Wake Me When It's Over

We spent five hours today talking in circles. I think we're all ready to kill something.

So we came up with a definition last week for meaningful engagement, and now we’re trying to figure out how to measure it. We thought we would survey people, and have them example social media posts on a scale of 1-10 for each of the three main factors. The first two are intuitive enough—personal interest and learning. But how the hell are you supposed to rank a post for its community aspect? There’s nothing intuitive about that.

So we started throwing ideas back and forth, and shooting them down as quickly as we came up with them. They weren’t specific enough. Were too biased. Were completely subjective. We debated and argued and discussed and got bloody nowhere.

Once again, the problem is that we’re engineers trying to do social science. I tried (not for the first time) to point out that we don’t need a technical, exact, thorough measurement; we just need /something/ that can later be used as a launching point, a starting ground. It’s subjective by nature; it doesn’t necessarily have to be specific. But I did a poor job of communicating that, or else they just weren’t willing to accept it; I’m not sure which. Maybe both. So we talked in circles some more.

And then it got worse, when one of my teammates burst out saying that not only is our project impossible, but it’s pointless. No one actually cares. No one is actually going to use anything we uncover. All anyone cares about is getting more customers, making more money, and meaningful engagement isn’t going to help that, so it doesn’t matter whether anything is meaningfully engaging to begin with.

And when I tried to argue that meaningful engagement does matter, that it is useful, the other two agreed with her, and together the three of them all but outright stated that I was wrong.

Suddenly I feel like I’m the only one who wants to see this project succeed. Who cares about it at all any more. And I feel like any input I have, any suggestions I make, are disregarded or ignored. I don’t think that’s actually true; I realize I’m likely being oversensitive and putting too much weight on a few particular instances. But it still feels that way.

Anyway. We met with our advisors today. They told us that we don’t need a technical, exact, or thorough measurement, that it’s subjective by nature, and that it doesn’t necessarily have to be specific. Go figure.

I don’t want to go to work tomorrow.