Tag Archive for 'Communication'

Dried Meat(space)

Published by james on August 16, 2006 in Editorial. Closed

Management has found herself in the unenviable position of watching the gulf between herself and her childhood friend widen to a point where, at times, it seems uncrossable. There is no single cause or reason that can be identified, the first cracks appeared shortly after they graduated high school and became very noticeable about the time we got married. She’s not alone.

My best friend from high school was my best man and I for his wedding and the bonds that we forged as children and the sharing of those milestones were not enough to moor each other together. We grew apart because of the paths we headed down: he abroad to continual higher education and myself leaping out of college into the working world. The physical and temporal distance made the gap easier to accept as each time we caught up it had grown much further than I remembered making the awkwardness easier to rationalize away. Management and her friend, however, have had their friendship grow apart like the slow peeling of a bandage since neither has lived more than a few miles apart from the other.

Management’s struggle with the friendship as the pregnancy progresses made me stop to think about the study just published which concluded that Americans, on whole, have less real-space confidants than they did some twenty years ago. I’ve touched upon this study on two separate occasions and in both cases took the stance that the researchers were overlooking the possible role of the Internet as a tool for facilitating and extending relationships beyond the constraints of place and time that in the reality of now asynchronous communication is a necessity for the cultivation and maintenance of friendships. Reflecting on my own experience and Management’s I’m now left with the feeling that the core of the study is on target but the conclusion that technology is to blame still seems naive and more than faintly Luddite. Color me biased.

Narrow would be an apt description for the focus of any given day. From sun up to sun down, Monday through Friday, it is about work and managing the house. Precious little time is left for anything beyond reading a chapter in a book, sitting through half a movie, or replying to a handful of emails and IMs, this all before the baby arrives. Over-scheduled, we grind our way through the week and what pocketful of time remains is given over to our families. Are we missing out? Possibly. We have both watched two long term friendships evaporate and seen our social live retreat into a mere glimmer of what it once was. Are we bothered by the trend? That’s an extremely tough question to answer.

I’m ambivalent but that could be from sheer exhaustion or a mixture of resignation and satisficing but that could be me rationalizing. The simple fact is that never in my life had I partook in those vast social webs described in the study and portrayed in on TV and the movies. My circles have always been small enough to count on two hands with some fingers left over. So for myself the constriction of our social life has not been so great that my online network of acquaintances cannot offset it. For my wife, however, it has been more difficult as she had a much wider circle of real-space friends that occupied her time and she is far more extroverted than myself.

Neither of us has given thought to what impact Gabriella will have on our social lives.  The friendships that are fading or have disappeared will likely remain so but certainly she will encompass our time to such an extent that I may not give thought to this notion of shrinking social circles, though, there is the chance that the process of raising her will bring us out into the world more that we are currently. If anything, the child will likely keep my existential angst posting to a minimum.

Why PR ruins the news…

Published by james on May 23, 2006 in Editorial. 6 Comments

Sure the byline reads, Michael V. Copeland, Business 2.0 Magazine senior writer, but the article On the Launchpad: Unlocking the iPod is written like a self-congratulatory shill piece typically pumped out by over paid PR firms that Astroturf the news outlets. Minor massaging it is no different than this piece found over at MacNN. Hell, just Google for it and you’ll see close variations on a theme. From business to politics to health-care to world events this type of mouthpiece writing is prevalent and it does a disservice to the consumer of the news. Then again, if you follow the money, who is the real customer?

Not you and not me. The real customers are the ones paying for the placement of these pieces and they are paying for readership. It is the same model as broadcast television where the viewing public is the product and the customer is the advertisers, same model as Google AdWords. So what bothers me about this more than advertising? PR is insidious in that it clothes itself the trappings of authority and responsibility alluding to the notion of substance. Advertising is much more easily spotted in that it does not often pretend that it is any more than what it is, though there are exceptions it is less disturbing and damaging than PR which inserts itself in and amongst items that might actually be news.

PR pieces are laudatory and do not ask the obvious and sometimes difficult to answer questions. In the case of Navio that would be, “How is this different than every other closed source solution that has preceded it?”, “So, tell me, I’m going have to buy yet another device for playback of music and movies?”, “Great, another phone-home solution that will also act as a layer between me and my hardware and likely cause nothing but headaches when I want to burn a CD of photos from my kids first birthday. Why?”  I suppose that I ask too much from the Fourth Estate.
To Navio, the PR machine, and all the news outlets that run this crap without asking the tough as well as easy questions, I say screw you.

Framing conflict makes it easier to hang on the wall.

Published by james on May 3, 2006 in Editorial, Gaming and Tabletop. 2 Comments

It seems that my short lived stint as a GM is weighing on my mind and has me looking closer and closer at the dynamics that are in play with the group. One of the things that I did notice the last session was that while everyone appears to get along there is an undercurrent of tension and it would seem that is acted out through the game itself; if this was 3-on-3 elbows would be up and noses bloodied. Anyway, the experience has me pulling out my old textbooks and getting refreshed on the notion of decision-making and conflict resolution.

One of the building blocks of conflict resolution is the ability of individuals to articulate their position but the challenge in that is the group as a whole might not be communication within the semantic context. Word choices and meanings will differ among peoples and groups so there is a distinct need for the group to define a common language with which to hold meta-level conversations without adding to the existing conflict. This is not to say that group cohesion is achieved through dry discourses on individual purpose and motivation followed by a tedious negotiations, instead much of the time it occurs as subtext to the overall socializing patterns of the group.

