How Ideas Behave 3: What Do People Have Ideas About?
On Elon Musks's Dark Secrets and Other Interesting Things
Part 3 in a series. See also Part 1: Tales of Blood; Part 2: Variation in Knowledge.
People have ideas about anything they can observe or imagine – including about other people’s ideas. But not everything in the universe is equally likely to crop up in human communication. Here we’ll consider in detail why some things are more talked about than others. We’ll start by introducing a general way to analyze ideas as social interactions.
The Social Structure of an Idea
Sociological theorist Donald Black conceives of ideas as a kind of social behavior, an interaction involving multiple parties. There are three main parties to every idea: the source, the audience, and the subject.
The source of the idea is whoever is producing or spreading it, such as the author of the book, the person sharing the gossip with you, or the teacher instructing the class. The audience of the idea is whoever is exposed to it, such as the reader of the book, the person hearing the gossip, or the students listening to the lecture. The subject of the idea is whatever person, place, or thing is being discussed.
The social structure of the idea is defined by the relationship between these three parties. Social structure (or as Black often calls it, social geometry) includes the degree of social distance between everyone involved in the interaction. Social distance here doesn’t mean standing three feet behind the person ahead of you in the grocery check-out because of pandemic restrictions (which always should have been called physical distancing). Social closeness is a product of intimacy, interdependence, and similarity, and social distance is greater where these things are least.
Intimacy, or as Black calls it, relational closeness, is defined by the degree of involvement one has with another. That includes, for example, how long two people have known one another, how much time they spend together, and how much they know about one another’s lives. In this sense members of the nuclear family are generally closer than casual acquaintances are closer than strangers.
Notably, relational closeness or distance can be uneven, perhaps one-sided. We become more intimate with historical figures when we read about their lives, though they are dead and can grow no closer to us. We can also become more intimate with animals, inanimate objects, or locations, based on how familiar we are with them, or how much we learn about them.
Interdependence is a form of closeness arising specifically from cooperation, and from relying on one another for survival or well-being.
Similarity includes cultural similarity, or as Black calls it, cultural closeness. People are culturally close to the extent they share language, dialect, clothing styles, beliefs, and so forth. It can also include similarity in form and function, such that people can be more or less close to non-humans as well. People are in this sense closer to fellow mammals than to lizards, or to animals than to plants, or to living things than to rocks.
Social Closeness of the Subject
Black uses social closeness to explain which subjects are interesting – that is, which attract the most ideas and attention: the attractiveness of a subject varies directly with its social closeness. That is, the more intimate and/or similar a something is, the more it tends to attract ideas and attention. As Black explains: