Mental Orientation: Who’s Building Your Bridges?

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The anticipation of the existence of another person – or becoming oriented toward an “other” – is a distinctly social act, as Max Weber explains:

Social action, which includes both failure to act and passive acquiescence, may be oriented to the past, present or expected future behavior of others… The others may be individual persons, and may be known to the actor as such, or may constitute an indefinite plurality and be entirely unknown as individuals. (1978: 22)

As we become oriented toward others, whether these others are formally “known” to us or not, we actually engage in a type of social action.

“Watching is doing,” Erving Goffman asserts, and the same is true of thinking: when we project ourselves mentally into a situation, we really experience it (1974:381).

Technological mediators are as “bridges” between separated people, facilitation joint mental orientation. Two physically separated individuals and a technological mediator (or “mediating element,” in Simmel’s terms) as a mediator “brings: information from one person to another (see Simmel 1950 [1908]: 118-77). Though the triad has three components of “sides” (two people and the mediator), we tend to forget or take for granted the side representing the mediator, because technological mediation occurs constantly in our society. (This would not be the case in a culture in which, for example television had jus been introduced.) The connection, then, comes to feel much more like dyad. With the assistance of the technological mediator, two spatially separated individuals thus have a chance to learn enough about one another so that they can become oriented toward and get to know on another.

Questions of the day –

• Who’s building bridges for you?
• How are you fostering the triad of interaction
• Is the content you’re creating causing a dyad even though you have a technological mediator?

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