SOCCER
Last night I viewed an episode of 60-Minutes featuring an exciting movement in Barcelona creating a process/organization that gave young children a high quality education AND prepared them to be prime players in the game of football (soccer in the USA). This effort is a highlight of the city, giving it meaning.

What my mind explored was a meta issue – how much of the “Rest of Reality” (RoR) were those deeply involved in this exciting venture aware of, and to what degrees.  There actually was explicit reference to Catalonia’s political movement to separate from Spain, so we know that many are not locked into “just sports”.

SPORTS has long been my exemplar for lockins, but never adequately explicated.   From my first period living alone in a major USA city, Cleveland , Ohio during the summer of 1956, working for GE, and discovering (to my disgust) that the front page of the Cleveland newspaper was the sports page.

I wonder at who actually are those persons, dressed in proper gear, who “ride” their bicycles up 5,000+ feet to the summit of Mt. Lemmon, above Tucson, Arizona – and then “fly” down the winding mountain road. What are the other domains of interest for those who devote considerable time to performing or consuming a “sport”.

Most sports fans are oblivious of their manipulation by big business – e.g, tailgate parties and massive stadiums.  The football stadium in Barcelona was awesome.

The query; for those for whom SPORTS is a primary domain in their lives, how much detail are they aware of in all other potential domains?  Does everyone have a set of primary domains that occupy the vast majority of their time and attention? How do these domains change over time?  Could this be mapped?

MAPS
I have a map of the land masses on Earth where the areas on the map reflects the actual land mass area. The awesome expanse of Africa makes the first impression.  There are many different projections for the coastlines and national boundaries that highlight different aspects of those regions.

Color coding and elevation above the map surface can also be used to represent different aspects of different regions. Unfortunately, these visual representations quickly lose their utility when we attempt to contrast many different factors simultaneously.

IMAGINE a map of different domains of interest or involvement for persons.  The area for each domains representing a function of time-x-attention-x-level  given to each domain.  My interest is the ~5% called “other” – the RoR that is seldom explicitly attended to. What is the refugee’s knowledge of science or globalization? How much of the map of most is given to our Crises-of-Crises? And, even those MOST ACTIVE in the nu emergent movements, what are at the margins of their world awareness?

Might we view the narrow margins of a person’s map as NEGATIVE CONTEXT.   Positive Context would be the cognitive domains most relevant to their primary activities – which may be “right” or “wrong”, “depending”.  Negative Context is not “negative” from the force of its ideas, but “negative” in its critical constriction of Reality.  In the absence of some context, what actually develops may be highly bizarre and ultimately very dangerous.  Yet, this has been the human condition for a long, long time.