Patterns of Human Interaction

Ryan Sharp recently posted on his blog a wave of thought about how language is a symbol and a common currency. He states that we naturally develop categories to help us process thoughts and ideas in a more efficient way. This is much how we identify mental landmarks to determine our bearings in a familiar location, but within the context of natural language.

I started exploring this thought further in regards to a lot of research I've been doing recently with natural language processing from an automated perspective, and I started thinking of examples of mental patterns we create regarding specific words and phrases given a certain context.

For example, whenever we are ready to end a conversation on the phone, we say, "Goodbye." This holds true in any case except for when the person has made us angry, or in the movies. With other forms of medium, saying goodbye is optional. Whether that's a digital instant message, or sometimes even in person, if no one says, "Goodbye," it's irrelevant. People keep moving and no feelings are hurt.

What's strange is that we have a mental pattern; an expectation that both parties are required to say, "Goodbye," before ending a phone call, and even if a call is dropped from a mobile connection, we are still left finding ourselved feeling uncomfortable, like the conversation can't be truly ended and resolved until we at least call the person back and finalize the discussion.

These types of patterns are everywhere in our language and interaction, and eventually it may even be possible to predict the medium content is derived from by simply plotting the right data points to represent these patterns.