Psyberspace » sociometry

Sociometry: Facebook & Twitter

Walter — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 12:26:40 +0000

I am using Facebook a bit more lately.Â I still use Twitter more.Â But very differently.Â This post for example I might link to Twitter, I found the link on Twitter.Â It relates to my “Exploring the Psyche in Cyberspace” – psyberspace project.Â And people who don’t like this stuff may well drop off, others who like it will stay on.Â But Facebook is different.Â Family, friends and local people hang out there.Â I don’t want to foist my arcane musings onto them. Â I might send a snippet, and a snippet of art.Â My photos update from Flickr to Facebook.

I’m getting the hang of the difference!Â Each has its place, one is not better than the other, both are pretty amazing social networking innovations. Â (both are owned by corporate leaches who suck our life for profit).

Why are they different.Â Permissions.Â I can follow others without their permission, they could block me, but by default I can follow the Dali Lama, Bill Gates, Obama.Â Very different to Facebook. Â On FacebookÂ it is not follow, but friending, and the link must be mutual.Â This is of course of great interest from a sociometric point of view.Â Never have there been such huge social networks.

Look at this sociogram!

Click for larger image.

Me on Facebook, me on TwitterÂ (not that I am very active on either really).

Facebook Continues to Dominate Among Youth | World of Psychology:

7 out of 10 (73% to be exact) teens use social networking websites like Facebook, only 1 in 12 teens use Twitter.

Progress and Pitfalls in Sociometric Theory

Walter — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 06:01:09 +0000

I’ve tagged this “psychodrama-lib” I think we have this journal in the Christchurch Psychodrama Library, and it looks like a good article. I am particularly interested in the idea that there is a different reality in the group, “underlying, intangible, invisible,unofficial structure but one which is more alive, real and dynamic than the other.” to quote from the first page, all they will give me on the Net!!

JSTOR: Sociometry, Vol. 10, No. 3 (Aug., 1947), pp. 268-272:

# Progress and Pitfalls in Sociometric Theory # J. L. Moreno # Sociometry, Vol. 10, No. 3 (Aug., 1947), pp. 268-272 (article consists of 5 pages) # Published by: American Sociological Association # Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2785077

Thinking creātically – By Kenneth G. Johnson

Walter — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 10:54:11 +0000

Thinking creātically: a systematic, interdisciplinary approach to creative … By Kenneth G. Johnson

That is the Amazon link to the used books at a huge price.

As part of my link journey on the General Semantic theme I found it on Google and took a snap off the screen with the iphone of some references I wanted.

More details of my process and the book follows.

An app I have turned it into:

And did the OCR – and I emailed it all here!

NOTES

(1) Elwood Murray, ‘Several Relationships of Psychodrama and General Semantic’, Sociometry, 9 No. 2/3, 1946. p. 184.

(2) Ibid p. 185.

(3) J. L. Moreno, Who shall Survive?, Foundations of Sociometry Group Psychotherapy, and Sociodrama. Beacon, New York, 1953 (Revised). This is a classic text.

(4) Moreno and Korzybski knew of each other and met briefly. ln his Preludes to My Autobiography, Beacon, New York, 1955, p. 55, Moreno tells of that encounter:

That is all there is online, but I will find those books!

I can apparently embed the Google book here! Lets see how that goes.

A generally semantic journey

Walter — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 10:50:44 +0000

I have enjoyed some of the writing and audio from Al Turtle a relationship therapist. I get an RSS feed of his updates and today found a link to his favourite books. Great idea!

I found a ebook of A. E. Van Vogt’s The World of Null-A, non-Aristotelian logic in SF form. I see that this is not a one-off in Al’s list! He is into General Semantics – intrigued I went off on a search trail.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map-territory_relation#

Ah, this is the map – territory guy, Alfred Korsybski.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Korzybski

http://www.generalsemantics.org/

The organisation Van Vogt mentions in the intro. It is still alive.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elwood_Murray

Murray wrote an article in “Sociometry” linking Psychodrama and GS. I found the info in a Google book, and can’t copy from it (easily) details in the next post!

