balls to merton
A goblin hides around the corners of my brain and snatches words. I feel nothing is good enough. The goblin comes in gangs, of thousands sweeping the lining of my lobes and stomach. I feel so wrong. I feel
Robert Merton – father of focus groups …
Reawakening a sleeping source
Obliteration by incorporation
I was watching the university challenge and this (Robert Merton) was an answer… and like I’ve said in the past, I don’t really care about the history of the concept of focus group when it came to it’s conception in 2024…. however, looking into it now I do care about it, I find it wrinkles quite beautifully with my initial intuitive, experience led/ naïve reactions…
(((((Robert King Merton (1910–2003)
Sociologist
LittD 1985 (hon.)
Faculty 1941–2003
…known for his contributions to the study of social structure, sociology of science, bureaucracy, and mass communications. Called the "father of the focus group," he developed other concepts, such as "self-fulfilling prophecy," "deviant behavior," and "role model”…[1]
[1] ‘Robert King Merton’, n.d. <https://c250.columbia.edu/c250_celebrates/remarkable_columbians/robert_king_merton.html> [accessed 12 January 2026].))))
long-time collaborator Paul F. Lazarsfeld at Columbia University in the 1940s
A goblin hides around the corners of my brain and snatches words. I feel nothing is good enough. The goblin comes in gangs, of thousands sweeping the lining of my lobes and stomach. I feel so wrong. Greer said that men hate women. And I have been in the company, in the theatre of war against men who tried to castrate me spiritually. And I completely get what Greer means. There is a hate, the language is pointed and pointed in a way that will be misinterpreted and controversial. I see the truth of it, and ignore the misunderstandings… I see my truth in it and that is good enough for me. She has her truth of it. We all have a different truth of this statement, that men hate women.
I have not set up an appropriate schedule to grieve, and I’m reminded by authors and friends that this is something most of us neglect… that we get a certain amount of time to grieve and then expected to get on with things. And I feel this need so much, because I feel grief I hold in my body turn into dangerous feelings and violent dreams, into cancerous monsters and goblins.
Are these my own self fulfilling prophecy’s? And it is quite nice to have a name behind the concept of a self fulfilling prophecy, it makes it human, and not god like, it makes it susceptible to mistake… his words were so influential because it helped prolong this system we are in, the system loves these ideas, it thrives off of them, my goblins feed on them… how powerful our choices are, and now I can have a choice, to call bullshit, to say that self fulfilling prophecy is again as sig as the sun and and a grain of sand. each cell that pushes around the goblin, and each cell that moves me to write, and each cell that reacts to the next is it’s choice, and some of my cells seem more skilled than others, more genius in some aspects than others, and in this case, though part of my body fights itself, often, I must figure out a way to send out signals to those cells that are hurting me to calm down, stop lighting yourself on fire, please, go lightly. for anyone who lives with a general anxiety, this is how I describe my own, and even now bits of my stomach and chest feel like a soft pad of electricity is being laid and hotwired on the inside of my stomach, its not painful just alarming, and it feels like it needs to not be in my body, festering.
