Topic 19: The Influence of Proximity

Carol:

The Power of Positive Proximity

The challenge of trying to respond to these sometimes archaic, often head-scratching daily topics, is discovering what I really WANT to say as opposed to saying something that will just fit the topic. I have started this essay three times. The first time, I wrote about peer pressure as an often negative example of what the term “influence of proximity” might mean. I’m sure we can all point to places in our lives when we did something we wish we hadn’t purely because our friends dared us to. Big-haired, white-lipsticked, black eye –shadowed as I was in 1964, it was inevitable that I would give into peer pressure to smoke, which I attempted at lunchtime in the back of a friend’s car. Fifteen minutes later the whole school knew about it because in an effort to be cool, I also got sick (luckily after I got out of the car). We all have those stories.

But, once I got that out of my writing system, I started thinking about the positive things that come out of being part of a strong sphere of influence. That same year in high school, a group of us jokingly formed a “Constructive Criticism Club.” I imagine at the time we did it to encourage each other to lose weight, grow our fingernails, and attain some kind of previously unmet goal of social acceptability, but in reality we banded together to talk about books, dream about going to college and laugh a lot. That “laugh a lot” part was really important.


That recollection led me to think about the bursts of creative energy that have come out of time/spatial proximity of people who probably were risk-takers and innovators and rule-breakers individually but whose spark of genius was encouraged by association with a group. Most people need models and mentors, I think, in order to push the boundaries of what they think they can do. When two young, Harvard-trained Unitarian Ministers in New England decided to form a discussion group for “disaffected young clergy” in 1836 (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy), I don’t think they would know that the Transcendental Club would attract the minds and creativity to start a Movement. Imagine the conversations when Ralph Waldo Emerson and his friend Frederic Henry Hedge got together with Bronson Alcott (Louisa May’s father), Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Margaret Fuller, who became the editor of their publication The Dial. What began as critique of their theological roots and exploration of European philosophers led to advocation of women’s rights, Utopian social experiments such as Brooke Farm and Thoreau’s sojourn at Walden, and eventually to anti-slavery protest.

Whether a philosophicall/social movement such as the Transcendentalists or an artistic movement such as the Harlem Renaissance in New York or the congregation of artists and writers in Paris during the 1920’s, there seems to be that notion of synergy where the total effect is greater than the sum of the individual parts, or what we might call The Influence of Proximity.



Source: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy –Transcendentalism


Megan:

The Serendipity of Browsing

One night when I was still working, a prisoner shouted to me from across the library,

"Miss! Where you keep the black books?"
"We don't segregate books in this library."
"Seriously Miss, how am I supposed to find other books this guy wrote? You should have a system and put them in some kinda order, like, by genre, you know... law, cooking, fiction..."
"Yeah, we do have a system."
"You gotta fiction section?"
"It's arranged by the author's last name."
"Oh, right. That's a good system."
"I think so too."

Setting aside the fact that I obviously failed that prisoner when I gave him the library induction, the way books are shelved in a library can actually be a complicated notion. The inmates who worked for me in the prison library were tasked with shelving the library materials. It was a continuous struggle to get them to put the books where they belonged instead of in the first space they came across. One time they tried to convince me that all the books should be re-shelved according to size because “it would look so much nicer” and had completed a section before I could stop them.  

Everyone’s heard of the Dewey Decimal Code, but it’s actually a really outdated coding system (i.e. Philosophy & Psychology get the 100’s, Religion gets the entire 200’s section, but computers only get from 004-006). However, with the DDC and other subject based shelving systems, items placed next to each other are usually related. This system lends itself well to browsing, as people are often searching for a specific topic rather than author (except in Fiction). In the library world, there is a notion of the ‘serendipity of browsing,’ the loss of which is often bemoaned when discussing the digitization of information – when card catalogues became online catalogues, and when people started using Google to answer their questions, instead of the Reference section. The serendipity of browsing is the idea that one often finds exactly what they are looking for, seemingly by accident.

But it’s not an accident – not really. You may be randomly browsing the Just Returned shelf, or wandering the stacks with a vague idea of what you’re looking for, and suddenly stumble upon an entire section relevant to your interest. There is a psychology to this – people choose reading material either because it was recommended (in reviews, by a friend, and by virtue of having been recently read) or because they are looking for specific information. Non-fiction books are not shelved alphabetically because people would have to run all over the place to find what they were looking for; it would incapacitate the ‘serendipity of browsing’ and diminish the influence of proximity.

The influence of proximity is really a matter of convenience. People usually shop at the grocery store closest to their home, pick the restaurant closest to the movie theater and fall in love with “the girl next door.” And when browsing, they look for more information on a subject and expect to find it within arm’s reach. Those aren’t the only options and they may not be the cheapest, the best, or even available, but close and convenient often rank high when making decisions (at least, when I make decisions). And it is this somewhat lazy human personality quirk that Mr. Dewey was catering to when he came up with his system.