Observations
On the way to work, walking from Euston to MHS:
a passerby - a girl wearing a faded t-shirt bearing the faded illustration of a crown and the words 'King of Love'. For some reason I picture myself shaking her vigorously by the hand 'your Majesty', I say 'it is an honour to meet you... I am a loyal subject of the Kingdom of Love - I haven’t spent as much time in love as I would like, but I would like to thank you for making it such an excellent place.'
I wonder what it means to wear a t-shirt saying 'King of Love' - because it seems to me a new thing in a human history that words should be quite so completely transvalued. It is not a new thing to note that words depend for their meaning on their context - but it seems a distinctly 'postmodern' thing that words can be so completely traced by their context - that their location can erase them in such a way. I start to notice a kind of gradient of significance around me with words sliding downwards across the faces of slippery marketing materials.
My colleague and I pass a photographer who we regularly see resting against the railings on the Euston road, long lens cradled in one hand, coffee in the other. We stop and ask what he is doing. He responds brightly - an unashamed, practised response, I think 'waiting for Dr. Death - this is the GMC building... he's going to be walking along here - probably looking around a bit nervously...'.
We wish him luck in his hunt for Dr. Death and continue our walk to work, eager to once more join the fray in the battle of good against evil.
Monday, September 25, 2006
Friday, September 01, 2006
Conformity & Creativity
conformity & creativity
Wikipedia defines conformity so:
'the degree to which members of a group will change their behaviour, views and attitudes to fit the views of the group.' As a psychological definition it is understandably couched in behavioural and observable terms - and fails to get to the heart of the matter, I think.
Something stronger, along the lines 'The degree of conformity of a unit is proportional to its residual frustration with the normal system' is more interesting to defend.
Clearly conformity is not merely 'doing what most people do' - nobody would describe military personnel as a non-conforming group of individuals - it is more like the degree to which people are satisfied by the available options. A person may 'fit in' with the '9 to 5' existence but privately feel frustrated long for something different - in this sense they are conforming only superficially, complying but not truly conforming. If, however, they go home, watch a sitcom about how laughable office life is, and return next day with a smile on their face, ready to face life with a new perspective; then they may be conforming. Conformity works in mysterious ways.
Any existence will offer a number of alternatives, simply as a way of inmproving the degree of conformity and reducing the degree of frustration within the system as a whole.
So the internet is an interesting thing: at an abstract level you would guess that increasing the degrees of freedom of a system (i.e. the total possible way in which all the units can be related together) is most likely to cause the system as a whole to settle on a new attractor - shifting to a new, more all-inclusive pattern. At an abstract level, then, the internet is a vast conformity-engine.
This seems counterintuitive, because the internet is superficially so diverse - and certainly you would predict that the medium-term impact will be massive disruption (as above). But from a wider perspective a different picture emerges: you can become quite frustrated and unconventional with only four options (or four 'channels') - but with vastly more options (or 'channels') almost everybody can be captured by the system considered as a whole.
Nobody need be frustrated - within the internet there is a norm to which to conform for all. In this way the internet fosters diversity to the extent that it creates conformity. Rather than four groups of people with many non-conformists we arrive at a thousand grups of people with hardly any non-conformists. What do people watch on youtube? They watch what everyone else watches - they start by sorting by most watched and watch the most watched.
Why should anyone care? It's as much a gut-feeling as anything: the sense that this 'frustration' and unconventionality is essential to something - to creativity, perhaps. That despite appearances to the contrary, the 'net'-result will be the substitution of variety for creativity.
Wikipedia defines conformity so:
'the degree to which members of a group will change their behaviour, views and attitudes to fit the views of the group.' As a psychological definition it is understandably couched in behavioural and observable terms - and fails to get to the heart of the matter, I think.
Something stronger, along the lines 'The degree of conformity of a unit is proportional to its residual frustration with the normal system' is more interesting to defend.
Clearly conformity is not merely 'doing what most people do' - nobody would describe military personnel as a non-conforming group of individuals - it is more like the degree to which people are satisfied by the available options. A person may 'fit in' with the '9 to 5' existence but privately feel frustrated long for something different - in this sense they are conforming only superficially, complying but not truly conforming. If, however, they go home, watch a sitcom about how laughable office life is, and return next day with a smile on their face, ready to face life with a new perspective; then they may be conforming. Conformity works in mysterious ways.
Any existence will offer a number of alternatives, simply as a way of inmproving the degree of conformity and reducing the degree of frustration within the system as a whole.
So the internet is an interesting thing: at an abstract level you would guess that increasing the degrees of freedom of a system (i.e. the total possible way in which all the units can be related together) is most likely to cause the system as a whole to settle on a new attractor - shifting to a new, more all-inclusive pattern. At an abstract level, then, the internet is a vast conformity-engine.
This seems counterintuitive, because the internet is superficially so diverse - and certainly you would predict that the medium-term impact will be massive disruption (as above). But from a wider perspective a different picture emerges: you can become quite frustrated and unconventional with only four options (or four 'channels') - but with vastly more options (or 'channels') almost everybody can be captured by the system considered as a whole.
Nobody need be frustrated - within the internet there is a norm to which to conform for all. In this way the internet fosters diversity to the extent that it creates conformity. Rather than four groups of people with many non-conformists we arrive at a thousand grups of people with hardly any non-conformists. What do people watch on youtube? They watch what everyone else watches - they start by sorting by most watched and watch the most watched.
Why should anyone care? It's as much a gut-feeling as anything: the sense that this 'frustration' and unconventionality is essential to something - to creativity, perhaps. That despite appearances to the contrary, the 'net'-result will be the substitution of variety for creativity.
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