meta
Here’s a collection of some social psychology concepts I find interesting. I’ll let these clinical definitions speak for me.
A social group is a collection of people who interact with each other and share similar characteristics and a sense of unity. A social category is a collection of people who do not interact but who share similar characteristics. For example, women, men, the elderly, and high school students all constitute social categories. A social category can become a social group when the members in the category interact with each other and identify themselves as members of the group. In contrast, a social aggregate is a collection of people who are in the same place, but who do not interact or share characteristics. from here
Groupthink in action: video
Groupthink is a psychological phenomenon that occurs within groups of people. It is the mode of thinking that happens when the desire for harmony in a decision-making group overrides a realistic appraisal of alternatives. Group members try to minimize conflict and reach a consensus decision without critical evaluation of alternative ideas or viewpoints. Antecedent factors such as group cohesiveness, structural faults, and situational context play into the likelihood of whether or not groupthink will impact the decision-making process.
The primary socially negative cost of groupthink is the loss of individual creativity, uniqueness, and independent thinking. from wiki
If you are interested in more, I think social psychology is the field that digs into this kind of thought. Social Psychology wiki
I haven’t found the term for the concept I’ve noticed. Maybe you can help: Having a label or term applied to a new phenomenon or unusual something, legitimizes its acceptability. For example, “What’s that slop you are eating?” someone says after looking at a medley of vegetables, cheese and grains. You respond, “Quiche.” The amend, “Looks tasty!”
This applies to new inventions, foods, clothing, whatever. If you do it on your own, you’re eccentric. If someone markets the idea puts a few bucks in an ad campaign, gets it sold in stores, then all of a sudden another social phenomenon occurs like ostracization for not knowing about the name for this same thing.
Example: blended up fruit before jamba juice existed, I yes I’ll get personal now, I was ridiculed or poked fun at for drinking such funky looking barf, then a few years later all those same douchebags are spending $5+ a pop for store-made smoothies.
Back to the first paragraph, I like having a distinction between of social group vs social category. now to let my computer read me the entire social psychology article while I doze off to sleep.
In conclusion, who cares.
Thanks for listening.
So I don’t write publicly much partly because I don’t want my thoughts to be immortalized online forever. Even if no one really notices or care, the fact that thoughts are out there means someday they could come back to haunt me. Or to help me…
Anyway, Since this is a blog and I’m torn about posting in blogs, I figure this is a good place to muse about such a topic. And maybe this newer blogging generation of tumblr will have some insights (so feel free to comment away).
The prose and cons of 1 blog for all, and posts lasting forever.
I like the idea of having one place to put all thoughts and having tags give distinct views as desired (photos, code, music, words are a couple). This way you give one link say, ‘http://blog.vincentcharles.com/tagged/tts’ and that is treated as the entire website. But it’s not it’s own site, one can easily look at everything. Is that good? Sometimes. I’d argue it’s good in some directions but not others. Example if one is looking at a personal site it would make sense to give links to more professional things like a resume etc. But if you want to give a prospective employer your resume it might not be a good idea for them to easily be able to see your photos of that party where you were puking all over the toilet at 4am. “I’m very responsible, dependable, reliable….burp.”
So a directed graph is good, maybe. [EDIT: this can be done by customizing my template: just show nothing on the homepage, only give out links to tags, and remove the ‘related tags’ section from each page’. There’s probably more to it than that but that’d be where I’d/I’ll start]
Now I’m losing patience so I’m moving on to the next topic. Should blog posts last forever? One beautiful thing of things like a wall or stream (on fb, twitter, g+ etc) is that the thoughts are very recent. Passing thoughts that can easily be read are very real to the person that posted them. When they fall off the wall, no one really reads them, they are still there tho…
So what I suggest is maybe having an expiration date on all blog posts by default. This post will stay on the live site for 3 weeks or while it’s one of the 10 most recent posts. As soon as post 11 comes along it will be bumped off into ‘private’ status. Not deleted because of course I want to keep my thoughts around for myself forever, but out of the public domain unless I explicitly say (at that time) actually this post is good for another 3 weeks or 10 posts) maybe you’ll say just leave it on forever. This post is timeless, for me.
These days we have so many pre-made platforms for doing stuff, sometimes entire new companies are founded on taking the same platform but framing it, or setting up their own set of arbitrary constraints that then give life to an entirely new form of expression and media.
Anyway, I’m toying with that idea. My hopes are that it will allow me to post more frequently because I know I won’t be held accountable for some random thoughts next year when I’ve completely moved on.
Ok off to actually make something do something, than describe some idealized ponderings of how things could be…. Thanks for listening and seriously, feel free to chime in.
As I’m trying to articulate this very simple thought it’s sounding more and more like it can be summed up with a short phrase and sound like a zen koan.
When I don’t care about something that something is easier to attain. Or when I stop reaching for something it naturally rests in my hand.
but then there are some other ways of seeing it:
When I put my ‘intention’ toward something it more easily ‘manifests’. (yes I like quoting newage dialect, sometimes it’s just easier to say things, but if I omit the quotes, I tend to not dismiss the entire phrase as unconscious cliché.)
So how can those antagonistic things co-exist? I don’t know but they both seem to happen sometimes at the same time.
Alright I didn’t really have much to say, I just wanted to post some thoughts here in my new blog, because I can.
Easy it is to post and make a tag.
