Tagging craze!

It seems bloggers are in the throes of a a craze similar to when I was a child on the playground and we played a particular game for weeks on end with intense focus and passion.

I recall we played this particular game of "Poison Ball" every opportunity we got during recess and lunch. The game had two players either end of the "court" and everyone else was in the middle. A basketball was then thrown between the two end players across this court with the aim of tagging as many of the bodies in the middle on its way through. if you were in the middle and got belted by a highspeed basketball, you had to join the end of the court from which the ball had been thrown. The last person standing in the middle was deemed the "winner" no matter which end player had the most players on his end of the court.

Then there was the hopscotch craze which I think I actually started come to think of it. Most hopscotch was a basic T shaped pattern of boxes chalked onto the ground. You placed a stone or block of wood into the first square. Then hopping on one foot you had to both hop and kick the stone into the next correct numbered square to move ahead. If you touched your free foot to the ground, it was the next persons turn. If the stone went outside any of the lines, you were "out" and disqualified from further play. The winner was the one who successfully could kick their stone from square number 1 through to square number 7 or 8 I can't remember. Anyway, I "invented" a rather complicated version of hopscotch that involved having to kick the stone across a number of squares and and back and forth in a kind of zigzag though the re-designed grid. It became somewhat of a hit...even with the boys... as it implied a lot more kinesthetic skill to achieve good results. We played it for numerous weeks until for some reason another craze came along.

And now here we are in cyberspace playing almost exactly the same kinds of games but in a virtual and textual context.

Tagging each other with plea's for posts and linkages.

There are however, no winners or losers in these new "grown-up" versions of internet Hopscotch and Poisonball. This new form of tagging is more about a group of like-minded bloggers backing each other up to get "ratings", traffic and just good old fashioned information sharing.

The Individual voices amongst us are looking for a Tribe in which they can belong I think. We start out blogging to express our own individual point of view and then want others to play along, so we invent these games to find those, out there, who are willing to play by the same "rules" that we have assumed for our own world view.

I'm not being cynical here. It's a natural and very normal part of the collective human behaviour to want to do this. The dichotomy of autonomy and collective soul is always present in the human being. We are both individual and family..it just goes with the territory of blogging that we gravitate to those bloggers on the growing numbers of lists that match our own values and opinions on specific ethical grounds.

So when I was recently tagged for the Personal Development List, it is probably congruent and coherent to assume that I will be henceforth tagged for various other off-shoot lists too.

I'm now tagged to comment on the new "list" (if it can be called thus), for the topic Why most Leadership sucks...including yours

I'm not going to do that in this post though. Read the next one for my thoughts on the topic. :)