Chance meetings

I was walking to a cafe that offers wifi here in Almaty. I've been spending quite a bit of time here lately, using their wireless and people-watching. This morning there was an interesting group of people here with name-tags. These kinds of things signify purposeful meetings so I walked up and asked what they were doing here. Turned out these were the professionals from Almaty who hang out on a relatively new Russian social network site called professionaly.ru. Today was their first meeting of its kind and the people that I initially met, were friendly and willing to exchange business cards. I am extremely low on business cards now, and I keep thinking of that huge box in my office full of those useless things.

As I explained to the collection of professionals the purpose o my presence in Almaty, one of them suggested that I speak to one of their number who might have more interesting things to say on my topic as she is a psychologist. She was very forthcoming, offering to connect me with professors in the department of psychology at Kaz University here in Almaty whose students have done work on similar themes to mine. She also sketched out a rather interesting theory of how and why people use the Internet to meet others. Some of her ideas were in line with some of hte older ideas put forth by Sherry Turkle and Lee & Spears. Others were somewhat more interesting and she got very excited whe I suggested that her ideas were of interest to me and that if my research leads me more in a psychology direction, maybe we should write something together. It's always kind of neat to meet people who are academically and intellectually curious and so forward with their ideas. In short, she suggested that in seeking out others on the Internet, just like in any other social space, people seek two main things - structure (as she conceptualized formalities of belonging) and warmth (or a kind of emotional feeling of belonging and feeling wanted, needed and valued).

This kind of breakdown of belonging is something I've been thinking about quite a lot and I actually think she is right. She approaches this from a profoundly psychological point of view, but there are also sociological and anthropological ways of thinking about this that eventually result in the same kind of idea - we do seek structure to our lives in the form of social obligations bourn out of belonging to people and groups that place demands on us as a cost of that belonging. We also seek the benefit of that belonging that is the warmth and the emotional security that such belonging provides. The structural aspects of belonging are not entirely a cost in that they are also a form of signalling to others the fact of belonging in our own lives. They are also a form of signifying our social worth to ourselves in the structure of social business of our lives. Arguably, social worth is one of the more important self-markers in the development of self-esteem.

This cafe is interesting as I see a few people come here with laptops and use their wifi, but for the most part, especially during the holidays this weekend, people come here to meet and chat and spend time together. I see maybe one or two laptops, usually being used inside the relatively empty cafe, while the outside portion is packed and I am usually alone here with my foreign-looking mac (most computers here are PCs). Generally everyone has a phone and they are using their mobiles constantly. Also, everyone smokes, which makes the inside of this establishment untenable for me, the softie American.There are very very few people here who are sitting at tables alone. In fact, I am pretty much the only one. Even with laptops many people are here with someone else, showing, discussing.

Almaty is a funny place. It is no longer a captial, so the pace of life here is a bit slower. Yet it is the most populous city with the largest number of insitutions of higher education in the country. It is also the oldest Soviet city here. Thus it is the cultural and business center, where Astana is the government and maybe financial center. There is a qualitative difference between Amaty and Moscow but I can't quite pin it down yet.