Consciously or unconsciously, we're listening to how each other talk, and we're looking at how each other dress, and we're looking for those call signs.
We find a group we feel comfortable with, and we converge upon a table.
Whethey you right now occupy the body of a high schooler, a business man, a new employee, an elderly person in a home, or whatever- this happens to you at some point.
What happens next we can call "RoleDiscovery," and it's where you pick out, consciously or unconsciously, your roles with your neighbors.
You may choose to be a princess, a robot, a philosopher, a whore, an alien, a wizard, or a leader. You may choose to be an angel, a devil, a scruffy guy, an elf, or a lizard.
Whatever you choose, your choice will stick with you, at least within the realm of this group. Should you change, either the group will accept the new role, or you will effectively disappear in a mutually agreed upon, though likely unseen, communication.
The roles in a group balance themselves. There is a way the system works, once set in place. New people have fewer options, though as roles disappear, there come new opportunities for metamorphosis or inclusion.
The roles will determine your friends and enemies. The roles will determine your actions and thoughts. You will both love the role, and at times hate the role. In your imagination, you will have more freedom than what the pragmatics of time and space offer you.
See also: JoiningScript - The process by which a person joins a community.
It is my belief that, in the CriticalTheory, when they talk about the importance of "identities" and communication, that this is the sort of thing they are talking about.
This should probably go to a different page, but this is a related thought, and I'll put it here for now.
I Love Candy.
Why this is important, we'll see in a moment.
I Love Candy. If asked, "What would you like to eat?" ...I frequently respond with something like "Junior Mints" or "Sour Worms." I do not like Chocolate. I like sweet Candy and mint candy and some candies that I am forgetting about. But not Chocolate.
I have come to believe that this is not just an assesment of taste, but also a Role-aligned decision.
In Harry Potter, JK Rowling goes to great lengths to make sure that we know that Professor Dumbledore Loves Candy.
It seems quite plausible to me that this is a "subliminal communication." (Just begging to be linked...) We may never be able to track the subliminal communications that come to us in real-time- that would be a frontal war on authenticity, I suppose. Probably something we may want to consider investigating, down the line, in unraveling what is before us.
I would think that the Love for Candy (tastes) and the Communication that love for candy grants are wrapped around each other. Because we, people, are biological systems. We're "messy and intertwined," so to speak. Thus a love of candy and a communication of a love of candy would become mutually genuine, I guess. (I'm trying to say: If you love the taste of candy, it will become the communication. And if you do the communication, you may turn to actually love the taste of candy.)
This then would be related to the three rings of our mind: The way it is, the way we perceive it, and the way others perceive it. Each of these rings affects the others, and changes them. If you want to become someone else, then, you stay away from other people for a while, and remold yourself by yourself. Or you join a group that will reinforce the image of self that you want.
There are many forces at work here. I believe I am beginning to be able to articulate the connection between CriticalTheory and my own beliefs about the HiveMind ("our," if I understand our collective unconscious correctly.)
It seems to me we should, (or at least, I should,) construct a visual map of the connections that we can agree with, and dot the points to one another.
Then perhaps we can look at our software, with the types of interactions it leads us towards (SocialAffordance,) and then remake it to fit the structures we believe in.
phew.
BenHyde, for myself at least, you resemble the "missing link," that we need, because we have difficulty penetrating the blog-o-sphere.
We come up with stuff, but nobody knows in the blog world.
Something somewhere in what you were writing clicked with me, and triggered this page and a few others.
Heather is feeling out for OneBigSoup right now, but other than that- there is remarkably little in the blog-o-sphere that communicates with the Wiki-Sphere.