Greek Dining as an Information Ground
The Greek Community consists of fraternities and sororities, essentially, houses that are filled with large numbers of people. Every resident comes to this information ground for the same reason, to participate in the main focal activity, eating, and they come away with knowledge that they were not expecting to gain. We found that information was offered, shared and trusted 100x faster in the Greek community (compared to a dinner with someone you’ve only lived with for a quarter) because it offers a close knit and safe environment for information sharing. Through observations, we’ve formed five distinct stages of how a meal in the Greek community progresses.
The first of these stages, the food line, can be categorized by its first-come-first-serve, random ordering and creation of initial information incidents. The fact that almost everyone in attendance has a preexisting relationship serves to create an atmosphere that is different than the typical information ground. The second stage, seat selection, findings showed that if a participant was engaged in a discussion while waiting in line, almost half of them on average would end up near the people with whom they were having the discussion. On the contrary, when participants who did not engage in discussion prior to seat selection were observed, they commonly either chose seats nearest to people that they had strong relationships with, or a seat based on space availability and the pattern in which the room was filling up. While discussion on the food quality served as an ice-breaker in the third stage, eating and information exchange, a large portion of the conversations were regarding current events, past personal experiences, humorous anecdotes, gossip and announcements. The fourth stage, post consumption, provided an interesting phenomenon: even after the participants had finished eating, conversations carried on. However, the scope of conversations changed, the information often became more personal and more reliable information was gained. Departure, the fifth stage, concerns the manner in which exiting occurred in one of two ways. The domino effect- as a conversation began to wane, one of the participants might decide that they needed to allot their time elsewhere and would take their leave accordingly. This would often trigger another person to consider their priorities and decide to exit as well, in turn prompting others in the group to follow suit. Alternately, events scheduled right after the meal might cause a conversation to experience a mass exodus.
Room layouts were varied depending on the house and yielded great differences on all counts including how big the room was, how many tables there were and table set up. We found that usually there was a pattern to how tables filled up. While it is very hard to generalize, in some sororities, we found that there were many smaller tables, seating around 6 or 7, which yielded more intimate conversations because there were less people to give input. In some fraternities, we found large tables that could seat practically the whole house into just a few conversations. The turn out ratio was primarily based on what was served and secondly based on prior commitments or meeting/class schedules.
The most important improvement that would better facilitate information exchange is the reduction of ambient noise. This was the only serious factor which seemed to limit information exchange. During the course of a meal noise not only came from plates and utensils clanking, but from places like the kitchen and street outside. Better segregation from the kitchen and better insulation from the outside would reduce ambient noise and improve everyone’s ability to hear one another.
ADPi Dining
ADpi Dining
Liz Moffat, Joel Epps, Eric Olson, Steven Steiner