A little over a year ago, I read this article ‘My Crowd’ by Bill Wasik, the senior editor of Harper’s Magazine.  Oddly, it seems to come up randomly in conversations that I have with people from time to time.  Since I know I’ve mentioned it to at least some of you before, I thought I’d post it here so that anyone interested might take a gander.  The basic premise is that Wasik invented Flash Mobs to explore the concept of deindividuation in our society.  In this experiment he uses ‘hipsters’ as his target population.  I found it pretty interesting…

INTRODUCTION

Before we break down our present cultural situation, it will be worthwhile to revisit the concept of deindividuation, which psychologists put forward in the mid-twentieth century to address the question of evil more generally. As first defined by Festinger, Pepitone, and Newcomb (1952), deindividuation is "a state of affairs in a group where members do not pay attention to other individuals qua individuals"; when in a crowd or pack, the theory ran, each man sees he doesn't stand out and so his inhibitions melt away. Indeed, the writers observed, even "the delegates to an American Legion convention, all dressed in the same uniform manner, will sometimes exhibit an almost alarming lack of restraint." Zimbardo (1969) broke down the causation into ten input variables, enumerated A through J, ranging from anonymity (a) and arousal (E) to sensory input overload (F) and altered states of consciousness (J). Experimental heft was soon supplied by Diener, Fraser, Beaman, and Kelem (1976) in their paper "Effects of Deindividuation Variables on Stealing Among Halloween Trick-or-Treaters," which put hard numbers to the theory

In recent decades, the concept of deindividuation has fallen into scientific neglect, and yet I believe that it possesses great theoretical usefulness today. Consider the generational cohort that has come to be called the hipsters--i.e., those hundreds of thousands of educated young urbanites with strikingly similar tastes. Have so many self-alleged aesthetes ever been more (in the formulation of Festinger et al.) "submerged in the group"? The hipsters make no pretense to divisions on principle, to forming intellectual or artistic camps; at any given moment, it is the same books, records, films that are judged au courant by all, leading to the curious spectacle of an "alternative" culture more unanimous than the mainstream it ostensibly opposes. What critical impulse does exist among their number merely causes a favorite to be more readily abandoned, as abandoned--whether Friendster.com, Franz Ferdinand, or Jonathan Safran Foer--it inevitably will be. Once abandoned, it is never taken up again.

ahhhh fuck!!! i can't seem to make a link to the rest of this article work without an SFU computing ID or subscription to Harper's.  if you have a few minutes to kill, and you're actually interested in reading the rest of the article, e-mail me.. codycallon@gmail.com, and i'll send it to you.

Now you can all share in my delusions.

I’ve gotta say that all things considered I had a pretty good weekend.  Thursday night, Laurin and I had planned a “hot date” for what we thought was the first night of Dineout Vancouver.  I attempted to get dressed up, however, I managed to spill red wine all over my shirt before we went anywhere.  We had booked a table at Figment restaurant, which is currently masked by a large construction zone at 12^th and Cambie.  It is a very large space that housed relatively few patrons, probably due to the unfortunate state of the roads around there at the moment.  Much to our dismay, it turns out that we were there a day early for Dineout, which was surprising since we booked our reservation on the Dineout Vancouver webpage. So, all dressed up with nowhere to go, we decided to stay there, rather than try to re-book for another night.  The food was excellent, but the space felt very large and cold.  I don’t think that this would have changed had there been more people there.  I must say that the atmosphere left something to be desired, and I would not go there again.  The evening ended with us having consumed more than our fair share of wine, and confronting some issues.  I admit that this was not the most pleasant way the evening could have gone, but it ended well and is probably for the best in the long run.  Hopefully this is working towards me being trust worthy.

