Tragedy has been a major theme of our literature since ancient times — in fact it is probably the most antiquated form of fiction in human history. Contemporarily, we watch MTV soap operas and other forms of “reality tragedy” in order to fend off our desire to see the most dire conditions. We have transcended the age-old method of showing tragedy through plays and literature into real situations and books with people’s trials and tribulations are lining The New York Times’ bestseller list.
We are all obsessed with hardship. But why? Doesn’t it make us depressed or feel as though there isn’t anything to live for? In fact, it does the complete opposite. It’s almost as if society is using other people’s tragedies as a coping mechanism for their own problems and issues. In my opinion, the reasons for this obsession is dependent on the viewer’s situation.
For most people, the desire is a result of wanting to believe that individuals have the capacity to bring themselves out of hardship. For the millions of people that live without health care, get addicted to drugs, contemplate suicide, etcetera, there are a small percentage that do correct their situation and find a way to rise to the top. While the number is small, the fact that people do find ways to resolve their problems transforms hope into a human virtue rather than just another form of denial. An example of this transformation occured with the release of A Million Little Pieces. The Oprah scandal that followed the release of this novel devastated most people and the majority of the population that fell in love with the book felt cheated by falsity of Frey’s story. Frey instilled hope in the eyes of his millions of readers and the realization that his biography was merely a story caused the readers to proclaim Frey a “liar”.
I don’t believe that people admonished Frey because they felt like lying about a story was bad, I believe that people were furious because they had given so much power to hope and Frey shattered that hope. I still think its a great story. However, for most, Frey’s dishonesty scared people — it caused them to question whether hope was a virtue or a form of denial (sorry, I know its awkward to use a negative retort to prove a claim).
For others, tragedy is a litmus test for innate human good. People are reduced under tragedy — they feel helpless and we see their true character. Idealists have a strong affinity for tragedy because it shows that humans are capable of being altruistic and generally good to each other. Anger and rage are common forms of masking pain and suffering, but under the condition of having “lost everything”, people are seen for who they truly are. I think that under tragic conditions, people are once again reduced to the state of tabula rasa. I recommend reading: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tabula_rasa to learn more about the origination of the term and the theory. Locke is a major advocate of tabula rasa and he argues that people are empty minds when they are born or “blank slates” and that impressions are how people acquire their character. Human behavior, according to Locke, is a function of their environment and upbringing. A few theorists behind tabula rasa have also argued that negative impressions have more of an affect on people than position impressions — i.e. sexual or physical abuse. I want to make clear that substantive knowledge is different than psychological behavior: our ability to communicate in language is a substantive skill, but our ability to talk about our emotions is not substantive.
In the case of tragedy, humans can be reduced back to their tabula rasa form. While their substantive abilities, language, motor function, etcetera are in tact, their psychological behavior is completely altered. The warrant for this argument is that people who are subjugated to tragic conditions have almost nothing to gain from being ingenuine. When I talk of “tragic conditions”, I’m referring to people who have lost almost everything — they feel as though society is purposely pushing them down and that instead of continuing to fight, they have chosen to give up. Humans decide to act in their own interest when they have something personally to gain by doing so — in the event that they feel as though they have lost, they are reduced to the sympathetic beings that search for ways out of their situation by asking for help from others and simultaneously supporting others in similar situations. To the viewer, this is attractive because it shows the ideal human. This case is prevalent in the end of Shakespeare’s Othello and contemporarily in Celebrity Rehabilitation with Dr. Drew.
How does this apply to connection building? It has quite a bit to do with connection building. In fact, most human interaction is a result of tragedy. When people decide to find friends or build new connections for social reasons, they generally seek people with similar tragic situations or people who are willing to talk about their tragic situations. Interest in the tragedies of other people is the reason why we read books or novels — have you ever heard of a novel/memoir that did not deal with some level or hardship or conflict? As people are more willing to reveal their history and the hardship they’ve had to undergo, the stronger the connection between the two confessors becomes. It is through the act of conversing about our tragedies that we actually begin to understand people’s behavior patterns. The fact that people who watch tragedy reality shows or read fictitious stories about tragedy become close to the characters in those stories without actually meeting them makes this all the more true.
So do I think hope is a human virtue or a form of denial? If you know me, you know the answer to that question.
I posted a diagram a few days ago showing some primitive circuits and I was going to use the diagram to show the evolution of information exchange on the internet. Information exchange really began when people started using the internet back in the late 1980s and up until the release of Yahoo’s directories. Gathering information was mainly done by searching and the activity of learning new information was an individual task. Socializing information on the internet hadn’t existed.
For this comparison, I’ll use the diagram to show what I mean by the evolution of information exchange. Column A will be used to show the complexity of online connections and Column B will be used to show the information flow across those connections.
1a accepts that connections between people exist, but clearly shows in 1b that information isn’t being shared between those connections. This disconnect is probably the main reason why social networks became popular. While Zuckerberg, Abrams, and Anderson might not have thought of this as the main reason for why their networks all flourished, it was clear that people were yearning for an easier way to exchange information. Google was a great way to find what you were looking for, but for the most part, people like having information pushed to them. An example is: “David uploaded 4 photos of himself skiing” or “Michael attached an article from the New York Times”. People are also more likely to take a look at information that is pushed to them because it is more trusted than randomly perusing content silos. In the early 2000s, information flow across the internet transformed towards 2b where information intersected other information and as in 2a, connections between people had substance on the internet — people became much more than just a buddy on your AIM contact list, thus the dot in 2a.
Now, where does information flow go from here? People are beginning to realize that having information pushed to them from their friends is good, but its not ideal. For the most part, friends have an agenda or simply don’t like the same things as their friends do. While funny videos are great, the real question is whether information flow is the most efficient through the social graph (your friends).
