9/11 conspiracy theories, for example, or about how hard it can be to be gay.

A man in Sweden called to thank him for "trying to make a difference."

And a bunch of teenage girls who said they were from London asked him his favorite color (blue) and his favorite food (lasagna) before finishing the call with a big collective kiss -- "Mmwwah!"

A few callers seemed creepy, or even downright scary, such as the man from Maine who threatened to become violent if Fitzgerald would not meet with him.

Jack Levin, a criminologist at Northeastern University, said Fitzgerald's experiment is extremely risky.

"An individual like this young man may feel safe and not understand that he's being manipulated by some sociopath who will fabricate his characteristics in order to have a personal encounter," he said. "At this point, this young man is in danger."

Levin added, "There's a good chance he'll be fine, aside from the money he's going to lose. But the question is, why take a risk like that when there are so many other ways that are far less dangerous to be altruistic, to be generous, to be helpful to other people."

On YouTube, Fitzgerald's video drew a melange of e-mail responses. "Cell phones don't take collect calls, so the only one getting charged is you. NOW WHO IS . . . STUPID?" wrote one viewer. "Why don't you answer then?" Deathwisher666 wanted to know.

Jackawful said: "This is how desperate guys can get." Wrote foxybrown555: "I think it is so kind that you are trying to help people by listening."

Fitzgerald's father, a clinical psychologist, is not at all pleased with his son's experiment, said Fitzgerald. He said his dad would not be interviewed for this story.

"My dad is a doubter," Fitzgerald said.

Not so for Fitzgerald's identical twin, Sean, who said the exposure could help him and his brother move ahead in their plans to become actors and models. (They have their first job next week, they said: a marketing gig in Maine for something involving guitars.) Still, Sean admitted, he was surprised at the response.

"Who wants to talk to a complete stranger?" he asked .

A lot of people do, apparently. Ryan Fitzgerald has had so many text messages he can't respond to them. Saturday afternoon, he turned the phone to "vibrate" so he could go to a concert by the band Hawthorne Heights, but he said he tries to call back many of those who leave him voice messages. He pledges to keep it up for as long as he can, despite the expense.

"Come Monday, no way I'm going to just hang up on people and say, 'I don't have the minutes,' " he said.

He has also gotten calls from reporters. He did an interview with radio station WAAF-FM, and he has had inquiries from a smattering of television stations as well, he said.

All of this has kept life unusually busy for Fitzgerald, who acknowledges his school-free, job-free, obligation-free lifestyle is perhaps unusual for someone of his age. His normal activities, he said, include bowling, writing computer viruses (just for sport, he said, not to actually send), researching this and that on the Internet, and hanging out with friends.

He said his father buys him a 12-pack of Dr. Pepper and makes him a roast beef sandwich for lunch every day.

"I never get sick of it," he said.

Fitzgerald graduated from high school nearly two years ago. He says he has not continued his education because he can't afford the itinital fees, but he hopes to begin community college this summer. He said he used to think he would study computers, but his YouTube experiment has made him think he might excel in a people-oriented field, such as human resources or psychology.

"I love talking to people," he said. "I just love helping people."

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"The final frontier may be human relationships, one person to another." -- Buzz Aldrin, Astronaut

PERCEPTION and EXPERIENCE of DEATHS

My first email:

"Hello (Friend in Southwest),

How are your students and you coping with the tragedy?"

Reply:

"Funny, only one or two people mentioned it. Out here in (the Southwest) I think most people feel pretty removed from what's happening on the East Coast. I'm guessing it's a much bigger deal in New York City, much more up close and personal."

My second email:

"(Friend in Southeast), I wanted to check-in with you about how you and your students and community are doing in light of our recent tragedy? Hope you are all ok."

Reply:

"Thanks, for your concern about our students (and faculty, for that matter) after last Monday's events. I think every campus in the country is shaken up. There have been reports all week of people being arrested for threatening high school and college campi all over. It's sad that you can't enter the classroom now without fear that something like that might happen. So, we are all a little rattled, but life and learning go on. This is our last week of classes (and it's a partial week) before exams, so school is almost out for the year."

---

I checked-in with two college professor friends of mine about how they, their students, and their communities were doing with regard to the Virginia Tech deaths, of one week ago. One friend teaches in the Southwest, the other in the Southeast. They shall remain anonymous as our exchanges were intended to be and remain personal -- "off the record." Also, this post is not about either of their personal views, but rather about the subject of: a PERCEPTION; and one's EXPERIENCE of that PERCEPTION. I want to explore how the same occurrence so often means something so very different to each of us.

