Twenty, Part II

An hour and a half later, we finally returned to our desks, but we only had half an hour remaining before our first meeting; not really enough time to get work done on the writing. Instead we went over our agenda and planned the meeting.

Our sponsors seemed pleased by our definition just as our advisors had been. Stephen (the person officially in charge of the project) nit-picked it a bit, questioning our choice of certain words. As he put it, it was good stuff; he liked to argue with good stuff. Which was encouraging and frustrating at the same time, because we realized his arguments were valid and would need consideration. But he also said that he thought it was solid enough to take and run with. We didn’t need to test it or validate it; we’d already used expert sources to synthesize it, and we weren’t going to get any new information.

The next step, then, was to figure out what to do with it next, and as the meeting went on we grew more and more frustrated as we realized we were about where we had started—feeling like this was beyond us, like it was an impossible task, like we didn’t even know what we were trying to achieve, much less how to go about achieving it. We had the definition, and we needed to figure out how to apply it to social media in a tangible way. But how? They gave us a deadline of next Wednesday to present them with some ideas of ways to test it. Whatever ‘testing it’ actually means.

So instead of working on our writing, we spent the afternoon discussing Stephen’s criticism and trying to get our heads around our next step. We figured there were two ways of looking at it—measuring people’s behavior, or measuring content that is posted—but realized that it wasn’t possible to have or even measure one without the other. You can’t figure out what one person’s behavior means without knowing the content that was posted; but you can’t know how much content is worth without understanding what caused someone to react to it a certain way. If each relies on the other, but we can’t measure either one… It’s another impossible question.

All the while we had it in the back of our minds that we were running out of time for the writing. None of us wanted to work on it over the weekend. But we couldn’t really do much more work on it until we answered these questions.

We reconvened with our sponsors and our advisors, and spent the better part of an hour talking over those very questions as a group. Everyone seemed to have a different idea, a different understanding of our goal. The only thing that all of us agreed on (sponsors, advisors, and project team) was that we had been thinking about it too long, and should go get a drink after work to take our minds off it. Take that for what it’s worth.

The meeting finally adjourned, with just over an hour left to work on the writing assignments. But with our advisors there, we had some questions we wanted to ask them, since we had the opportunity. And so the conversation resumed, and we talked in more circles, making no more progress, except to realize just how convoluted this whole project is. The conversation was summarized in one ten-second exchange:

Advisor One commented on how he almost felt we should be sitting around smoking pipes, since we were discussing something so philosophical.

Teammate One muttered that we needed something stronger than pipes.

Advisor Two remained silent, but wore an expression that left no doubt that she agreed completely with Teammate One’s analysis.

By the time they left, there was no hope of getting the writing done. While we didn’t go out and smoke or drink anything, we did desperately need to give our minds a break. So we reluctantly accepted that we would meet over the weekend to finish the writing. It wouldn’t be the end of the world.