“How can you not have insurance?”
“Because I spent my money on the Clapco D29, the most impenetrable lock on the market today. It has only one design flaw, the door must be closed!”
Relationship Diversity in the 21st Century
The rise in popularity of online social networking communities in the last decade has shown to have a variation effect on friendships and relationships overall, a phenomenon akin to biodiversity in healthy ecosystems.
The effects can be seen as more diverse groups, who would not normally interact, mingle using the variety of media for communication and expression of ideas. There has been a rise in the types of relationships which people describe themselves enjoying, the male-female platonic friendship being one example.
Figures show that there has been a steady rise in these micro-systems emerging, consider the ‘psuedo-’ or ‘long-lost family’. This could be due to the proliferation of ways in which people can express affection, and co-create together.
One century ago, the limitations of the postal and telegraph services required that the intentions for communication were likely to be clearly fitted within inflexible ‘blocks’ of activity, clearly defined by the structure of society at the time. A letter, or a telegram had to be succinct, and as accurate as possible a reflection of what was likely to pass. Nowadays, changes of plan occur much more rapidly, due to our freer flowing information systems and advances in personal mobile communications.
In the 21st century, communication can spark from as little effort as a non-intentional collection of pixels exchanged from point to point via satellite. This means that the numbers of people able to find each other for non-specific intentions is growing, and thus the range of roles which people define in each others’ lives has blossomed at an unprecedented rate, never before recorded by sociologists nor anthropoligists.
To illustrate the diversity of connections, below is a list of roles which a recent poll sample generated:
New brother
Soul brother
Long-lost brother
Gig brother
Neighbourhood brother
Drinking bro
Elf brother
Non brother
The prefixes contained in this list also apply to a range of other relationships, such as: cousin, sister, friend, associate, mother, father, poppet. The full diversity of connections is vast in complexity and was found to be impossible to map via online community websites alone.
Wallace Marsden
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