Symbolic Convergence

Observation #7
February 24, 2015
Symbolic Convergence

I served as Director of Stewardship this year for Ball State University Dance Marathon.  There were twenty-one other members on the executive council.  Each Wednesday, we would meet for our weekly exec meetings and they would typically last around two hours.  Each meeting began with a question to get to know everyone a little better.  These questions could range anywhere from our power song to our goals for the year, but the only thing we all knew when we went into the question was that it would get extremely off topic.

Even though our exec meetings each week were geared towards discussing goals and ideas for our upcoming weeks until the marathon, we would often discuss during these meetings things that would never actually happen.  For example, we would spend ten minutes discussing multiple ways that we might get recognition from John Green or Ellen Degeneres, yet we all realized that the likelihood of this happening was zero.  Though these were off topic, the theory of Symbolic Convergence notes that these group chains allowed the group to come together.  It later became a running joke that whenever we would try to discuss an idea, we would try to figure out how it could tie in to our overarching dream of attracting attention from Ellen (we never did).

Even though we all knew that these discussions about getting Ellen to come to our marathon would get us nowhere, we still continued to have them.  I think that at the end of the day, this fantasy drew us together because it kept our mind off of the stress of our positions for awhile and allowed us to see where we all wanted this marathon to go.  We knew that Ellen was not a realistic possibility, but through dreaming to have Ellen at our marathon, I think that we were able to bring some great people like President Paul Ferguson and current Miss Indiana to our marathon.