And coming up again and a gain is one that I loved when I read it years a go Steps to an Ecology of Mind
by Gregory Bateson

And the search led to a lovely essay: Exploring time-binding formulations with William Wordsworth.

There are in our existence spots of time,
That with distinct pre-eminence retain
A renovating virtue, whence–our minds
Are nourished and invisibly repaired;
(Wordsworth, The Prelude, lines 208-215, p.369)

I have that file on my Instapaper, awaiting a quiet moment when I can read it more thoroughly on the phone, where it will no doubt bind with some other moments of time.

My Activity Stream

Walter — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 09:05:39 +0000

I am moving around in the social network space like a sleeper tossing & turning in bed trying to get comfy.

Managed to get my Tweets off Facebook so I now have a sense of belonging to Facebook, some dear friends and family are there. Twitter is more remote but I follow a buch of great people, they mediate my news.

But for anyone, me included, who wants to see everything I do online it can be seen here in Friendfeed

It is cool, just searched on Friendfeed: from:walterlogeman librarything and saw a bit of history.

Can I publish all that data somewhere where it belongs to me?

Zootechnique

Walter — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 00:04:03 +0000

Ideas on cyberspace and psyche follow, with reference to social networks, science, psychodrama and sociometry. I conclude with a quote from Moreno that led to this reflection.

Technologically mediated social networks are evolving at run-away speed. Email, blogs, IM and now twitter and real-time developments in Facebook and WordPress, Google Wave, are together creating an environment that is tumultuous, disruptive but so ubiquitous it is hard to see.

In that way it is like the psyche. Like the unconscious. We seem to be individuals with autonomy and choice, but our hidden selves in our unconscious mind and our life in the hidden influences of social networks, public opinion, culture and fashion means our autonomy is not what it seems.

Jung, I think, links the personal and the social through the collective unconscious. Similarly Moreno visualises the psyche as a network of relationships.

Anyway, however others see it, I think of the psyche as “out there”, a network of ideas and knowledge with its own life and a network of relationships, attractions and repulsion with its own life.

Getting a handle on this purely virtual phenomena, (like Teilhard de Chardin’s Noosphere) is unlike understanding the physical world. We can enter this sphere and get glimpses of it directly through conscious experience, but as there is no actual “thing”, what is there described in words (or images), with their own fluid meanings. Love and hate are between people and things. They are in a space that is separate from the psychical entities. Metaphor is a way to describe the virtual phenomena. “The rising tide of public discontent” or God. Then the immediate question arises… is God real or a metaphor? This is where the notion of Metaxy comes in. There is something, the metaphor fits, or does not fit this something, some descriptions fit with the virtuality better than others, but they are not the same as labels in the physical world. Testing for the truth of a metaphor has its own place in the methods of science. Truth is possible, psychodrama is often referred to as the “theatre of truth”.

All of the above popped out as an introduction to a quote I found from Moreno. But I have digressed. You may see a link. I like to study the the role of such phenomena as the real-time-web, social networks, to grasp the evolution of the psyche.

I am seeking a psychodrama of the internets.

ROBOTS/HOW TO LIVE WITH THEM

… The countermeasure lies in a cold appraisal of the situation, a systematic study of the causations underlying the invention of mechanical devices, the origin of the robot in human nature and beyond it, a careful calculation of the “socio-atomic organization of mankind”. In other words, we should bring the problem into full scientific consciousness and develop parallel with sociometry a zootechnique, a science of the technical animals.

J.L. Moreno, Who Shall Survive? p. 601

Anne Hale answers a question about conflict

Walter — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 01:06:42 +0000

Anne Hales site is worth a visit.

