Scenes

What is a scene?

Take for example an open mic scene. It might start with one cafe having an open mic night one night a week. It's fairly successful, and some of the people who attend would be willing to go to another open mic night on a different night. So another cafe nearby starts having an open mic night on a different night of the week.

If you go to one open mic, people there will talk about the other. The best way to find out about open mics is to go to one and hear from people where the others are. (In my experience, online directories of open mics exist, but are poorly maintained / tend to be out of date -- that's been true of San Diego, at least.)

Cafe 1 generally does not (or even could not) cause Cafe 2 to start their open mic, and similarly has limited ability to shut down Cafe 2's open mic.

Venues are quiet but important elements of scenes. You can have an open mic in a cafe, at a beach, in a park, a student union -- but you have to have it somewhere. And each venue has some influence over what kind of open mic can be done there. If a venue is no longer available (like a cafe goes out of business), then that disrupts the scene. An open mic can move to a different venue, but people might not follow.

Someone in the open mic scene might decide to put on a house show that is mostly attended by people from the scene, a one-off event. This isn't strictly speaking an open mic, but it's still part of the same scene.

When I was attending UC Davis, there was a monthly open mic that was led by a group of people, some students who were poets. I don't know how organized their group was, but at least they always performed a group poem at the start of the open mic nights -- they had to coordinate at least a little in that. (So, an organization can put on regular events.)

There weren't a lot of other open mics in Davis at that time, but that particular open mic generated its own small scene. I was part of a collaboration that came out of the open mic, made a song with two other artists connected through the scene. The collaboration was not caused by the open mic organizers as such, was something independent that "arose emergently" from the open mic.

A church is more like an organism, while a scene is more like a space or matrix that contains organisms. But like the Davis open mic, a church itself functions as a scene, to some extent.

A scene can contain sub-scenes. For instance, the universal church is not a single organization, but rather is a scene. But within the universal church is "the set of churches or other Christian social phenomena in San Diego County". I can't very practically interact with Christian in-person things in Los Angeles (speaking as a San Diegan), so the LA scene is mostly not directly relevant to me. But it's certainly possible for me to hear about another church in San Diego, to leave whichever one I might be attending and go to it. It's certainly possible for me to say "I'm going to go see what they have in LA" and visit, and then find a church there. Or happen to hear of an LA church from someone in San Diego, maybe someone who moved here for a job and left a church they liked. But it's less likely than getting caught up in what's happening in San Diego County.

(God's perspective on the universal church is that it is the body of Christ -- not that it is merely a scene. A body has a deep kinship and claim (whether manifested or not) to being one interconnected thing. But scenes do not, not necessarily. (The cells in a body differ though most of them share the same DNA. A diseased body could be like a poorly-connected scene.))

Scenes have definitions to them, loose as they are. The open mic scene is made up of open mics, and the people who meet each other through open mics. A Christian scene is made up of Christians, and the people who meet each other through the elements of the Christian scene. In a sense, an open mic is part of one great scene, for instance, the social life of San Diego or even the United States or the world. The boundaries of scenes are fuzzy and can be continuous with other scenes, both broader and less definite ones (San Diego's open mic scene could be continuous with the overall social life of San Diego) or narrower, more definite ones (and it could be continuous with the local drum circle scene). If you are at an open mic, you are definitely participating in the open mic scene. If you are at a house show and everyone there is from the open mic scene and they all met each other through the open mic scene, then you are part of the open mic scene. But if there start to be non-open mic people at events, perhaps at some level of non-open mic person attendance, they aren't really open mic scene events.

A focal point (sometimes referred to as a "Schelling point") is a solution that people tend to choose by default in the absence of information (according to Wikipedia). This is relevant when trying to coordinate people's actions. Maybe someone explicitly sets up a focal point (informs people), but once this is done, it just "floats" in the culture -- maybe is hard to undo. Scenes involve focal points, perhaps more so than organizations, because they don't provide explicit direction to coordinate people.

An important basic focal point is "I'm going to go there [to a particular event or venue] because other people go there." I go "there" because I think explicitly "there are going to be people there". But I also go "there" because I am in the habit of going there. I rely on the habitual nature of others to feel like there is a "there" (socially speaking, a populated space) to go to.

Something that is in the neighborhood of a focal point is the "spirit" of a scene. A spirit is an animating breath, something with both a power and a quality to it. Somewhat like a fuel: wood burns differently than natural gas. Some spirits are contagious, and can be caught within an organization or scene. The metaphor of a fire: the coal can burn outside the fire, but burns out much sooner than if it were among fellow coals in the fire. Spirits are a third reason (besides habit and rational anticipation), that people decide to show up to (or find themselves showing up to) specific events or group meetings within a scene.

The definition of a scene selects a certain kind of person to be a participant in it (for instance, the extent to which the label "Christian" is taken up by a certain kind of person who then seeks the Christian scene). Due to this, and other habits, expectations, and spirits, people within a scene behave a certain way toward each other. Scenes shape individuals in (hopefully) congruent ways, so that the individual-to-individual interactions (those farthest from conscious organization) are still affected by the fact of being within the scene as a whole.

Are scenes really spaces where impersonal forces emergently generate social interaction and culture? In a sense, no. Each thing is caused by a consciousness. A consciousness that causes has preferences and will, and in that at least minimal sense is a person. So somebody causes each thing, including the basic actions occurring in a scene. These actions may interact in ways that no one person foresaw or intended, but the choice of personal beings was operative in everything.

God chooses some things and might run parts of the world in a mechanistic, systemic way, but this is less true of social systems, which are more under our own responsibility. Some features of scenes that appear to be unchosen are the aftereffects of choices made in the past, or the choice to not choose, or the preference to not choose. Scenes behave differently when there are people making conscious choices in them versus ones in which people choose not to choose or prefer not to choose. Every element in a scene participates because someone chose to participate, so without choice, there would be no scene.

Certainly one of the virtues of a scene is that it does not control people, and another is that it is not subject to the life and death cycle of an individual organization. It is good to choose not to control scenes or their elements, to preserve the ability of individuals to make choices and test their preferences against reality. However, there are times when a person's agency is threatened by another member of a scene, and then it can be justified for someone within the scene to exert some kind of control against the other member (a group bans someone from their events, for instance). A general goal for scenes (for people thinking about scenes) can be agency-maximization.

The preceding three paragraphs together say something like: you have to choose in order to do your part in developing a scene, but generally it is best to not make other choices within a scene, to allow other people to make their own choices. If you make very many choices for other people in a scene, you start to turn it into one large organization, instead of a scene.

So maybe I can try to define a scene, having given those examples: A scene is an interconnected collection of essentially independent elements of social life (events, venues, groups, individuals), and their spirits and "institutions" (habits and expectations).

Individuals (individually or corporately) are aware of other elements of the scene and have some ability to interact with multiple elements, or to refrain from one element in order to participate in another. So a scene can include loyalty to one group, but also includes all the other possible groups, and the pathways by which people can participate in other groups. It tends to include features that seemingly nobody consciously chooses, things that are "in the air". No one person or organization is in control of a scene as a whole. Anyone can extend a scene, without permission, simply by making an element known to people in the scene that is fitting with the concept of the scene (Christianity, open mic nights, etc.) or which mostly attracts people who primarily know each other from the scene.