I was made to wake-up bright and early on Friday morning to move into the living room to watch the much anticipated “Fashion Fridays” on Sally Jessie Raphael.  I can think of better ways to spend from 9-10am on a Friday morning, namely sleeping, but I did get breakfast and coffee out of the deal.  Laurin and I pretty much spent the day just hanging out, some of the time with Jorcy (does that work?), and some of the time just us.. it was really nice, and something I don’t take time for often enough.  Later in the afternoon, Wendy came over, we smoked a joint and went to watch Stomp the Yard.  The story line is your typical black kid from the hood, moves to a better neighborhood, falls in love with some other guys’ girl, and astonishes everyone with his skills.. that said, the dancing was fucking awesome.  Laurin, Wendy, and myself have resolved ourselves to starting our own dance crew and learning to throw down like these dudes in the movie, it’s so frickin cool .  We need more people though, anyone interested?  After the movie, we went to Larry’s new apartment to smoke the fattest, sloppiest joint you’ve ever seen (I’ll post a picture later).  It had painters tape holding it together for Christ sake.  Nevertheless, I always like smoking pot with Larry and furthermore, I had the privilege of meeting David-schmavid who I’d previously only seen on my beloved youtube.  With this, I must say that I have been making good on my goal to smoke pot until Jordan’s birthday.  The night ended with Laurin and I heading out to Port Coquitlam to meet my cousin and some of his buddies at The Cat & The Fiddle.  This place appeared to be Po-Co’s hot spot, and it has been a while since I have spent any time in a suburban bar, but it was weird in there.  Not that I am one to be commenting on this sort of thing, but the place was filled with people decked out in their “stylish” American Eagle duds, getting drunk and bumping uglies on the small dance floor to the latest and greatest top 40 from the past five years.  This isn’t to say that I didn’t have fun, I think the old adage “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” would work well here.

Saturday morning Laurin went to work, and I went climbing, which ties in with my goal to do more exercise.  Climbing has been going really well actually, my strength and technique have improved exponentially in the past month.  I’m looking forward to attempting some outdoor climbs this spring.  Saturday afternoon, Dr. Oulston and I delved deep into a lazy Saturday.  We discovered this website www.peekvid.com where you can stream movies and tv shows. It’s crazy, I can’t believe this shit is free now on the internet.  Anyways, being men who love the youtube, we were entertained for hours watching the likes of Jackass 2, Macgyver, and Transformers.  In the evening we had a small going away party for Marcel, drank some beers, and headed down to library square for what was apparently Trevor’s last night there???

Sunday, I went for a run for an entire 25 minutes without any knee pain.. great success!!! This still follows the doing more exercise thing.  In the afternoon I had my parents over for lunch and put up a wall hanging.. yippee, another one of my to dos.  I also put a bunch of photos on Facebook.  Apparently something like 80% of all US college students have facebook accounts.. isn’t that insane?  How can it be so popular??? I just got one, but as far as I can tell it’s pretty useless aside from being a very easy and convenient medium through which to post and share photographs.  That said, I don’t see why you can’t make your photo albums open to everyone on the internet rather than simply your facebook friends.  Sunday night Laurin and I went to Superstore, I’ve lived in my apartment for four months now, and this was only the second time that I went grocery shopping.  Sure I’ve picked up odds and ends here and there, but never a bunch of stuff all at once.  I think this is a sign that I have been eating out far too often.

In terms of completing my To Do List, I think I did pretty well this weekend.  Aside from what I’ve mentioned above, I found out that being a broacher isn’t really positive or negative, it’s simply a word that formerly was not believed to be a word but now is.  I don’t think I did anything that I didn’t really want to do, and I did take some photographs.  That leaves scrap booking, reading, and herpes.  I like Altaira’s idea of group reading sessions, however, I feel like reading with others would be a lot like studying with others, and there would be more talking than reading.  It also reminds me of a time when I was studying at Calhouns a couple of years ago.  I was there for hours, and there were these two guys that came, sat down, and each read a different Star Trek book.  The funny thing was, one guy finished his book a good 45 minutes before his friend, but he just sat there patiently, without a word until his friend was finished, then they both got up and left.

Is it kosher to make livejournal posts this long? Will anyone aside from me actually read all the way to the end?  If you do, I'm sorry, I'll try to make the next one more interesting.

I thought that Joren and Coral really had something.. Who knew???

I have never before committed myself to any sort of regular blogging or internet sites that support friend finding and/or networks of friends.  However, everyone seems to be doing it, whether it’s myspace or facebook.  If this type of thing is the cyber equivalent of cell phones and text messaging, I’ve decided I misewell give it a ganders.  On recommendations from Jordan and Laurin, I have chosen LiveJournal to avoid some of the negative aspects of myspace’s popularity, as well as its creeper factor.  So, lets see how this works out..