Can Fraternities Be Inherited?

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Everyone is a member of some group or the other e.g. school, college, neighborhood, company, etc.

Different groups have different level of affinity aka fraternity strengths. Intuitively, we know that some fraternities are strong whereas others are not.

In my blog post entitled How To Measure Fraternity Strength, I proferred a formula for measuring fraternity strength.

Going by that, my IIT Bombay hostel group has the highest fraternity strength of any group I belong to.

Ex-residents of Hostel 4 of the class of 1985 have a WhatsApp Group called H4-1985, which sports the following display picture.

While this picture of our hostel was clicked recently, many of us in the group felt that the hostel looks virtually unchanged from when we graduated from there 36 years ago. But that’s a story for another day.

The fraternity strength of a past employer (Wipro) comes a close second to that of my hostel group.

Members of the aforementioned H4-1985 group regularly share plaudits about their children’s achievements on WhatsApp.

Encouraged by the engagement received by one such message recently, a group admin toyed with the idea of getting our offspring to create a Next Gen H4 1985 group.

I wonder sometimes on how the Next-Gen, which is very well poised to do a lot more than we did… can learn and leveraged our network / friendship. Sorta NG-85ers Alumni group… in terms of understanding and motivating them to even harness what we can offer. I don’t see any such attempts within the IIT core; have seen a few attempts within Stanford alumni with limited success. Any thoughts guys?

My first reaction to this suggestion was driven by the maxim “Not my father’s brand”.

Used by marketing professionals to discern shifting brand preferences across different generations, the maxim posits that kids shun their parents’ favorite products / brands. Instagram and Debit Card are cited as two of its major success stories.

  • Our parents are on Facebook, we will avoid Facebook, and go to Instagram
  • Our parents are buried in credit card debt, so we will avoid credit card, and use Debit Card (and bank account linked payments like UPI, Venmo and Zelle.)

Going by this maxim, I felt that the next gen group won’t have a strong sense of fraternity.

(For those of you who need a refresher on generation labels, here’s a nice exhibit, courtesy Pew Research Center.)

Not wanting to be biased by my conclusion, I asked around a few people from the next gen for their take.

They echoed my thoughts – but for a different reason. Most of them said they already have their own strong fraternities and therefore lacked a compelling reason to start / join groups inherited from their parents’ fraternities.

I can easily believe that because I’ve noticed that my daughter’s school (Bishops School) has very high fraternity strength.

A few other members from our group echoed the same thoughts.

Based on what I see of gen-nxt, I doubt there will be interest. They have their own networks already, and don’t seem to seeking more.

Ergo we canned the idea of Next Gen H4 1985 group.

Moral of Story: Fraternity strength cannot be inherited from one generation to another.

On a side note, the lack of fungibility of fraternity strength means it can be minted as a Non Fungible Token (NFT).

So far, I’ve been talking in terms of strong fraternity versus weak fraternity.

Fraternities of next gen prompt another comparison: Strong Fraternity versus Large Fraternity.

From my interactions with Gen Y and Gen Z people, I sensed that social network is a big fraternity for the Gen-Next.

Just to be clear, I’m not talking about a group of ex-classmates or ex-coworkers who stay in touch via social networks but a fraternity made up entirely of friends and followers on social networks who have no prior connection with one another in the real world.

I was convinced I wasn’t making this up when I read this tweet by a millennial:

One of my favorite things to do when traveling is meeting my Twitter friends in real life. Palo Alto yesterday, Santa Monica today and London in August. So fun, and it feels like we’ve known each other for ages!

Flash mob is another canonical example of social network fraternity: One message on Instagram and scores of people who don’t know one other in real life assemble at a mall or some place with heavy footfall and dance or enact a street play in support of a certain cause.

These fraternities are large but are they strong?

The following analogy will help grok the difference between strong fraternity and large fraternity: Strong ego is resilient and does not crack so easily whereas large ego is fragile and crumbles at the slightest affront.

To answer this question, let me turn to the BOSCH TV show. In Season 4 of this Amazon Original series, a flash mob is planning to assemble outside Hollywood Division of Los Angeles Police Department to protest the protagonist’s handling of a certain homicide case. The Chief of LAPD is grappling with ways to reduce the sting of the protest. He gets the following insight from his PR consultant:

It’s easier to get a flash mob together and do something but it’s harder to sustain it because the connections aren’t as deep. The commitment that they need to put in sometimes isn’t as great. And there’s this tendency to just move from one thing to the other. You find the next bright, shiny thing and you go.

LAPD leverages this fault line in flash mob mentality while formulating its strategy to deal with the flash mob. Long story short, the strategy is a roaring success.

Going by this data point of one, I’m going to conclude that social network is closer to a large fraternity than a strong fraternity.