Social Objects: Notes on Knitting in America

December 7, 2009 By

I recently bought a classic, cherry-finish  River City hourglass. It was the first time I deliberately bought something to serve as a social object, which I’ll define as any tangible entity that can catalyze a characteristic social chemistry. In this case, the hourglass helped me tweak the ambiance of a writers meetup I run in the Washington, DC area.

hourglass

I’ve wondered for years about how people connect over particular elements of their environment, ranging from water coolers and YouTube videos to parrots. We are currently in the thick of social object season:  turkeys, Christmas trees, mistletoe.

Social objects are a complex idea. We need a theory that can provide a conceptual framework and vocabulary, suggest conjectures that might become laws, and distinguish between social objects and related but distinct creatures such as memes, social signals, brands and ritual objects. A good theory should also shed light on specific questions, such as “why have so many hip young American women taken up knitting in recent years?”

I am finally beginning to see the outlines of such a general theory. The first useful inference I have been able to derive is this: when communities digitize, social objects replace walls. I call this the first law of social objects. Let’s work our way up to that. (before more people yell at me… yes, this is an early beta stab at a new theme, so apologies for the length and looseness of editing).

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Morality, Compassion and the Sociopath

November 21, 2009 By

Again, the response to the Gervais Principle II seems to require a response to key themes that have emerged. There are several that I am going to touch upon in the next part, and some I am not touching, ever, but one deserves note and a serious response, since I hadn’t planned on addressing it. This is the question of good and evil. For those of you who want the elevator-pitch version, the short position is this: my entire thesis is amoral; there are good and evil sociopaths; more sociopaths is a good thing; the clueless and losers are exactly as likely to engage in evil behaviors as sociopaths. Details follow. Keep in mind that this is a very rough sketch, and a sidebar to the main series that I really don’t want to pursue too far.

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Fear of Improvisation (and Clunkers)

October 26, 2009 By

Late Saturday afternoon, I headed out from my apartment to pick up my wife from the airport, about 30 miles away. It was pouring and cold. Traffic was heavy and slow as I caught 395 North into the district. Just as I was about to enter the tunnel that leads into Washington, DC, I heard it: a loud, ugly CLUNK! followed by the jarring tinny racket that tells you that your car is dragging something metallic along. A minute later, I heard the harsh throb of an unmuffled engine. I took the first exit I could, which unfortunately, dumped me right into the heart of Washington, DC. I found a parking spot and stepped out. As I’d suspected, it was my exhaust. A bracket had broken and the exhaust assembly was being dragged along. Here’s a picture of the fix I improvised with my belt, before driving back home. I expect it will hold up fine for the additional mile or so to my repair shop on Monday.

exhaust

The fix, as you can see, is not a particularly clever one. What struck me though, as I thought of it, was how just how long I spent on dumb, unproductive by-the-book “call AAA” thoughts before giving myself permission to figure out this obvious fix. It strikes me that quite often, what holds us back from improvising creative options is not lack of creativity or ingenuity, but a vague fear of improvisation itself. So I poked around the idea a little bit and realized that the fear of improvisation is really the fear of death. Here’s why.

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The Tao of Frogger

September 28, 2009 By

Remember Frogger? The classic video game that inspired a memorable Seinfeld episode? It struck me that the game illustrates the difference between working smart and various flavors of working stupid. So here is one of my world-renowned cartoon philosophy illustrations (haven’t done one in a while).  Of course, the full-blow version also has crocodiles, turtles and a busy highway, but let’s keep it simple.

frogger

The Allegory of the Stage

September 23, 2009 By

Have you ever taken a deep breath and stepped out on a stage of some sort to perform? Time  slows down. Sounds quiet down and you can actually hear the thudding of your heart. And then, just as suddenly, as your performance starts, your acute sense of self-consciousness is forced to recede. Time speeds back up and the audio gets turned up again.  You are left with a hallucination-like memory of that moment of transition. This experience, which I call the “trigger moment”  is at the heart of the allegory of the stage.

spotlight

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Your Evil Twins and How to Find Them

September 17, 2009 By

Recently a reader emailed me a note: “I just wanted to bring to your radar ‘the pleasures and sorrows of work’ by Alain de Botton, and what you thought of its theses.” Now de Botton (The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, The Consolations of Philosophy, How Proust Can Change Your Life) has been on my radar for a while. I had browsed his books at Barnes and Noble a few times, but always put them down due to strange, sick feelings in my stomach. Thanks to this reader’s gentle nudge, I finally caved and read the first of the three, and managed to figure out why de Botton’s books had made me viscerally uncomfortable at first glance: he is my evil twin. An evil twin is defined as somebody who thinks exactly like you in most ways, but differs in just a few critical ways that end up making all the difference. Think the Batman and the Joker. Here’s why evil twins matter, and how to discover yours.

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Knowing and Caring

September 14, 2009 By

Do you ever idly fantasize about kicking a wine enthusiast in the pants? Wine enthusiasts routinely confuse knowing with caring. They are eager to explain to you that this 1992 Chardonnay has more body while that one has a cleaner finish.  They assume that if only you knew you would start to care. I made up this 3×3 matrix to illustrate the various combinations of knowing and caring about any sort of A-B distinction. Ponder. I will explain.

knowCare

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The Manager on Labor Day

September 3, 2009 By

There will never be a Management Day to complement Labor Day. The reason lies in the nature of the function, which I once flippantly defined as “delegating whatever you can define, and doing whatever you cannot.” What you cannot define, you cannot step away from. Stuff so ambiguous, you can only define it after actually doing it. When worker bees step away from their tools, situation awareness fades rapidly, and perforce, they must relax a little. There are no tools to the management trade. Your head is it, and it goes with you to the beach, even on Labor Day.

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How to Think Like Hercule Poirot

August 31, 2009 By

Last fall, I spent a long weekend in the Outer Banks region, a few hours south of Washington, DC, reading a collection of Agatha Christie pastiches called Malice Domestic, Volume 1 (now the title of an annual mystery  conference). The summer tourist season was over, and the hordes had moved on to Maine and Vermont to chase the Fall colors. The days were gray, windy, rainy and chilly.  The beach front properties had mostly emptied out, and most of the summer attractions were closed. We had a large three-level beach front house to ourselves, with a porch facing the troubled, ominous sea.

outerbanks

The ocean view from our hotel at Cape Hatteras, Outer Banks

Perfect conditions for bundling up in a blanket with a cup of hot cocoa and a mystery. Reading Malice Domestic was a revelation. None of the included writers even came close to creating Christie-like magic. Which led me to wonder: does Poirot endure because he represents certain truths about how to think effectively, which lesser fictional detectives lack? I think so.

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The Pregnancy Metaphor

August 24, 2009 By

Pregnancy is a rich, if slightly uncomfortable source of metaphors, especially for men.  For example:

  1. The idea of the startup incubator
  2. The idea that product launches are like birth events

The most interesting aspect of pregnancy metaphors is the difference between male and female attitudes towards them.

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