Leaving the Party

by Alphaville Herald on 28/05/04 at 6:50 pm

In the Clay Shirky article post below is the following passage, which I found interesting, and worth pondering out of context.

“You’re at a party and you get bored — it’s not doing it for you
anymore. The people you wanted to talk to have already left, you’ve
been there a long time, you’d rather be home playing Ultima,
whatever. You’re ready to go. And then a really remarkable thing
happens – you don’t actually leave. You decide you don’t like this
party anymore, but you don’t walk out. That second thing, that thing
keeping you there is a kind of social stickiness. And so there’s this
tension between your intellectual self and your membership, however
tenuous, in the group. Then, twenty minutes later, another really remarkable thing happens. Somebody else gets their coat, ‘Oh, look at the time.’ What
happens? Suddenly everybody is leaving all at once. So you have this
group of people, each of whom is perfectly capable of making
individual decisions and yet they’re unconsciously synchronizing in
ways that you couldn’t have predicted from watching each of them.”

We’ve all experienced this. Question is, how many of us are experiencing it right now in TSO?