Practitioner question

There is someone in your training group whom you fear and dislike. You don’t like conflict very much and have not spoken about this. How might you prepare yourself to address this conflict? An answer suggested by Ann E. Hale, M.A., TEP

sociometry.net

An excerpt from her response follows:

It is important for the well being of a group to have conflicts surface, especially if the concerns are tying up energy that could be expended on other group issues. A person who brings a conflict to the attention of the group is vulnerable, particularly from people who do not want conflict, or want something else to happen in that moment. A facilitator will recognize the need to take the pulse of the group and attend to the issue of readiness. At the same time, the person raising the concern needs to be supported with acceptance and respect. If the issue involves someone else who is a group member, whether present or not, this person may need time to check inside and identify their feeling and response to being part of another person’s issue. If the person is not present it may be opportunistic to address the issue without having to “worry” about their feelings or input; however, involving the group member directly is preferred. This will give both persons the opportunity to experience support from the group. Having to delay, until all parties are present, also sets in place a norm, that if you miss a group session for some reason, your position in the group will be protected until your return.

Some good principles here.

I see opportunity to dialogue in this but the methods don’t quite encourage that.

Research

Walter — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 01:55:44 +0000

I am intrigued by the parallel between the physics of particles/waves that change depending on the observer, and the psychotherapy process.

Once an observer is introduced we change the nature of the psychotherapy. The very stuff we grapple with in a diad, trust, engagement, transference are impacted in many ways if there is a third party observer. All the relationship stuff of the psychotherapy would be present with the observer as well. In addition what happens to the unconscious processes as a result of the invitation, allowed by the therapist, on the work with the therapist?

In a brief conversation today with colleagues I noted two comments that I’d like to reflect on more.

“Even inside the group there are things we can’t see.” (A)

And the other…

“Deciding to LOOK at the process changes the group as well, even when the observers are all members.” (G)

It might be useful to see how these observations relate to Moreno’s “Rules” of sociometry, which is a form of research relying on practice based evidence. I’ll quote my summary of them.

Participants are informed, ready, willing and able to participate.

Participants in the group are “researchers”, and the leader is also a participant.

Participation is done in action. Learning is experiential, it is learning by doing.

There is acknowledgment of the difference between process dynamics and the manifest content. To quote Moreno: “there is a deep discrepancy between the official and the secret behaviour of members”. (1951:39) Moreno advocates that before any “social program” can be proposed, the director has to “take into account the actual constitution of the group.” (ibid)
Rule of adequate motivation: “Every participant should feel about the experiment that it is in his (or her) own cause . . . that it is an opportunity for him (or her) to become an active agent in matters concerning his (or her) life situation.” (ibid)

Rule of “gradual” inclusion of all extraneous criteria. Moreno speaks here of “the slow dialectic process of the sociometric experiment”.

References are to: Moreno, J. L., 1951, Sociometry, Experimental Method and the Science of Society . Beacon House, Beacon, New York. Page 31

Action Research and Sociometry

Walter — Sat, 13 Dec 2008 03:30:06 +0000

In my exploration of Moreno’s ideas on Methodology I have come across Action Research. Kurt Lewin’s name comes up again. I recall he had something else that was *like* Moreno, but not quite? Yes, Force Field analysis, (see next post). I wonder how connected it all is, and how useful? Or if it is important to see the specific Moreno aspects that might be overlooked? I imagine the ideas of wap and Maximum Voluntary participation might not be present. Will check out, and would be interested in comments from people who know!

Action research
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Action research is a reflective process of progressive problem solving led by individuals working with others in teams or as part of a “community of practice” to improve the way they address issues and solve problems. Action research can also be undertaken by larger organizations or institutions, assisted or guided by professional researchers, with the aim of improving their strategies, practices, and knowledge of the environments within which they practice.

