Identifying amorphous social groups or networks to satisfy personal networking needs

As I sat and listened to the ambitions and dreams of somebody I met whilst on a weekend away in my camper van at a musicians reunion recently, it crossed my mind that many of the things we find most difficult in life are involved with finding what we are looking for within amorphous or open ended social groups or situations and perhaps this is why finding my idea of bohemia is so difficult.

For example, finding a job is difficult. I involves searching potentially an extremely large body of opportunities, often depending on whether one is willing to travel to the next town, next country or even world-wide. Advertisements convey something about a job but never the mass of detail which is what the job is really about.

Finding love, friendship or marriage is typically one of the most difficult things we do in our lives and perhaps one of the most important. But the size of the potential population of people who may match our conscious or unconscious criteria could be absolutely huge, perhaps even 50% of the population. Cutting the size of the challenge down by specifying like-minded activities such as 'likes playing tennis' or 'non-smoker' may help but, again, it is difficult to search within a group when the group is so badly defined or amorphous.

On the other hand, it is extremely easy to find something specific such as a commercial product, for example a car or a can of beans. Our whole society and its price mechanism is based on solving these specific needs.

So, how does one go about finding people who would make my bohemia? If they are all congregated in a club somewhere with advertisements aimed at increasing membership of the club, it would be easy but this is not likely to happen.

Could one put up a big sign, perhaps through the Internet, saying 'like minded people gather here'? In theory, this would work, as long as the advertisement was very large but most private individuals not having high public profiles would have difficulty getting many people to look at the advertisement and this probably applies even using the new social media web techniques.

In my local area of West Somerset, England, I have for a long time suggested Local Authority regeneration plans should be made in discussion with all local small businesses and not just a small few who have been identified and are considered (rightly or wrongly) representative. The Local Authority is reluctant to do this, probably for a variety of reason but, arguably, and possibly reasonably, because it is very difficult to identify a group called 'small businesses in West Somerset'. It's not impossible but many of the small businesses are hidden away in their homes and so the information is not going to fall off an Exmoor tree and hit them on their heads so, given resources etc., it won't happen.

The problem is that the characteristics of the population that forms 'jobs I would like to do', 'people I would like to date, love, marry' or 'small businesses with whom I would like to network' are vague and the constituents of the population are undetermined and probably changing all the time.

Expand the search to groups of people who have the same ideas, beliefs or emotional needs and the problem expands probably exponentially with no improvement in techniques or methods with which to do the search.

So 'whence my bohemia' becomes a slightly different question. Rephrased, it may better be described 'whence is the system by which I can identify my bohemia?'

Although perhaps that leaves me no further advanced in my networking search ... and is of little help to that person in the camper van who is seeking something that is very difficult to define. But perhaps these thought processes are a start!

Bye for now

Rob
(Online author and reluctant philosopher)