One of the more addictive features that the team has rolled out is the Money Confessions section where people can either publicly declare something or mutter behind the cloak of anonymity. Some of them are outright funny, like musing if buying a hooker a car is a bad idea, but sometimes they are heart wrenching displays of humanity.
It is that combination of irreverence and poignancy that makes the feature so addictive to follow.
So this morning whilst perusing my feeds I came across a post about being more of a bookworm than I already am. Unfortunately, there were no tips about how to extend the day by another couple of hours so I have more time to read in my already cramped life but there was a little gem tucked inside: BookMooch. BookMooch is like what LaLa was to CDs in that you create an inventory of stuff you want to unload and a wishlist of what you’d like to get in return. Here’s my inventory and it is also in my side bar showing six random items.
Getting started was pretty easy requiring you to choose username and password and to make your postal address available so that people you want to mooch from can ship to you. Adding books to your inventory is as easy as banging in the ISBN number, books without one can be easily looked up by author and title, and failing that you can always hand enter the item in. I knocked out some 49 books in under an hour and had three people looking to relive me of four in a couple more hours. Not too bad.
The system relies on a sort of karma system in that each book added to your inventory nets you 1/10 of a point, shipping one domestically nets you 1 point and 3 for international shipments. You’ll need those points when you want to get books for yourself with a domestic mooch being -1 points and -2 internationally. Reading Kafka at Work lays out the system better than I.
So far the system beats trying to set up an auction on eBay and feels a little more social than just dumping them in a box and posting it on Freecycle. I am particularly impressed with how easy it is to use and the first three people mooching off me are awfully polite people who are just about as book-addled as myself. I’m looking forward to figuring out what I would like to mooch and see how that end of the system operates.
Jumping on teh intarnets bandwagon, I’ve been playing around with laying some pipe, Yahoo! style. Iskold and MacManus have the best explanation as they draw a parallel between it and relational databases and just like those databases it can have a bit of a learning curve but it allows for some pretty powerful and nifty connections to be made once you get a hang of it.
Below is a screenshot of my Planets Pipe which mixes together Gnome, KDE, and Ubuntu sorted descending by date then by post title.
Squiggly lines abound!
As far as Pipes go this is pretty basic as it just folds the feeds of three sites together into one, the real power lies in using operators to chop up, drill into, and slice ‘n’ dice the data. For example, you could build a Pipe that feeds you info about a geographic location from photos on Flickr, listings on Craigslist and Freecycle, concert information from Pollstar, and events from Meetup. That’s the beauty of pipes is that it treats the Internet like a giant database and you can sort, query, and mix data to your hearts delight. As for myself, I am still getting my head around it and musing over what sort of data mash would have the greatest utility in my life.
What kind of pipe would you lay (using Yahoo! :-P)?
Guy Kawasaki’s Ten Questions with Dr. Joseph Chamie, Demographer and it’s follow up made for an engaging albeit brief read. I was especially drawn to it because of my minor in Sociology with a concentration in Economics and Dr. Chamie offers some well thought out “napkin notes” about the trends we will be facing in terms of globalization and how migration, urbanization, and in a broader sense domestic politics will impact the individual and collective fortunes of nation states.
For me it was a refreshing read as I usually dwell on doom and gloom being very much a pessimist and a believer that if you give a person enough rope they will inevitably try to string someone up followed by themselves. File me under the school of thought that humankind is a greedy brutish lot. Dr. Chamie paints a picture of movement on a regional as well as global scale that will carry with it the usual disruptions but at least from his depiction I, as an individual, might just be able to weather it.
While he is discussing trends on a massive scale it did get me thinking about when I wind down my fiction reading project that the next task I wanted to undertake was an understanding with regards to the interplay between politics, geography, demographics, and migration. Last year I began researching the role of corporations play in sustaining or undermining local economic enclaves. The Blue Back Square project in West Hartford and Evergreen Terrace in South Windsor prompted me to consider how many of these development projects are often a Faustian deal where the town is lead to believe that a windfall in tax revenue will occur and that it will possess a near infinite viability. When in fact these developments lead to capital flight as the majority of each dollar spent leaves the town and or region.
Could this be the same bargain that some members of the European Union will experience? Dr. Chamie writes, “European Union, for example, national boundaries have been opened for free movement and trade with a common market for its members.” More importantly, as he discusses migratory patterns to come, what is the impact of the communities that have forsaken locally based economic endeavors for multinational ones? Corporations follow the smell of money and if your community is experiencing zero or negative growth it will be the first on the list for vacating. Just look to the exodus in the Great Plains states.
Reading Kawasaki’s interview invigorated me to pull out my reading list and take a look as to what I have down so far. Starting off are Thomas Sowell’s Migrations and Culture and Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition both of which I read in undergrad but did not get the time to truly digest. Arendt’s work was read alongside works of Saul Alinsky which I found to be a nice pairing of thought and action. Following up are three books that I have read positive press on but have not gotten my hands on: William Bonner and Addison Wiggin’s Empire of Debt, L. Hunter Lovins, Amory Lovins, and Paul Hawken’s Natural Capitalism, Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and Jeff Speck’s Suburban Nation. Providing the structure for this slightly disparate list would be Jane Jacob’s The Economy of Cities and Cities and the Wealth of Nations. To fill in the cracks, I’ve spent the better part of the year gathering white papers and journal articles on planning and zoning, local political communication and activism, and analysis of regional economic trends. Heavy reading list but I’m sure I can spin it into something productive here or elsewhere.
If only I were born a trust fund baby, I would spend my life in academia as I am full of questions that want for answers.
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.
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.
… 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.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. —Voltaire
My education in canning continues. This time with tomatoes. #
You are currently browsing the elwoodicious weblog archives for 'social' tag.
Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution
by Paul Hawken
