This is on Madison St. Not Madison Avenue, but just as nice. En route to Coffee, on foot.
Coffee and Croissant. Croissant: eh. Black Eye: mmmm.
Lauren of Breaking and Entering.
Chris and Natalie discuss.
Afterward. The snow prevented some from attending. Ahh, but it’s pretty!
Chicago Coffee Morning 2 happened in spite of the snowy conditions. Last night marked the first snow of the 2006-2007 Chicago winter season, and it came in with a bang. Supposed to drop several inches—even up to a foot in places—of snow over the next day.
Well, Natalie, Chris and Lauren showed up at our usual spot. Lauren was the first to arrive and was seated at the appropriate table.
Chris has no “current” blog and works in some capacity with finance. He’s apparently been through a couple blogs; I envisioned his use of blogs as somewhat like the way people use Moleskine notebooks…once they’re full, you move on to a new one when you’ve got a hankering to write or draw. I wonder if that would be an interesting way to approach blogging, with a finite number of posts. Perhaps this could be a new variant of Wordpress…It would force you to be a bit more deliberate, or could help you keep things separate as you might if you kept several notebooks going at once. I think a max of 100 posts should do it.
Lauren wants to be a planner and has interviewed at nearly every Chicagoland agency. She’s done the right thing by starting a blog at jrplanner.blogspot.com. Very appropriately named and I can’t believe she got that URL. She’s featured a nice PDF she put together on the comparison between Prefontaine and being a good planner. Find it in her sidebar, and wish her luck in finding a spot somewhere.
Natalie is a middleschool art teacher in Glencoe/Wilmette. She’s outside the blogosphere and thus provided a nice perspective on social networking and how it’s affecting the pre-teens of the nation. Or at least her neck of the woods.
Our conversation was mostly about social networking via blogs, Myspace, Friendster and Facebook, and the different ways that “real” human relationships are manifested online. I suppose, in my mind, we concluded with an idea that it’s like the difference between analog and digital pictures. For a more concrete examination of this, I recommend you check out Russell’s recent post about his use of a pinhole Polaroid camera to capture his meetings/work environments. Truly fascinating stuff.
We were talking for a bit about the differences between online and real relationships, and whether an online representation is inherently less “real” than the impression you get of an individual when you meet them in person. But Natalie brought up an interesting point… our online choices — how you lay out a Myspace page, what you include in your blog or your Flickr or your Facebook — can be just as superficial and manufactured as the way you dress, fix your hair, or style your interpersonal interactions. I, somewhat tangentially, brought up this post I wrote about identity. No need to click through… I’ll put the important part below:
I’m currently reading The Ethics of Identity by Kwame Anthony Appiah. I was first introduced to Appiah, I think, by Prof. Movindry Reddy of Occidental College. The book was published in 2005. Appiah is professor at Princeton and is a leading thinker in the identity arena.
One of the notions that sticks out is the idea of identification and identity. “Once labels are applied to people,” Appiah writes, “ideas about people who fit the label come to have social and psychological effects. In particular, these ideas shape the ways people conceive of themselves and their projects” (Appiah, 66).
In support of this notion, or rather, to introduce it, Appiah mentions the Robbers Cave experiment of 1953, where two groups of young boys were taken to a camp in the Sans Bois Mountains of Oklahoma. The boys were from a generally homogenous white background and were settled in separate camps in the deep woods. Once each group of boys had set up camp, they were told of the presence of the opposing settlement. In a rather Lord of the Flies style, they competed against each other in a variety of physical battles including baseball and tug-of-war.
In a matter of four days, each camp (on their own!) developed an identity: one named themselves the Rattlers and the other the Eagles. The Rattlers, fittingly were the tough ones (swearing, fighting…the whole ‘tough guy’ bit) while the Eagles maintained a stoic, gentlemanly air. The really interesting part: “The groups did not arrive with these names; nor did it occur to group members that they needed a name, until they learned about the presence of another group on the campgrounds†(Appiah, 63). Somehow, within the span of four days, these kids–out of thin air–developed distinct identities.
The juncture between this idea and the online social net is that our understanding of others’ superficial identities is manufactured artificially, either intentionally or without conscious thought. It doesn’t matter anymore whether we’re talking about online or real-life identity, because both are so easy to manipulate. Chris, Natalie and Lauren, please feel free to elaborate on our discussions in the comments. This is a fascinating topic and I’m glad y’all came down to chat.
The next Chicago Coffee Morning (ed. 3) will be December 15, and then we’ll be off for the rest of 2006. So you better show up.
8 Comments
I am always interested in how identies are shared. While in India, I found that in more rural settlements, identity was less important than belonging to a family. Several boys in the villages had the shared the same name and even last names, though they had no blood relation. Everyone referred to eachother as “brother and sister; auntie and uncle”, and even my fellow travellers were referred to as such..
With the onset of capitalism and the premium put on the value of the individual, I believe the idea of “community” is somehow lost. This particular community in India will see no threat of modernization so long as its natural resources, and tourism potential stays off the radar — unlike its neighboring villages. You see this same threat in Amish communities where there is an intense reviewing process each “new technology” must go through before it is allowed by the Ordnung (an institution made up of elders that keeps Amish law in check). In his book “The Amish Struggle with Modernity” Donald B. Kraybill writes,
“…modernity is a process of social separation that fragments and differentiates. Thus the Amish, in order to maintain cohesive communities have tried to remain separate from modernity, the Great Separator” (23).