I really don’t think so. People have very specific preferences and as I described before, psychographic projections are multi-dimensional. The act of sharing items with friends is beginning to decline because people don’t really always like what their friends like. In fact, most people are embarassed to admit what they really like to read or like to watch. If we look at 3a, we can see that people are connected to a stream (the horizontal line) and from this horizontal line, they are connected to other people and to information. I call this the “line of preference”. From the line of preference, information flows to the right people based on their preferences, not by who they’re connected to. As metadata becomes more detailed, the flow of information can become more efficient, targeted, and relevant. 3b shows the information still intersects other information, but the distribtion of that information is more relevant to the people.
I know the correlation to the diagram is relatively absurd, but in academia, people have a tendency to do absurd things.
I would recommend reading this first: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hierarchy_of_needs
As with our ability to function as humans, people need certain criteria fulfilled in order to accept a new connection. Online, we think of connection requests as so lifeless because they’re merely the ability to view information about me. However, the assumption that a request can only be binary is flawed. Individuals decide to build connections based on a lifecycle of the relationship. We progressively decide to elevate people from acquaintances to friends or vise versa. It is a series of events and interactions that cause a connection to exist and persist.
How do we manage this online? Well in order for relationships to be built, there need to be several opportunities for a connection to be strengthened or weakened. Relationships/connections are developed because both parties decide to take part in the connection. By providing opportunities to measure the strength of a relationship and offer ways to change the strength of the bond, connection building in the real world can be emulated online. Currently, the act of “sharing” things on the web have little to no incentive — shared items are what I call vanity currency. Shared items can become more valuable to both parties if they have some meaning to the strength of a relationship. In addition, showing people the reasons and actions that have caused a relationship to become stronger, will allow them to keep track of the relationships they’ve cultivated more readily.
I need to do some more thinking as to what the hierarchy of needs for new connections is, but at least its safe to say that there are such needs and those needs can be represented online.
One of the questions I struggle with is whether or not it is possible for people to connect without physically meeting. At Facebook, it was assumed that people didn’t become closely connected unless they had met face-to-face under “trusted” conditions. However, it has become apparent to me that people are connecting online and becoming quite close. Virtual devices have become more apt at helping people build relationships online and at mirroring real interaction.
But is it that people of the younger generation are becoming more comfortable with virtual interaction or that the Internet is becoming more accepted amongst all demographics? I would argue that the younger generation is simply more accepting of using the internet to build and maintain relationships. The people that are 19 now were the first to use AOL Chatrooms in the mainstream. Many contest that they have built relationships online through Internet applications and games.
My roommate actually invited a friend to spend the weekend in California he had met in high school through his favorite game Asheron’s Call. Sure enough, his friend flew in from Dallas and spent the weekend playing Halo 3 and talking as if they had met in person many times before. To my surprise, Scott and Kyle had never seen each other’s faces — they had only talked online.
Maybe the means by which we connect with people is changing — it seems as though the past four to six years have been a major inflection point in how the internet is perceived for building relationships. Fewer people attribute Chatrooms and meeting online to creepiness. Games have been a great place to meet people because they connect people that both love playing games. I think that the reason we haven’t seen more people meeting online is not because it is still perceived as creepy, but because there is no utility that correctly introduces people to each other.
I was talking to a professor at Stanford today about how the social networks are looking at a cross-section of the social graph. At first, I was quite puzzled by this considering people usually only care about the singametric plane of the graph. An example of what he means is that in linguistics, singametric refers to the study of language in today, rather than diametric which is the study of language over time. His thesis was that people wanted to see more valuable data about their friends and connections and the best way to represent this was to look at their progression of psychological and relational over time. He felt that a diametric social graph would allow people to see how others changed over time which would be more meaningful because it would give perspective on how people became the people they are.
I also realized this might be interesting because people would be able to look at how their diametrics overlapped. It’s true that my friends all liked to listen to U2 a lot in high school but don’t do so very much today. But how valuable is this data to me? I don’t really know, but I do know that is has quite a lot to do with my previous post.
Psychological projections (which will most likely be discussed throughout this blog) do require a bunch of analysis on what people have done in the past. I know for a fact that people do decide to build connections because they have something in common that is substantive from the past. I have a much higher correlation with another person because we both went to the same college or both died our hair green during our emo period in high school. In that respect, diametrics might play a significant role in the makeup of a person’s psychographic projection.
I know the title of this post sounds rather academic and overtly an example of intellectual masturbation, but I think it makes sense for this post.
Why do people build relationships?
Relationships are unique in that they are a double-blind objectification of a sensation. When I say double-blind, I mean that there is no true way to understand how an individual feels about a specific person and why they decide to build or not to maintain a relationship. Our ability to express information is too rudimentry to fully explain the complexity of relationships and the our personal tastes because the sensation of a relationship is dependent on the intersection of several sensations. Relationship building is thus ontological in nature because we are unable to fully communicate the reasons for why we love or like a specific person. The only method by which we can accurately understand the reasons for building relationshuips is through the understanding of a person’s psychographic projection.
What is a psychographic projection?
A Psychograpic projection is a digital representation of a person’s thinking patterns and personality function. At basic level, one might consider extroversion as one element of the projection. My theory posits that as the projection grows, it is clear to see a critical path of the projection — in other words, a person’s projection has a general “mode” of thinking.
Since the elements of the projection are multidimensional and have a infinite amount of possibilities, the solution can only be derived from a decomposition of these possibilities as values. While I still haven’t figured out what the critical path of each projection is and what it means, I can clearly say that a critical path exists for all projections. My warrant is simply that there are patterns of similarity between people for how they control free-will and how they make use of free-will. Therefore, a set number of critical paths exist for an infinite amount of possibilities within a projection.
