Last week, we all curated the Golden Album down from 24 tracks to 10. This week, we were provided with a visualization that showed a network of the tracks we each selected connected to others that made the same selection. In one of the visualizations we were grouped with others that selected similar tracks to ourselves. I am not sure what the threshold was to be placed into a group, for example, whether we had to match “x” number of tracks to be grouped together. What I do know is that we only input our song choices, with no other information such as the reason we selected each track, the priority we might assign to each track, etc. That leaves us to ponder whether we are, in fact, to connected to those of our identified group, and if so, how.

One of the questions to reflect on in this exercise is, how like-minded are we? Broadly speaking, as I see it, there were two factors involved in this activity: the selection of tracks and the reasoning behind our selections. The visuals told us who had similar selections but not the reasons, or the thought process, that led to those selections.

I was grouped with 4 others: Chris, Kylie, Tuo and Sylvia. I visited each one’s pages to review their reasons for selecting the tracks they did. Chris and I had very similar positions. We were mostly hoping our selections would evoke an emotional response from the aliens that might one day discover our record. We both posited that communicating the human characteristic of emotion might be the only thing we could communicate and/or that it would be the most important aspect of humanity to communicate. Interestingly, our similarity in reasoning resulted in similar selections.   Sylvia also considered different feelings, but also considered varied cultures. I deliberately choose to disregard cultural representation, and yet, our selections were similar enough to put us in a group. Tuo had several criteria, but emotion was one of them. Kylie was the only one I was grouped with that did not specifically mention emotion in her reasoning. So, despite a varied basis for conclusions, the end selections turned out similarly.

The other way to look at these relationships is to consider if others had similar reasoning to me but that ended up with different selections. I did not look at everyone’s sites, but I looked at 8 – 10 others not in my cluster. Interestingly, only one referenced emotional evocation as support for their choices. I had anticipated more people may have used the same reasoning with different picks.

To summarize, although we may group individuals according to some end result, it tells us little about the process or events that led to those results. Sharing an end point may be more of a coincidence than a predicted outcome.

Further, we were asked only to include a few sentences explaining our process for selecting tracks (although most people, including me, went beyond). I could have written much more on what my thoughts were for the exercise, globally, and more detailed for each of the 10 tracks I selected. This limited information prohibits a full analysis of how like-minded we are, or are not, to those in our group. Somewhat related to this, it would have been interesting, had we had the time and information, to read each others’ pages without knowing the tracks selected and then responded who we would group ourselves with based only on the write up of our support for our conclusions.

My final thought on the groupings is that we were limited by the 24 tracks in the original record. If our task had been, for example, to select any 10 songs that you think would represent and communicate the spectrum of emotions humans feel, I suspect nobody would have even one song in common. In the controlled environment, we achieved results that suggest we are like-minded, when in an open environment we may not appear that way at all.

I think these observations have tremendous relevance to our world today. We seem to be ever more attaching people to groups and making judgements about each based on one’s membership in a group. Often those groups associate to physical or other characteristics we have no control over such as race, gender, sexual orientation, etc. We further classify people by their religion, what province they live in, their political persuasion, area of study, grades achieved (ie. “A” students), etc. There are many examples where the gaps between groups is widening and rather than engaging in conversation to try to understand how others become part of a group, we make assumptions about each other based solely on the company we seem to keep. This often results in hatred, bigotry and prejudice, without justification.

This activity reminded me of a graphic I saw not too long ago, and was able to track down. (see below)

Source: https://datasociety.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/DS_Alternative_Influence.pdf

It was an attempt to connect a number of “controversial academics, media pundits, and internet celebrities…..”. Further, the comments note that, “While collaborations can sometimes consist of debates and disagreements, they more frequently indicate social ties, endorsements, and advertisements for other influences.” I have followed, or seen, the work of several people in this network, and I would never put some on the same page with each other, let alone attempt to connect them in some way.  It is reminiscent of the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon exercise. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Degrees_of_Kevin_Bacon).

It seems to me that grouping people by some measure may have a limited purpose, however, without full information, it may lead to undesirable outcomes as assumptions are made of each other based on the group(s) we belong to, whether we put ourselves there or somebody else did.