There are two ideas I've been wanting to write about for a while. They fascinate me, and I'm not sure whether they might be related or not.
The first is what I call "the micro-cult". Many months ago, Illara introduced me to the online Manga "Lean On Me". I believe she had been introduced to it by Kelli, but I don't know who introduced her to it. I know however that I introduced it to Ally, Peta and Marron. What I find fascinating is the tiny closely-interconnected niche which formed on the internet around this particular source, like a random seed falling on a temporary spring in the desert and greening the area with it's progeny. The internet has been expanding so rapidly, and has so many people on it, that one might think that it should be a completely heterogeneous distribution of people. And yet, out of swirling chaos comes order and organization. Clusters of people with a common interest gravitate through their communication nodes to points of shared interest. However, I digress, what's interesting is to see the formation of "organization" on such a short time-span. One might suggest that this is how religions begin, shared experiences amongst a central group of interconnected people which (under the right circumstances) gains momentum.
If you think about it for a moment, there should be an inverse-relationship between the size of a "cult" and the number of cults of that size. So, there should be a lot of "micro-cults" with say less than 50 people, and just a few very large cults with population sizes of say greater than a million. We can see this in the fact that there a just a few extremely large world-religions, but many much smaller "splinter groups".
What is odd is the drive towards organizations, and yet it is completely natural. Any dynamic systems ought to invariably move towards organization. If you shake a box full of randomly-sized rocks, they will be chaotically distributed because the individual particles are not communicating amongst themselves. If however the individual members have an attraction to similar members, they will aggregate. Humans have an innate drive towards finding similar traits in other people and preferentially being with similar people, therefore, one should expect this aggregation whether it be in terms of racially similar neighborhoods or shared interests in such a nebulous medium as the internet.
Returning to the idea of the "micro-cult". These "cliques" can be either dynamic or static and it is within this pattern which decides a lot about the direction of the "idea behind the group". Example. The sexuality department is a static group, we mostly know our sexuality's and these are unlikely to change by much, rendering our inter-personal relationships difficult if the only basis is our pre-determined static sexuality's. So it is difficult to organize events or parties where the only connection is that one sleeps with members of the same sex. "Lean On Me" used to be a dynamic system because each new episode brought out different feeling and thoughts in people, and these wider experiences could serve as the transient discussion point. "Lean On Me" has now finished, and so is now a static system, if Jade starts up a new comic, then this is a dynamic system also, but it does not necessarily have what attracted people to "Lean On Me" in the first place. In this case Jade herself becomes the centre of the micro-cult, the interest revolving around her art. No system is permanently dynamic, even long-term systems such as the Roman Empire became static and so gave way to new dynamic systems.
11 am - I no longer yearn for the altered spaces, why?