Saturday, April 2, 2011

Psychogeography of physical and virtual space

Psychogeography belongs to those influence, which has micro geographic orientation and relationships on psycho proceses and interpersonal relations. It is also connected with the fact that geographical relations between members of a group cause nonverbal influence on the process of interaction inside the group. Space relations and the orientation between people, influences members as physically, as symbolically. Psychogeography creates a kind of network of relations between people, defining the type and the quality of interaction.

Psychogeography has a huge influence on leadership and team dynamics.
  1. Circular psychogeography makes people concentrate on interpersonal relations and pay attention that everyone in a group has equal status.
  2. Placing a semi-circle mean concentration of members of the group on what is in front of this semi-circle. This arrangement implies the equality of status of alloccupants who want to take any action or reach a consensus on what is in the spotlight.
  3. The group, sitting side by side in a straight line, also implies equality of the totalcenter of attention, but greatly reduces the interaction between group members.They can act, but do not interact as a group.
Usage
Various psychogeography can be constructed and used for the stimulation of different types of group processes.
Circle is an effective technique for fantasy or brainstorming session, because it increases the interaction between group members. Circleimplies that all members, so the idea of equal worth, and people can easily jump from one idea to the idea, drop some, add others, not focusing too much on any oneperson or idea.


Psychogeography, in which group members sit Side-by-side on the same line to treat an idea or goal is more effective for criticism or evaluation. The proximity to each other suggests that they all - members of one group. However, each will bemore inclined to speak from their point of view, not checking the response of other group members.
Semicircle is more effective for psychogeography awareness or planning how toreach certain goals or dreams. In a semicircle people will continue to perceive each other as equals, but their attention is increasingly focused on a particular object.Idea or plan is not related to any member of the group and is a common focus forthe entire group. It is important that the group is more focused on the task than on the internal relationships.

Of course, there are more types of psychogeography in our everyday life. Remember, how people are placed in the university, school, at work, at the disco or in discuss club. 
But the point is that we are spending more and more time everyday on the internet, where now there are no borders between space and time, age and sex. And new types of psychogeography appears, but now it is our time to explore them!

I was trying to make a kind of analogy between virtual psychogeography and physical one. But virtual arcitecture has much more variants, and it is more difficult to classify them.
1. Circle can be characteristics of different co-working tools  Google Docs, Huddle, MindMeister, etc.
2. Semicircle is also a kind of co-working tool, but in a way of work of Skype conference, Google groups, Facebook group and other communities, WizIQ, etc.
3. Side-by-side is something like commenting of blogposts, replying on tweets, commenting videos and pictures, answering wall posts on Facebook.
4. I would also add "Creative chain" as another architecture of psychogeography. It is absolutely connected with the way we interact and work in the internet. 
4.1 We have an idea, then we spread our idea all around the world, there are possibly other people, who retweet our idea and then other people, forming groups or communities, discussing this idea and coming up with some reasonable outputs. But sometimes, just talking, without creation of output.
4.2 Another example: there is an idea in the internet, somebody retweets or reshares it, other people are interested and they also reshare it, but finally there is one in the chain, who is able to connect the idea with his own thoughts and create a new outcome, new idea! That's the great side of an internet, overcoming age, time, space, borders and people are able not only "copy-paste" relevant content, but also create something new, using already created things.
If you have thought on classification of architecture of psychogeography of virtual space, I would really appreciate them in comments!
Thanks for reading!

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