Some social theorists like Kraybill are in agreement that the application of technology (industrialization) to virtually all aspects of social life is the “prime catalyst” in the modernizing process. And thus, perhaps, the movement towards total individualism. In the book “How to Be Alone” by Jonathan Franzen, he writes about a Tokyo University where it’s possible to go through an ENTIRE YEAR in the city without seeing a single other human being! Where is our value of community going?
I’ll tell you: what astounded me after today’s meeting, is that blogging, myspace and other related sources, bridges both an encouragement of individualism and a creation of community. Today’s meeting is a brilliant example of how in spite of modernization (in respect to how technogolical advances have individualized us), it has also opened up new ways of building, and restoring community. People in the comfort of their homes, away from the bustle of random social interaction, find interests with other people and meet. This building is what Quaker scholars at my school referred to as the “holiest of practices”.
But I wonder, how sincere are meetings and community building if they take place solely on the web? I know this is something we talked about before…and perhaps I’ve been on too many tangents, but to ask once again in a different light: Is it more genuine when you’ve met in person? Does it need validation? Internet identity can be so easily manipulated, and true, communities may not exist on genuine practices — yet I think today’s meeting showed me its beautiful potential. (whew, brevity is not my strong suit!)
Thanks for the updates…I really enjoy how’s your coffee moring meeting going on. Love to read
it kind of looks like i’m flicking the camera off in that shot. whoops!
The moleskine interpretation is dead on. I suppose blogging is inherently episodic, but giving a string of posts a finite lifetime would force more purposeful themes. And like the periods of a renowned artist, it could actually be inspiring to be so fickle.
The Robber’s Cave experiment reminds me of the Stanford Prison Experiment. You could get away with anything in the name of research back in the day.
If I had more time I would riff on what you are saying about online and real relationships and how it relates to Plato’s allegory of the cave. But you know what I’m getting at.
In order…
Natalie:
First off, thanks so much for taking the time to out-word my post (and out-think it!) … As Grant McCracken says, “May I take this opportunity to thank people who have left comments? These comments are, many of them, wonderfully good, much better than the posts they adorn.” Your response has been so thought provoking that I’ve not been able to come up with something adequate to put in this box. But two things stand out. 1: Building and 2: Validation. I was in the orientation team for my college, and one of our initial “workshops” for incoming freshmen was to have an activity where, in a semi-structured way, we talked about race, background, and culture. A young lady from St. Louis by the name of Charmiesha (sp? … Sorry, Charm, if I butchered that and you ever read this) thought that life would be more productive, generally, if we spent more time building with each other, with random people. She defined building as a process of conversation whereby passionate discussions of seemingly random things could provide insight into the thoughts, influences and feelings of those involved. It’s a bit complicated, but I feel like the whole process of blogging, for me, is about building. I’m building an image of “Clay Parker Jones” online with every post, with every picture I have online, with every new blog I create. I even have software installed on my computer that records every song I listen to. Even though I do very little talking about myself, if you were to read through all the posts, you would get a pretty good idea of who I am. And as far as validation goes, I’ve found that the people I meet via blogs are very, very close to my imagination of who they “are”. Perhaps that’s because they have good, honest blogs. Anyhow, I’ve lost my way. Next!
Oakie:
Maybe someday we’ll video-blog a coffee morning so you can really “be” there. That sounds pretty tough, but we’ll see. I’m glad you like the posts.
Lauren:
Yeah, I noticed that too. Funny…
Chris:
Glad I got it kindof right. It’d be funny to actually do a blog only of Moleskine pages. It would be almost an anti-tech way of approaching blogging. It would be really nice if there was an online service that “kept” your blogs in one spot and made you choose a new theme and design when you reached a certain point. Maybe I’ll call Google. And I’d love it if you could find some time to write a bit of how you think online/offline relationships relate to Plato. Just because while I know what you’re getting at doesn’t mean that everyone else does…
Thanks again, to everyone who braved the snow and to everyone who read/commented here.
low fidelity blogging. i love it. i need a scanner. a graph paper moleskine would be hot. what would merlin mann do? (WWMMD?)
i’ll see what i can do on a writeup. honestly i’m a little intimidated by natalie’s analysis…
Blimey. You guys don’t just drink coffee and chat. You really come up with some incredible stuff. Fantastic work. We’re going to have to raise our game. And Clay, thanks for saying nice things over at Business Week.
Yeah, I guess you can chalk it up to the partly imagined, partly real Chicago industriousness…I am awed by these responses and I can only hope to have more meetings like this in the future.
And Russell, you’re very welcome. It’s a great public service that you’re providing, and I know I speak for everyone who participates when I say, “Thanks.” I’m working on my Maple Syrup propositions and I just finished doing 10 for each of my clients (not sure if any of them are ready to share).
Chris, I’m still waiting for your response. And I can’t wait for you to start up your lofi blog.