What is a clique and why is it bad?
Sep. 1st, 2003 09:49 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ciphergoth(friends-only, not filtered)
Have you ever been accused of being part of a clique? Were you? Were you or the other "clique" members doing something unethical, and if so what? Have you seen others behave like a clique in a way that was unethical? What was it about their behaviour that was unethical?
Everyone has preferences about what sort of people they want to be friends with. There's a good chance your friends have preferences more similar to yours than a random member of the population. Thus a circle of friends can form of people whose preferences have common elements.
If you'd like to hang out with that circle, but you don't fit the common preferences, you may feel they are excluding you, and behaving like a clique. This isn't necessarily so; it's an inevitable part of friendship groups forming that not everyone can join.
So what makes a clique different from any other circle of friends? I tried the dictionary without much enlightenment.
My first guess is that you become a clique when being part of the circle makes you feel so special that you don't want *anyone* new to join, no matter how close they are to the sort of people you might like to know, because that reduces the feeling of specialness. However, if the membership of your group can grow as well as shrink, it's less likely to be a clique.
My second guess is that if you're in a situation of forced contact with others, such as a school or workplace, a clique is a group within that forced contact group who get daily or near-daily opportunities to make it clear to outsiders, in a way they cannot avoid, that they are not part of the clique. Thus, if we start to see LiveJournal as a forced-contact situation, we will start to perceive every circle of friends as a clique; it's important to remember that there are a million people on LJ and we each have the power to choose whose journals we read.
It's possible I'm missing something. Please enlighten me!
PS first day of work today, I may not get back to this LJ for a while.
Have you ever been accused of being part of a clique? Were you? Were you or the other "clique" members doing something unethical, and if so what? Have you seen others behave like a clique in a way that was unethical? What was it about their behaviour that was unethical?
Everyone has preferences about what sort of people they want to be friends with. There's a good chance your friends have preferences more similar to yours than a random member of the population. Thus a circle of friends can form of people whose preferences have common elements.
If you'd like to hang out with that circle, but you don't fit the common preferences, you may feel they are excluding you, and behaving like a clique. This isn't necessarily so; it's an inevitable part of friendship groups forming that not everyone can join.
So what makes a clique different from any other circle of friends? I tried the dictionary without much enlightenment.
My first guess is that you become a clique when being part of the circle makes you feel so special that you don't want *anyone* new to join, no matter how close they are to the sort of people you might like to know, because that reduces the feeling of specialness. However, if the membership of your group can grow as well as shrink, it's less likely to be a clique.
My second guess is that if you're in a situation of forced contact with others, such as a school or workplace, a clique is a group within that forced contact group who get daily or near-daily opportunities to make it clear to outsiders, in a way they cannot avoid, that they are not part of the clique. Thus, if we start to see LiveJournal as a forced-contact situation, we will start to perceive every circle of friends as a clique; it's important to remember that there are a million people on LJ and we each have the power to choose whose journals we read.
It's possible I'm missing something. Please enlighten me!
PS first day of work today, I may not get back to this LJ for a while.
no subject
Date: 2003-09-01 02:48 am (UTC)I have two problems with this, althought they're a bit nitpicky and I think broadly you're right.
The first is that the 'looking down on' should be being done simply because the other people are not part of the clique, not for any other reason. I'm a rude and arrogant sod a lot of the time, and there are several people outside my circle of friends who I can be pretty rude about because, basically, I think they're shits. I'm rude about them because I think they're shits, and they're not in my circle of friends because I think they're shits, but I don't actually look down on them because they're not in my circle of friends. I don't actually think my circle of friends is a clique, although I accept that others disagree.
Secondly, while I do care how people perceive me and will sometimes go out of my way to change how I appear to alter that perception (not for nothing am I termed 'Chameleon Man', you know), there are limits to what I can do about how people perceive me and my friends. So I don't accept that simply being perceived to be rude, arrogant or the like is sufficient to identify a clique.
Which could be perceived as being pretty rude and arrogant, I suppose, but there you are...