My Little Power Trip

My blog posts are a hell of a lot more interesting when I'm not working. Teaching a course, as is now the case, is emotionally and financially satisfying but it surely does clutter my mind with some extemporaneous nonsense. I guess there are only so many avenues of output I'm capable of. When I spend lots of time with the give and take of the classroom, the content of entries may suffer. The facts during these times drift towards very concrete ideas and simple explanations of duties.

Fortunately, I have a chance to counter this trend a bit today. My class is busy writing a three-hour midterm examination. I'm in the front of the lab on the teachers' console. I have a 45-minute chunk of free time.

I may have chatted about this subject in the past, I'm not sure. I am trying to come to a possible definition of power. I don't mean in the physical sense; rather, I am thinking about social power.

In the past, I've tried to tie the idea of mind-space to possible reasons for salaries. For example, a sports figure deserves the big bucks as he or she is on the lips, or in the heads, of multitudes of people. Hollywood actors pull in gigantic sums as their performances occupy literally millions of hours of viewers' time.

Power is related but a tad different. I think I could easily define it as the ability to screw with others people's lives. It's not just measured in mind-space but also in the influence over the actions of others. Increasing power is the length of the effect times the number of people involved. I think the maximum number of people I can effect is about twenty-four. I can dictate the action of the students in this room until five o'clock today.