Symbolic Convergence Theory

Have you ever had a running inside joke among friends? It could start off small such as when I told my roommates sarcastically that I was "super stoked for my English 480 midterm." Seeing how none of that sentence sounds remotely fun one of my roommates chimed in and said "maybe after all that fun you could top your day off by going to the dentist!" Soon the idea of just how much "fun" I was going to have that day exploded through out the house. Soon we were formatting the joke to our daily activities: my friend was going to see a movie that day, but insisted that she would love nothing more than to take the exam with me. This is the Symbolic Convergence Theory. Me telling my roommates about my "excitement" would be defined as a dramatizing message. Dramatizing messages can be a variety of things from puns and wordplay to stories and analogies which describe events occurring somewhere else and/or at some time other than the here-and-now. My exam was three days away so it was a reference to the future outside of the present. Sometimes, however, dramatizing messages don't go anywhere. We all know that awkward kid that tries to make a dramatizing message that lasts and it goes very bad, very quickly. Instead of building off of the dramatizing message, someone changes the subject and it falls flat. We call those people in life Kevins: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YFcBgzRSR8. In this clip you can see as much as Kevin tries to get a successful dramatic message flowing he just can't do it. The flip side to this, however, is the fact that the sharing of a successful dramatic message creates group cohesiveness. These types are called fantasies and are immediately grasped by the group, and soon start fantasy chains: A symbolic explosion of lively agreement within a group in response to a member's dramatizing message. Dramatizing messages are interpretive and are used to make sense of ambiguous situations in the present. All of this comes back to the first basic principle that sharing group fantasies creates symbolic convergence. Symbolic Convergence is basically the idea of more than two individuals from different viewpoints finding common ground among any situation. They seem to happen more often when a group is frustrated; a great example that portrays an ambiguous situation that conjures up a fantasy chain is this clip from the show Community. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2W6O3QoKpo In this scene Shirley is refusing to empty out her purse to reveal if she was the one among the group that stole pens and as a response to this particularly disconcerting event everyone in the group calls her out, the funny thing is that they all try to make their remarks of people's names that rhyme, soon everyone catches on and it keeps going throughout the episode, and eventually into others! These fantasy chains can be set off again at another particular time. All it takes is some type of code made within the group to bring them back to when they originally made the chain. For example, now when anyone in our house says they had a good time we ask if it was as fun as an English 480 midterm; that is now the bar for fun in our house. This exemplifies why symbolic convergence is so important among groups. I live with 5 other people with all different backgrounds so the fact that we can all bond over a variety of fantasy chains makes us more closer. I have also found that the more we were able to joke the more comfortable we all were with talking to each other about anything else, especially more serious things. I think it's the process of letting your guard down in front of someone else that creates the bond and builds trust. Lastly is the process of some fantasy chains spawning from small groups, but than reaching the public or community as whole. This happens when a fantasy is conveyed to the public, picked up by media, and spread across society. This larger scale version of people sharing a fantasy is called Rhetorical Vision. This is when large groups of people are all sharing a common symbolic reality. What should you do right after you read this? Go out and make some fantasy chains!!! #GoodRead #HowManyTimesCanIsayMessage? Bibliography Griffin, Em. A first look at communication theory. 8th ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2012.