Bormann’s Symbolic Convergence Theory is one interpretation of this process that grabbed my attention as an undergrad and has held it since. Essentially, Bormann postulates that cohesion emerges through the process of shared narratives which he terms fantasies. These fantasies are actually just stories and anecdotes that reveal and transmit emotion and while they are not directly related to the overarching goal of the group they serve to create a foundation of understanding. The sharing of these fantasies serve to weave a larger tapestry of connectivity between the individuals and the group which provides the cohesiveness allowing the group to address its long term goals (Bulher).

So what to do when fantasy chaining is not enough to provide cohesion? Well, the process ought to result in a common language from which to begin the process of addressing conflict however there are many different sources of conflict and several might be in play ranging from communication difficulties, issues of force, and agreement on fact-finding. Colorado University as a great website that outlines many of these issues as well as some possible tools to resolve them at their Online Training Program on Intractable Conflict (OTPIC) website.

Getting back to the gaming group it would seem that the conflict is a tangle of three issues: communication, scope, and facts. Certainly there is a great deal of variance in the opinions as to what the source of the tension is, ranging from finger pointing to a general malaise, and that ties into the notion of what individuals or situations may or may not be at the nexus. Add to that a general reluctance to communicate and you have a smoldering fire. Greatly complicating matters is the introduction of two new players as the group needs to be flexible enough to absorb them and generate the necessary cohesiveness to keep the group together. Groups more than two get complicated quickly.

Let’s see if my math is any good. Dredging up from my memory I seem to remember that a group of two consists of six distinct relationships based how each individual sees themselves, the other, and their respective positions in the dyad.

  1. A sees B
  2. B sees A
  3. A sees A
  4. B sees B
  5. A sees B sees A
  6. B sees A sees B

This jumps up dramatically when additional individuals are added to the mix. The number climbs to twenty-four distinct relationships for three individuals revolving around the same pattern but expanding to encompass the inclusion of how the group sees individuals and the individual sees that group. Basically, it is three dyads that are bridged to include perceptions of the other dyads. The group I game with consists of seven individuals and it would take me all night and a day to make a map relationship network but you can get a feeling for how complicated groups really are by just looking at a dyad.

None of this is to say that the gaming group has arrived at an impasse and that civility has taken a back seat to unabashed aggression. For the most part the group is one of the more healthy ones I have been a member of. This is more of an academic exercise that is fueled by my experiences and some of the recent reading I have been doing on the subject of gaming theory (big ups to Bankuei for boiling down the work over at The Forge). One of the interesting things about the articles on gaming theory is how work in social psychology, anthropology, and communications has been co-opted and framed in terms of leisure activities. Considering that my prior studies have centered around crisis management and corporate development it is breath of fresh air.

I see your lips moving…

Published by james on April 30, 2006 in Gaming and Tabletop. 2 Comments

… but I don’t understand a word you’re saying.

Now that I’m back at the table as a player I’ve been thinking more about gaming in terms of it being a social experiment. The small group conflict resolution exercises from college are very similar to the tabletop roleplaying experience in that you have a group of individuals playing to one set of motivations, the character’s, but underlying that are the individual’s own motivations and those could be in opposition to the former. It was that individual dynamic coupled with the group that made the exercise and gaming so fascination from a social psychology and communication standpoint because not only was their conflict to be roleplayed often a sort of meta-conflict would emerge with regards to how the exercise should proceed. Where did the character end and the player begin?

Bankuei of Deep in the Game has a great article on incoherence in gameplay, which by the way is no different than incoherence in those college exercises or even in everyday staff meetings. For any social gathering to occur with any degree of coherence there needs to be an alignment of individual goals with the groups. Every group goes through a negotiation stage where individuals work through the group goals and attempt to co opt them as well possibly propagate theirs into the group. Depending on the group this can either occur quickly, “We’re all here for the free bagels,” or with great difficulty, “I’m on an Atkins diet and all you brought was bagels?!”

The catch in all of this is how well the participant are able to identify their own goals and motivations as well as those of the group. Adding to the complexity is each individual’s ability to articulate those goals in a manner where all members are operating from the same semantic baseline. Tall order as in my experience most people have enough difficulty identifying those things that make them tick let alone expressing it in a meaningful manner. However, unlike staff meetings those groups of people that huddle around polyhedral dice already have two major goals aligned with the group: play a game and have fun.

So where an I going with this meandering half-baked essay about small group communication theory and my short lived run as a GM? That my earlier self-flagellation was misplaced. Coherence is as much the responsibility of the group as it is of the individual and that, as distasteful as it might be to some, meta discussion is a necessity to ensure that all the people involved are actually having their goals met or at the very least approximated to their comfort. If not than the result might be as Bankuei describes, “20 minutes of fun from 4 hours,” which in my book is a very close approximation of suck.

Sound advice is offered as the group should not only talk it out but play several highly structured games to determine what works best, “it provides concrete procedures and a solid direction to serve as a ‘compass’ that the group can then use to better find things they -do- like,” provided that those likes and dislikes can be adequately identified and articulated. The challenge for the GM is that they run these group encounters and are essentially charged with ensuring that the goals of the group reflect those of the individual. No small task.


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Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States