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The major time allotment of the Group Dynamics class was the the breakup of the class into two groups, and each group given separate classrooms. There were considered four stages of group dynamics, as the 'getting to know one another', the 'fight for pecking order', and the 'comfort zone group', where everyone knows there place and dislikes outsiders coming in and disrupting the status quo. The fourth type of group was one in which all the members of the group engage in play-acting of one kind or another, as an aid to other members of the group to elevate their consciousness. This last form was said to be a group option least exercised. There was the leader, the body guards, advisors and followers. For my final paper I posited another character identity new to the science. This was the spiritual adviser. This I discovered because this was my role, and watching myself in these different group situations, I noticed that I always assumed the role of becoming friends with the one who would become the leader. There was a further posit, and that was that there was also a contention between the leader and the spiritual advisor, as to which one would assume control of the group.
The group in the other class settled out the ranking in about two days.
The group I was in fought nearly the whole time period alloted, which may have been eight or ten classes sessions more or less. We never really made it to the comfort zone stage. I refused to be leader, but never made it known, which I suspected at the time may have been the reason the leader was not really established until the last or near last class. He and I had both been in a same earlier sub-group and so I knew him. He was not particularly bright and thus needed advisors; was a stubborn type convinced in the certainty of many things, which may be the essential quality of a leader, the quality itself based on the necessity of narrow consideration. Too many options muddies the mind. It
was a good theory I thought and I got an A.
The same sort of thing happened and was said to happen every time in one of my media classes. The class was split into two groups and the assignment was to
make a TV show. The groups were chosen by the students themselves gravitating to the type of individual they were comfortable with. The first group was math and science types, practical, button-down, conventional. Apparently they on the first day chose a leader, decided to do a news show and proceeded to implement it. My group was the more radical types, discontents, non-conformists and malcontents. So on the other hand, we fought the whole week, never arrived at an idea, and on the day of the actual simulated telecast, it was decided to burn a candle in front of drapery with maybe a bible and an apple or something ridiculous like that. As for my role in these things, I always acted as an observer
never actually initiating anything myself, and that was purposeful.
My last semester at Santa Rosa Junior College I took a night class given by a local radio station owner. This was something of an eye-opener. While Hazars and the college curriculum stressed all sorts of media ethics and idealism, the real world of radio was money, money and more money. The teacher was from New York, bought the station in Santa Rosa which was a country station, not something he would have thought he would be doing, but that was the market. The market dictated the content. He did country because that was the market, regardless of his own predilections. He said he got to like it, but was in it mainly because owning the station, he got to be the morning drive-time disk jockey.
I had watched TV all my life and kept track of things like ratings, popularity, why shows were pulled, and of course listened to radio, so I knew something of the market. Here I got to meet some of the disk jockeys and marketing people. This
teacher stressed the market aspects with many examples of how it worked.
Whereas the regular college courses did not emphasize all that much the market
influence.
Also that last semester Chriso and his wife were in Santa Rosa to promote Christo's 'Running Fence' for Sonoma County, the term Sonoma a Pomo Indian word meaning 'many moons', which is what I heard and liked. As was told to me, it meant when you walked the hills at night the moon rose and fell many times, so in a way it meant hilly. It is more generally translated as 'valley of the moon', as less picturesque. At least one of my teachers took an interest in Christo's fence and it was quite a subject of conversation around the campus. The general conception of an artist is the creation of works of art isolated from the community in general. Here the art project was for the most part political rather than conceptual, and I attended a couple of the city hall meetings where
he pitched his idea as well as at the college itself.
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