don't split the party
when i was in high school, i was regular on a forum that had grown during my stay at a rather remarkable rate. when i joined, it was pretty large, but small enough that most people knew most people, and therefore manageable. threads would come and go and while one wasn't expected to keep up with everything they could pop in and out and always feel comfortable with what's going on. the forum gained visibility, though, and enough people came to it that a few oldtimers decided "we want a more condensed community," and a sort of secret side-board was made, and those in charge picked out the faces they knew well and invited them to join. the resulting board felt much more comfortable, with no more of the "i've never seen this guy before what's going on" irritation, and indeed more condensed discussion-wise: most conversations were more serious than one might expect, with all the inane chatter gone.
in my observation, this sort of thing always happens with large communities. a lot of people see a group as appealing, and come to join. of course also as the group gets larger its visibility increases. it may also be worth noting that with such groups of people there's always an element of being a part of a larger organization (in the case of the forum, originally we were a subset of the people with a common interest of what the forum was about). there's some sort of a hardware limitation in the human brain on how big a community can be (400 or so), but it becomes a pain to keep track of lots of people with smaller numbers than that. and so, social groups end up splitting when they get too big.
i think there has been a sort of a gradual splitting among our social group this year. when i was a freshman, the circle was one big monolithic knot of friends, with maybe a few different areas within and some fringes too. recently, especially aided by changing of residence, socialization among (what we called the) cohort 1.0 has fragmented into several smaller groups with just a bit of interinteraction. independent of that, maybe, it also seems like the cluster-centric friendgroup is also starting to settle into multiple clumps of interaction, probably prompted by the arrival of a million freshmen. i'm wondering if the "people start to split apart around junior year" thing is a continuous effect that happens to everybody or if it's exceptional for our class.
splitting is not a very clean thing for a social group to do. there will inevitably be ties among the various factions to be preserved to some degree or another. but like in the forum example, closer and richer interactions are easiest to have among a closely-knit group. i haven't been good at doing that this year, unfortunately; i instead tried to hang out with several different groups of friends and never really felt satisfied with any of them. this is a pretty direct result of the fact that i'm having a hard time figuring out what i actually *want* to do with myself in this regard. i also don't know how much of this is expected circumstance and how much i should try to do something about.
(next year's housing plans will not leave me in the middle of any particular group, so no help from the convenience front.)
in my observation, this sort of thing always happens with large communities. a lot of people see a group as appealing, and come to join. of course also as the group gets larger its visibility increases. it may also be worth noting that with such groups of people there's always an element of being a part of a larger organization (in the case of the forum, originally we were a subset of the people with a common interest of what the forum was about). there's some sort of a hardware limitation in the human brain on how big a community can be (400 or so), but it becomes a pain to keep track of lots of people with smaller numbers than that. and so, social groups end up splitting when they get too big.
i think there has been a sort of a gradual splitting among our social group this year. when i was a freshman, the circle was one big monolithic knot of friends, with maybe a few different areas within and some fringes too. recently, especially aided by changing of residence, socialization among (what we called the) cohort 1.0 has fragmented into several smaller groups with just a bit of interinteraction. independent of that, maybe, it also seems like the cluster-centric friendgroup is also starting to settle into multiple clumps of interaction, probably prompted by the arrival of a million freshmen. i'm wondering if the "people start to split apart around junior year" thing is a continuous effect that happens to everybody or if it's exceptional for our class.
splitting is not a very clean thing for a social group to do. there will inevitably be ties among the various factions to be preserved to some degree or another. but like in the forum example, closer and richer interactions are easiest to have among a closely-knit group. i haven't been good at doing that this year, unfortunately; i instead tried to hang out with several different groups of friends and never really felt satisfied with any of them. this is a pretty direct result of the fact that i'm having a hard time figuring out what i actually *want* to do with myself in this regard. i also don't know how much of this is expected circumstance and how much i should try to do something about.
(next year's housing plans will not leave me in the middle of any particular group, so no help from the convenience front.)