Dear Boggled,

Maybe one of the things we can say about how we function as academics is that we're far more concerned with diachrony. How many bibliographies are solely composed of citations from the past year, or even the past 5 years? We're constantly picking up the past, and we're concerned (whether consciously or no) with improving upon it, with telling ourselves stories of progress.

I think of this in terms of the challenge of holding a discussion about Wayne Booth's new book, where it seems like there's never quite synchrony--some people haven't gotten the book they ordered, some have other commitments that keep them from posting, etc. And yet, there is some--you can go to my site, and find at least 10 other pages discussing it, bunches of comments, etc.

I don't really know where I'm going with this, except maybe to suggest that there's a strategic synchrony that network structure allows us to visualize (and ideally use) as a means of understanding social structure in different ways.

Does this make sense at all?

cgb

Seeing that you linked to Strogatz's book, Marcia, I thought this link might fit right in with the interesting set of questions you raise here. The notecard that says "We are all evaluated on identical schedules--What are the emergent behaviors?" makes me wonder what results from network-wide synchrony or desire for synchrony. I'm just thinking this through for the first time, but the possibility of an entire tree filled with lightning bugs blinking in unison suggests an eerie sort of calm and annonymity--almost as if the individual bugs are absorbed into a large--if shortlived--organism.

It seems as if this could be the million dollar question, Marcia. How do we determine if it is social choice or something other that is pushing us together helping us build identity. In reading the link Derek posted, I began to think of Marx and class consciousness. There is a group that is determined "the proletariat" and this group eventually gains a similar consciousness due to condition and inclination. (Reductive reading -- please move along.) So there is something to the context, as Watts tells us, but there is also something about the system that makes us begin to connect. For women, as Marcia mentioned on her blog, it is pheromones -- not in our control, for academics it seems to be affiliation -- which seems to be in our control. And I guess I am back to the tension between individual identity and contextual or systemic forces. Argh.

But I think this tension is exactly the answer--it's that quote about men (people) making their own history, but not exactly as they choose. It's about knowing that life is 10% what happens and 90% how I respond to it, about keeping my identity in the midst of social pressure, or cultural norming, the relentless assault of what's "good enough." That tension, that struggle, is part of what defines mankind. The connections we build are in part because they are presented to us, and in part because we look for them, and in part a mix of the two at an opportune moment. I think the important question isn't so much what is pushing us as whether we can recognize we are being pushed, sometimes in multiple ways, and that we are responding to a push. I think it's okay to say "yup, I'm pierced because 70% of my school friends are doing it and I want to be like them" as much as I think it's okay to say "70% of my friends have gotten pierced and boy do I think that's silly, so I'm not going to no matter how geeky they think I am". Where the problem lies, as I see it, is getting pierced when you feel the latter because you can't or won't acknowledge the former.

We synchronize, we move on, our synchonies change. Can we work with that? that's the question that always interests me.