Tag: social interaction

Parking Lots & Cultural Stans

~ cafebedouin

“The twin gods of Smooth Traffic and Ample Parking have turned our downtowns into places that are easy to get to, but not worth arriving at.” The quote is from urban designer Jeff Speck. It’s hard to think of a pithier one to describe the parking pandemic blighting America’s city centers — except perhaps the title of a Bloomberg article on the same topic: “Parking has eaten America’s cities”.

-Frank Jacobs, “These maps provide graphic evidence of how parking lots ‘eat’ U.S. cities.” bigthink.com. March 26, 2023

The major idea in this article is that there is often an inverse relationship between accessibility and interestingness. The more space you have to accommodate cars, the less space you have to accommodate people.

Open question: Is this inverse relationship also true in a space that is designed to accommodate people? Does a stadium that accommodates 100,000 people fundamentally different than one that accommodates 10,000? Are both fundamentally different from a venue that caters to 1,000? If so, is there a function based on orders of magnitude in play?

My sense is that the larger the group of people, the more likely pockets of sameness develop, which we might describe as a sub-culture. But, to have a sub-culture, you also need a dominant culture. We could probably use the Dunbar number as a reference point.

In any group, where each individual can know every other individual, there is a culture than defines interactions between individuals. This culture probably starts in groups as small as two. How two people relate will effect the dynamics of a third that enters a social circle? Each additional N people added to the group will tend to reenforce a particular dynamic. As the group enlarges, different dynamics can arise from different sub-groups.

But, my guess is that there is a share of voice issue that comes into play, where groups of the same sizes, say stadiums with 10,000 people are going to tend to look a certain way. Other factors, say a particular type of sporting event, will have its own norms that will influence these dynamics, but the size, by itself, is a part of these dynamics.

As size increases, the share of voice of average view and attitudes gives more sway to an average point of view, like a bell curve. With more people, there is more tail. But, there’s a whole lot more gravity in the center of the distribution.

This probably has a lot of explanatory power at different scales. For example, when you enable a mass medium for communication that is the Internet and infrastructure like translation tools, you are increasing your scale to global levels. This creates a global, Internet culture, but it also makes possible the creation of sub-cultures and new identities that wouldn’t be supported at a smaller scale.

If we think of this mainstream culture as a kind of parking lot, then it makes sense that people would be largely dissatisfied with it, and seek out alternatives. Yet, the critical mess will still sit at 1/3 and make much of the surrounding culture that it enables less interesting because it creates incentives to join these communities and it reduces the number of connections between individuals. Network nodes move from individuals to their stans, and each stan is a kind of parking lot creating the same kind of drag as the main culture.

This a just a brief sketch, but you get the idea.

Communities vs. Transactions

~ cafebedouin ~ 13 Comments

My wife and I have different ways of looking at the world. It occurs to me today that the ambiguity of these two ways of looking at relationships is often exploited.

I think my wife’s understanding is typical. In her view, people do things for one another because they care about one another. Unless it is some extraordinary request, you don’t count the cost. If someone doesn’t care about you, or you them, then you are not obligated to do anything for them. In fact, it’s likely you won’t help them because you don’t have the feeling of reciprocity from them.

However, one problem with looking at the world in this way is that beyond a certain threshold, the community model moves into a transactional model. Someone asks for something beyond the normal level of reciprocity of the commons, and then you owe them something extraordinary in return. But, it’s tacit. This is never actually said because the transactional model is a different model of interaction, and it undermines the community model.

There are also some cases where there will never be anything in return. But, sometimes the obligation is created across generations, such as taking care of elderly parents with the hope that, one day, your children might take care of you in a similiar manner. These kinds of commitments gives community longevity, so they last beyond the current participants. But, again, there’s quite a bit of ambiguity, and in many cases, expectations won’t get met.

I start from a different place. I assume every interaction is transactional, and I try, to the degree possible, to be autonomous and self-sufficient. The last part is key.

In the transactional model, you’re in the world of commodities and commerce. While there are relationships built on commerce, they are not relationships of regard or community, they are relationships of convenience. The advantage of being autonomous and self-sufficent is you can live in a world of commerce and not have to count the cost, the same way that you live when you live in the community model, except it doesn’t matter whether people care about you or not.

Except, obviously, it does matter whether people care about you. The difference is that I don’t need that to be the basis for my day-to-day interactions with everyone. There is a small group of people that I interact with the expectations of community. But, outside of that small group, it’s the transactional model.

And, here’s why that’s important. When you go to a subreddit, like antiwork, and you see that a boss asks someone to come in on short notice and be a “team” player. That’s a community argument. But, does the boss care about you? Not at all. The relationship is transactional. Working this kind of ambiguity, given how many people subscribe to the community model, is a path for exploitation. It’s really that simple.

The Danger of Small Talk

~ cafebedouin

“The Finnish don’t believe in talking bullshit.”

—Laura Studarus. “How the Finnish Survive Without Small Talk.” BBC.com. October 17, 2018.

Small talk is a social lubricant. It creates openings, fills in gaps in conversation, and eases partings. In environments with complex social networks that extend past our Dunbar numbers, social anxiety is a natural byproduct of the environment. Small talk eases this anxiety.

Gossip also has these features. It can be useful in communicating social standing in a group. It’s how reputations are made. But, it is can also be damaging if it becomes the focus of interaction, where what others think and will say about us within a group polices group behavior, leading to inauthentic lives.

Small talk has a similar problem. Sure, it can signal social connection and paper over awkward moments. But, it can also become a crutch that we rely on so much that we do it instead of making any kind of meaningful connection with others, which can easily heighten our feelings of social anxiety and disconnection.