What is the village effect? The village effect is a metaphor for the social contacts we all need as humans in order to thrive. These are the strong social ties that develop naturally in a village, where by necessity you cross paths with each other repeatedly every day. When you think of most villages, there is a central square, a public area where everyone converges or passes by going to the grocer or the post office or city hall or to sit at a cafe. And that is something we have less and less of today in our era of online connections. Commerce is moving online, everything is moving online, and these traditional village spaces are disappearing.
One-hundred-fifty is the number that comes up time and again in the types of social interactions that work smoothly. We see it throughout history — whether we’re talking about the number of people in traditional hunter-gatherer societies, Neolithic villages, an English country village or the number of Christmas cards we send out. These are people with whom you have strong enough ties that you could ask to borrow $10 until the next payday.
…Not all types of social ties are created equal…
Continuing the discussion from Quit Facebook:
Seems @dennis and @primalwar are escaping the gravitational pull so far.
It’s so weird to me how much pushback I’ve gotten when trying to get people to move away from that medium. It’s not as if folks are totally naive to the negatives, and sharing pieces like this start brief conversations–THAT HAPPEN ON FACEBOOK. At this point I wonder how much of it is Stockholm Syndrome.
I genuinely believe that there’s an absolute naivety to the total picture here. I post my “Suffocating Void” up regularly and have seen some discussion elsewhere, but I think there’s a notion in people’s heads that feeling passe about the obviously grotesque intrusion of social networking or going into it with a critique of technology makes you less or not impacted by using it.
That’s absolutely not true.
These are neurological processes at play. But you can clearly see that it’s an addiction. I felt that the first time I deleted a FB profile, kind of like a strange daze of missing something that you weren’t aware you were doing, like scrolling a news feed while standing in line somewhere. There’s a cognitive disconnect happening there and it’s more telling when we don’t notice it’s happening than when we do.
So it’s like Stockholm Syndrome, but you never even knew you were being held captive.
I think the people behind Saskatoon Circle gathering see themselves as creating a village for a brief time. When I think of, where would I find a 150 person village to exist with? Saskatoon is what comes to mind. (Saskatoon Circle is a primitive skills week long gathering that is very vocal about creating community and transitioning the brief time they have there into everyday living). And I think it works at some level, although there are problems with some people looking for money and followers/interns to support their egos, spiritual agendas, and personal land projects. (I know it’s ironic I linked to their facebook page, but their website is down).
I feel like a next generation of gatherings can take place that attempt in person values such as giving without hope of receiving, horizontal authority, reverse dominance hierarchy, etc. A complete egalitarian approach.
In other words, much like Saskatoon Circle stepped away from gatherings like Winter Count because of cultural appropriation/patriarchy issues, I feel like next generation of gatherings can step forward that address issues of power, privilege, and access.
The gatherings could even be benefits for Feralculture, or just land trust purchases in general. The hard thing about Saskatoon is that it ends. It would be amazing to have a gathering and then give people the option to just keep staying and practice what they’ve been learning. Some people stay at Saskatoon and join Lynx Vilden’s primitive skills immersion program, but that costs an awful lot (though I’ve heard directly that many women do not pay).
My sweetheart and I are in this circle at 1 o’clock, to the left of the lady in the red jacket.
I’ve switched just recently to only using Facebook for a few specific groups and messages. I anticipate phasing that out as well.
every village that i’ve been involved in or been a long-time part of, has been destroyed by land developers in the country, and gentrification in the city. i mean, absolute obliteration. people scattered froom the site. i keep in touch with some of them via facebook. i don’t know where to live anymore- everywhere i go, there is rapid erasure of the cultural and physical environment. maybe this is different where you are in alaska? but in the rest of the us, i do not think anything is stable.