Collaboration Connection: Ten Thousand Days of Gratitude, Love Me a Latte, Maria Filar and Ali the Unicorn.
Day 2109 – Day 2110
I have been neglecting this website during the pandemic. I have been putting much more effort into my new YouTube channel and to a project that came to me during lockdown.
A few years ago, the social experiment on interpersonal closeness of Arthur Aron was made famous by a New York Times article about the 36 questions that lead to love. At the time the article was published, I did my own experiment on Instagram to see if it could build community. There were some interesting results but mostly, it was not successful. I’m not sure that Instagram was the best platform for interacting and deepening closeness between people.
I’m not sure why YouTube didn’t occur to me. YouTube has been a relatively recent addition to my social media experience and this year I have been very impressed with the way that Thoraya has used interviews with strangers to create a universal connection with the viewer.
Given that I have taken the journey of Ten Thousand Days of Gratitude to YouTube this year, I thought it would be an interesting experiment to attempt, once again. For me, the idea of interpersonal closeness is interesting because it is the entry point for many people to a feeling of Oneness. I enlisted some fellow YouTubers with channels of about the same size but in very different niches to see if 4 relative strangers could develop – in the context of lockdown and the rise of the Zoom conference – interpersonal closeness.
My collaborators and I have selected a portion of the 36 questions and each week, we either answer 3 questions on our own channels or we come together to share our answers on a Zoom call. Not all of the responses are posted to my own channel but I have included all the videos on a playlist.
Every two weeks we also have been sharing our impressions with one another, using questions from Arthur Aron’s original experiment.
This week we enter into the final round of individual questions and next week we will have our last set of questions addressed in a group call, followed by a final sharing and wrap up. It has been an interesting experiment and I’m not sure where we will land on that final day but I’m grateful that my collaborators were willing to be vulnerable enough to undergo an experiment in closeness with strangers.
I hope you will come over to YouTube to see how things turn out over the next 2, rather intimate, weeks. If you’re interested in the entire process, you can watch all of the videos in my playlist here.
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