Like I said, checking-in with my friends was personal, I was going to just leave it at that, especially given the sensitivity and sadness of the matter. Then today, I read this:

"Professor axed for VT stunt: Re-enacted tragedy to tout pro-gun perspective

By Casey Ross
Boston Herald Reporter
Saturday, April 21, 2007 - Updated: 01:00 PM EST

An Emmanuel College professor has been fired after re-enacting the Virginia Tech massacre in his classroom in order to air a pro-gun viewpoint that offended students at the Catholic liberal arts school, the professor charged yesterday.

Nicholas Winset said he was terminated and permanently barred from campus following a Wednesday lecture in which he dramatized the massacre to show that deranged gunman Cho Seung-Hui could have been stopped if another student had been carrying a gun."

Then I went to his YouTube posting and heard his point-of-view there: Fired Professor Speaks Out

Since honoring each person's EXPERIENCE of their PERCEPTION is so central to a Youand approach, I thought sharing these views might stimulate others to consider how what is so true to each us, is often so different to another person.

Sincerely,

José Angel Santana

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"The final frontier may be human relationships, one person to another." -- Buzz Aldrin, Astronaut

VICTIM

Today, from the earliest hours of the morning when I met with my regular exercise buddies, the subject that dominated our discussions was “the victim.” Either in our discussion with regard to our present national tragedy, or while talking about our personal lives this morning, “the victim” seemed to inform all of our conversations.

Then, as if fate decided to punctuate our morning with a living example, another friend joined us in full blown identification with his own victim(ness). There seemed to be no way to communicate with him without offending him, each and every gesture, word, explanation, or attempt to reconcile seemed to only produce more offense. There seemed to be no way of satisfying some invisible wound that oozed constant and bitter pain and resentment.

When asked what the problem was, only silence, mean looks, and more expressions of affront. No invitation to resolve the matter could resolve it. We parted ways with the mutual understanding that an invitation was “on the table” to resolve whatever the perceived “problem” was.

This led me home to consider the morning’s events and do my soul searching, reading and this writing on the matter.

My experience of our encounter was one of feeling helpless while with someone whose hurts, perceptions and actions threatened to turn “me” into their victim. I chose to avoid this by requesting a resolution to our problem, at any time of his choosing.

Below, and linked here are the insightful writings about "the victim" by Lyn Cowan in her book “Tracking the White Rabbit: A Subversive View of Modern Culture. Her words have assisted my reflection on this morning's events. Perhaps others might benefit as well.

Sincerely,
José Angel Santana

“. . . No one is only one-dimensional; no one is only a victim.

A careful therapy of an adult who was wounded as a child requires not just regression to recall and relive the wound; it also requires progression through remembrance of what that child has, and might have otherwise, become. This is a remembrance not of all that was true or false, but of all the maybes, the thousand maybes and might-have-beens. As long as that early painful experience remains the central and defining experience of one's life, no real creativity is possible; life is lived in reruns - no new ideas, no new characters, no new plots, no new possibilities.

This is not blaming the victim. It is rather de-victimizing the person who has suffered painful blows in childhood; it is a refusal to tag the person with an eternal label of “victim, ” a label of choice for too many therapy clients. This label has been handed out by psychologists, journalists, and lawyers, who keep referring to such persons as victims - not as adults, not as individuals who have experienced anything else, not as persons, but as victims. The Muses assist us to disidentify with the victim archetype by calling us to reshape the context and import of those experiences of childhood which wounded us, so that we may honor the wound without having to suffer it daily, centrally, eternally.

You cannot look at Michelangelo's sculptures or read Maya Angelou's writings and know for certain whether they were abused as children. What matters is what they have made, the enduring images in stone and words they have given the world. Their works are full of suffering and power and so they speak to everyone, regardless of personal history or individual circumstance. But we know that Michelangelo suffered all his life from the mean-spirited and self-serving manipulation of his father, and we know that Maya Angelou had endured enough shattering pain by the time she was ten to fill a lifetime. But Maya Angelou is not a victim: she was our national Poet Laureate. And Michelangelo became immortal when he first struck chisel to stone.” (64)

Click to read: Chapter 7 - The archetype of the victim

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"The final frontier may be human relationships, one person to another." -- Buzz Aldrin, Astronaut