25 February 2009

Pavement Panto, Synchronicity And Bounded Rationality

Shortly after reading Brit's brilliant exegesis of the Pavement Panto, I was listening to Dean Martin sing On The Street Where You Live:



Suddenly, Dean was singing his disdain for the Pavement Panto:
People stop and stare. They don't bother me.
For there's no where else on earth that I would rather be.
Let the time go by, I won't care if I
Can be here on the street where you live.


Now, obviously this is what we organizational scholars call retrospective sensemaking; the words have meaning for me because of the meaning that I bring to it. All synchronicity -- and all blogging -- is a function of what we notice and what we notice is a function of what's in the front of our brains at any particular moment. We have bounded rationality. From the vast stream of information that's constantly flowing past us we see only those things that we're primed to see. I'll see the pavement panto now that Brit has invented it and hear Dean sing about it only because I know about it. We are each a walking wavefront of experience.

3 comments:

Brit said...

You've certainly deepened the discussion, David, I thought I was doing observational comedy. But you are, of course, right.

joe shropshire said...

Well, at least we know neither of you is whoring for traffic.

David said...

Speaking for myself, it's more that I'm very very bad at it.