Kurt Lewin, then a professor at MIT, first coined the term “action research” in about 1944, and it appears in his 1946 paper “Action Research and Minority Problems”. In that paper, he described action research as “a comparative research on the conditions and effects of various forms of social action and research leading to social action” that uses “a spiral of steps, each of which is composed of a circle of planning, action, and fact-finding about the result of the action”.

en.wikipedia.org

Action Research

I am interested to get hold of the article by Philip Carter

And one by J Guntz

Look these up in the Psychodrama library?

[CITATION] An essay on the metascience of psychodrama
PF Kellermann – Journal of Group Psychotherapy, Psychodrama and Sociometry, 1991
Cited by 5 – Related articles – Web Search

[CITATION] Progress and Pitfalls in Sociometric Theory
JL Moreno – Sociometry, 1947 – JSTOR
Cited by 5 – Related articles – Web Search

Here is the abstract of another one:

Click on any of the links below to perform a new search
ERIC #:
A unique accession number assigned to each record in the database; also referred to as ERIC Document Number (ED Number) and ERIC Journal Number (EJ Number). EJ681179
Title:
The name assigned to the document by the author. This field may also contain sub-titles, series names, and report numbers. Action Research: A Contradiction in Terms?
Authors:
Personal author, compiler, or editor name(s); click on any author to run a new search on that name. Hammersley, Martyn
Descriptors:
Terms from the Thesaurus of ERIC Descriptors; used to tag materials by subject to aid information search and retrieval. Click on a Descriptor to initiate any new search using that term. Research Methodology; Inquiry; Action Research; Educational Research; Greek Civilization
Source:
The entity from which ERIC acquires the content, including journal, organization, and conference names, or by means of online submission from the author. Oxford Review of Education, v30 n2 p165-181 Jun 2004
More Info:
Help Peer-Reviewed:
An indication of whether the document came from a peer-reviewed journal or U.S. Department of Education publication. Note: Used from 2005 onward. More Info:
Help Yes
Publisher:
Publisher name and contact information, as provided by the publisher; updated only if notified by the publisher. Customer Services for Taylor & Francis Group Journals, 325 Chestnut Street, Suite 800, Philadelphia, PA 19106. Tel: 800-354-1420 (Toll Free); Fax: 215-625-8914.
Publication Date:
The date the document or article was published. 2004-06-01
Pages:
The total number of pages including all front-matter. 18
Pub Types:
The type of document (e.g., report) or publication medium. Journal Articles; Reports – Research
Abstract:
A brief narrative description of the journal article, document, or resource. The core idea of action research is that there should be an intimate relationship between inquiry and practical or political activities. A challenge to this idea based on an influential ancient Greek hierarchy between theoria and praxis is examined. The contrary, pragmatist, notion that all inquiry arises out of human activity is accepted, but not the instrumentalism sometimes derived from it. Research must be treated as operating on the same plane as any other activity, but the relationship between the two will always be less than isomorphic, and this creates the prospect of severe tensions. These can be managed contextually in two ways: by subordinating inquiry, or by making it primary. Both are legitimate, but any attempt to treat the two components of action research as equal faces contradiction.
Abstractor:
Source of the abstract: ERIC or Author; prior to 2005, abstractor initials appeared at the end of the abstract. Author
Reference Count:
The number of bibliographic references included in the indexed item. 64

Cameron Riley interviews Richard Moore

Walter — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 10:53:48 +0000

Just listened to Cameron Riley interview Richard Moore. Excellent podcast. A credible analysis of the geo-politics and a credible practical way forward – rare. I am now checking out “dynamic facilitation” dialogue. I love the way he speaks about doing dialogues as an experiment. Reminds me of Moreno’s sociometric experiments. These are not experiments ON people. This is people experimenting together, well that is what I make of it.

The state of the art for community dialogues has a way to go I think. I can see a sort of combination of Imago, NVC, Sociometry working to facilitate such a process. Couple and small group dialogues are hard enough, dialogues for social issues may be simpler. I like the way he proposes that a small group with diverse opinions, if they find a solution, it is likely it will be broadly accepted.