Friday, October 19, 2007

Dr Nord
Karl E. Weick - World of language
cognitive dissonance - action causing thought- people retrospectively make sense of what they do when students agree with teacher to avoid conflict regardless of truth - mastermind sense making never know for sure

Contextual rationality - fire story - wisdom and methods to deal with situations - sense making as social structure - cosmologically moment where no one really knows - and how do you manage?

Bystander Effect - take guess from others to avoid it as long as others avoid it

John Sterman - all models are wrong but they are useful

"Dropping your tools" - letting go of what we know and react as new agents - tension between knowing and allowing
"hold your tools loosely" - creating empty space between tension and creation

Word become object that we believe in and become things while originally they were only names created for things that don't exist.

"not in our town" -PBS community Self Organization
"better Child syndrome" Weick changing perspective with new data

Introductory essay Weick
improvisation - opposite of stipulation not total chaos some stipulation - some construct to start with - decisions not the issue but managing decisions

overwhelmed by competing identities

Perhaps one of the main problems with studying theories of communication is trying to do so when one is also living a quite full life already. As a part-time student, full time worker, full time aunt, sister, and girlfriend. I am stretched so thin like a crepe, while my personality is fluffy like a buttermilk pancake. This is pretty much a freewrite blog, just writing what comes to mind with random punctuation. I was in this same spot last fall, taking two classes and trying to keep my head above the water. In the spring I got smart and took only one class, why am I so easily influenced into more work than I can handle. Why do I continue to overestimate my abilities? -amelia

Monday, October 15, 2007

social networking via the internet

Yesterday I was playing pool on the games site Grab.com and met several interesting people, a young man from Kentucky who aspires to be a plumber, a person from Scotland who called sinking the cue ball, "potting the white," and a youngster from Montenegro who taught me a great phrase that translates in English to something like: "You are more lucky than you are smart." (A phrase we both agreed we would say jokingly to friends but not to strangers.) I found that when I was engaged in typing conversations and intermittently playing pool, I played badly. When I merely said "hi" and nothing else, and concentrated on the game, I did fairly well.

I am finding this to be true in real life as well, when I am focused on something, it goes easily. Reading, pottery, scanning large documents. But my ability to multitask has diminished. I desire more and more silent time that doesn't seem to exist.

Of course, it struck me that the people I was talking to might be obscuring their true identities, and that didn't bother me. I might not have been as comfortable ACTUALLY playing pool with these strangers, but we talked about life, school, music, and popular culture -- just as I would have talked with my friends. Perhaps we will each find each other again through this website or in real life and have this shared experience in common.

Friday, October 12, 2007

John Skvoretz - network analysis - Suncoast NetWork Seminar - international social network analysis - emergence of trust amongst strangers

Emergent Quality - community
Environment - Florida Counties

Not all emergent phenomena is disirable
What is measurable

• ID components of community
• Density
• Social Capitol
• Map ties between households
• ID community behavior relationships- trust - network structure- volunteerism
  
• model individual interactions
• model time - how is time used - relationship of interactions based on time- cost of time for making relationships - ID agents with resources - resources with time requirements- economic conceptions

Tobacco Company Executives (circa 1974)

• Network analysis with line thickness
• pajek program for networks
  

Jim Moody - networks changing over time

Deep South - about Southern women by Allison Davis - study of social networking

Getting the data is the hardest part

Evolving network of relationships is community initiatives
Smith - Consortium of Community and Family - research model

Successive systems are more apt to stay the same with the environment

Friday, October 5, 2007

Mike Agar - "How does complexity make sense of continually changing worlds? It takes change for granted and helps think about it in a different way. It becomes normal rather than a deviation to be brought under control."

Next week: Social Network Analysis ...

Evolution of Trust and collaboration John S. Macy
Skvoretz and Wolfe
Harvard SNA blog
Thomas Shilling

property emerging that wasn't built in


The Evolution of Trust and Cooperation between Strangers: A Computational Model by Michael W. Macy, John Skvoretz American Sociological Review, Vol. 63, No. 5 (Oct., 1998), pp. 638-660
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Agents in the system - run and based on a meaningful model
What do we notice about a system - our system we only have one perception, but it seems the total is so much more than who we are individually

Skvoretz, Wolfe Complexity and Social Networking Blog