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.
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tuppence
Date: 2003-09-01 07:31 am (UTC)It has often seemed to me that the accusation of 'cliquishness' is regularly levelled at groups by excludees who wish to blame other people's arrogance for their inability to make friends and keep them, rather than having to face up to their own objectionableness.
The perceived moral superiority is usually on the side of the plaintiff, since exclusion which cannot be overtly justified (short of saying something like: "but you suck pears out of Satan's cock and besides your pits stink enough to make a Polar Bear hurl and nobody likes spending time with you because you'd irritate the hell out of the underworld" - none of which can obviously be stated in polite company, whether it be true or not) cannot be acceptable. Thus, this prompts well-meaning people who like to come down on the side of 'the people' to take up arms against the oppressors. i.e. the clique.
Which may in actual fact just be a bunch of pals trying to have a quiet party with people they enjoy being with. Nothing wrong with that.
In fact, I would argue that the difficulty in pinning down exactly what a clique is *is* due precisely to this political complication. It is one of those words which is used to manipulate, and is therefore (perhaps) quite difficult to define in absolute terms.