People-mapping

Another distraction from writing my papers.

I was amused this evening by a friend recommendation for one Eric Binkley. This suggestion makes sense from Facebook's perspective, since I was at summer camp working with a Chris Binkley, who I think still has one of my books, though I can't recall anymore which one I lent him and failed to get back at the end of that summer. I was reading Tom Robbins a lot that summer, so .... Anyway, I have never met Eric, but out of curiosity I pulled up his profile, just to see if he looks like Chris at all(He does.), and it turns out he and I have not 1, but 3 friends in common. Alex Hughes, I was also not surprised about. Chris, Alex and I were all camp folks who studied at CU, so it makes sense that Eric might know Alex. The third, though, no surprise to him, as e knows that he knows Eric, is Paul Kemp, who I know was at CU, and at the same time as Chris and myself, but who I only met this past fall. Not exactly a big deal or anything, just the sort of coincidence that puts that "It's a Small World" song in your head for a few hours. But it got me thinking.

People group together because they find certain commonalities between themselves, but in any really big group of people, like a big university or a city, they can only aggregate to the extent that the have access to one another. This means that those people with whom one has a lot of similarities, but who somehow don't become or remain friends, develop networks of people parallel to one's own. [I want to hunt down literature now on social networks,social circles, and boundary setting in social groups.]

The group I was in during my first degree was for the most part the younger part of Geoffrey Brinker's group, combined with my own physics friends and Whizzers groupies. I never really crossed the road socially between the hard science half of the CU-Boulder campus and the rest. Even Muenzinger, where psychology is located, is the easternmost building before the sports complex, so while it is technically across the road, it's still on the science end. There were a few camp people who had science classes, and at least one who was in engineering, but most of the people I knew from camp were on the "other" side of campus, and did not hang out at Whizzers. So, any commonality I shared with those camp people was in itself insufficient for us to maintain active friendships away from camp. I think, too, that since Forrest and I had such a cohesive group of friends already, we were less likely to draw together any sort of new group out of our camp connections. Anyway, within our group we often met people individually who had multiple ties with others in the group, [read to background instrumental of the "small world song"]. Some of these people linked back to camp, too, through their older friendships, with Geoffrey as the key person to this whole network.

At camp, the older generation, loosely associated with Forrest and Geoffrey, and the guys from Geoffrey's cohort, was ageing out, being replaced by a new generation centered around Alex and his cohort. Anyone who wants to see Kuhn's paradigm shift in fast forward can simply volunteer as a commissioner at a Boy Scouts summer camp that is transitioning between generations. It seems that there is consistently a lot of unrest and eroding standards at these boundaries, which alarms the older set, and since the younger set is still figuring things out, and is changing stuff, they are blamed, somewhat reflexively, for the dropping standards and growing chaos. As the new generation becomes established, things smooth out again. The removal of the old generation, not any individuals' changed ideas, is what changes the overall camp culture, and once the new set is firmly in place they figure out limits for themselves within the context of their own programs. (With a gradual decrease in the stories of overenthusiastic scouts knifing people. I seem to recall a similar story about Kevin or someone in his staff being attacked by scouts when he was playing the masked bandit, so this overzealousness issue is not new, just really funny to hear about afterwords.)

I've been amused by some of the trivial details Paul has in common with others I did know in Boulder(really, I wouldn't be surprised if he and I crossed paths in a computer lab, for that matter- maybe I kicked him out of a computer lab or something). Now I am wondering if maybe he and the Binkleys demarcate a parallel social network to the one I lived in. Different coffee-shop(s), different artsy circles and outdoorsey circles, and perhaps not quite so international, since my group centered for a while on Reed Hall and engineering, but stylistically/aesthetically very very similar. We had backpacking, camping and scouts, but not climbing, and we didn't drink alcohol at all in our gatherings, but these are not what define a culture. Forrest and I did studio art, so we were involved with the studio arts scene, but we didn't have ties into local music. I had a few theater friends, but not within the context of any group; perhaps if I knew were to look I could trace several parallel networks to mine. HMMM. It would be really hard for a sociologist to map such patterns without having familiarity with the people involved, and equally challenging to study such networks if they are made up of people with whom the researcher is friends. Still, perhaps there are a few brash/brave researchers who've looked at such patterns.