Thought on the permanence of social networks .
As I've previously stated, I believe that people are largely defined by the experiences, which also shape and create their perspective on the world and knowledge they hold. I also believe that a sense of connectedness and commonality comes from sharing a common set of views, knowledge, etc., and the easiest way of establishing that is through common experience. The more common understandings you share with some one, the closer you start off, but more importantly, the more experiences that you share with someone, the closer you become.
I believe in infatuation at first sight, and I believe that some people can intuited that some one they've just met is a good match, but I firmly believe that relationships need to grow over time.
This not only has implications on how I view my romantic relationships, but also how I view human relationships in general.
Relationships need time to build. Unfortunately, they can also start to fade if not-shared experiences are had. Since time is a limited resource, there is an intrinsic and unavoidable limit to how many people a person can feel close to, and no technology will be able to overcome this unless it change time or the way the brain works.
In other words, no matter how technology brings people together, there will always be some occurance of "degrees of separation" in all sufficiently large (on the order of hundreds of people) social groups, and all societies, I believe, will have this feature.
I am going to go out on a limb here, but I think a feeling of affection, kindness, caring, and love toward those closest to us, toward those we share the greatest amount of experiences and understandings with, is hardwired. It may even be an emotional response stemming from biochemical processes. I really have no idea.
Societies may or may not have biological families, but I will call these universally occurring small groups of people "families". And if this attitude is intrinsic, a feature of all humankind regardless of society an culture, then we can say that families, though they may not be biological ones, truly form the backbone of all human societies. Furthermore, if these attitudes are universal, then there most be a universal pattern of behaviors within these families, yielding a basic behavioral and structural component that all societies share. Hence, large societies are really defined by how they sow these groups together into larger societies.
In short, given a few assumptions, I believe that the groups of people closest to us form the social unit that shapes our lives in a way that transcends all cultures, and that these groups, which I call families are in a way similar across all cultures. Things like democracy, dictatorship, capitalism, and communism are just ways of providing an overarching structure for bringing families together into larger societies.
Wok, maybe I was being a little too assertive and universalist, but I still think I hit on something, and found some common factor to all social structures.
I believe in infatuation at first sight, and I believe that some people can intuited that some one they've just met is a good match, but I firmly believe that relationships need to grow over time.
This not only has implications on how I view my romantic relationships, but also how I view human relationships in general.
Relationships need time to build. Unfortunately, they can also start to fade if not-shared experiences are had. Since time is a limited resource, there is an intrinsic and unavoidable limit to how many people a person can feel close to, and no technology will be able to overcome this unless it change time or the way the brain works.
In other words, no matter how technology brings people together, there will always be some occurance of "degrees of separation" in all sufficiently large (on the order of hundreds of people) social groups, and all societies, I believe, will have this feature.
I am going to go out on a limb here, but I think a feeling of affection, kindness, caring, and love toward those closest to us, toward those we share the greatest amount of experiences and understandings with, is hardwired. It may even be an emotional response stemming from biochemical processes. I really have no idea.
Societies may or may not have biological families, but I will call these universally occurring small groups of people "families". And if this attitude is intrinsic, a feature of all humankind regardless of society an culture, then we can say that families, though they may not be biological ones, truly form the backbone of all human societies. Furthermore, if these attitudes are universal, then there most be a universal pattern of behaviors within these families, yielding a basic behavioral and structural component that all societies share. Hence, large societies are really defined by how they sow these groups together into larger societies.
In short, given a few assumptions, I believe that the groups of people closest to us form the social unit that shapes our lives in a way that transcends all cultures, and that these groups, which I call families are in a way similar across all cultures. Things like democracy, dictatorship, capitalism, and communism are just ways of providing an overarching structure for bringing families together into larger societies.
Wok, maybe I was being a little too assertive and universalist, but I still think I hit on something, and found some common factor to all social structures.