Blog Thirteen: Information Flow and its Functions

   When thinking about the relationship that I have with my parents, I feel restricted and can never fully express myself to them.  I have different attitudes, values and beliefs and tend to censor myself, knowing that my mom and dad are very old fashioned and that they have set ideas about how I should act and behave.  Because of this, I feel more comfortable informing my sister of events in my life, and turn to her with news first before I share with my parents.  My sister and I have similar ways of thinking and I know that she will understand and support me.  The idea of information flowing from person to person and our decisions to give primacy to particular people in divulging this information connotes our relationships with people.  Who we choose to tell the most important things to first says something about the strength of our relationship with that person.  Duck says, “Information flows through the family system in a way that reflects the closeness of the relationships that people have with one another and operates in a way that sustains the hierarchy or the strength of those relationships.” (Duck/McMahan, 192)  This means that we consciously choose who to share information with first, and that the patterns of revelation to certain people in a particular order mimics the strength of our bond with them.  I feel close to my twin sister as we are the same age and are best friends that share similar experiences and can relate to one another, as opposed to my parents, with whom I feel the strong effects of a generation gap.  By calling my sister and telling her that I have been accepted to graduate school before informing my parents, I am demonstrating the notion of information flow and transacting my relationships with members of my family.  Due to the distance between us because of college, my phone calls allow me to maintain a relationship with my family, but the order in which I make these calls expressing the same information conveys a deeper level of meaning that indicates how strong these relationships are.  Information flow can therefore be seen as transactional, in how simply the order of information exchange has a deeper meaning, indexical, in pointing out who we feel closest to, essential, in my case by using phone calls to stay in contact with my family and talking the relationship into existence by assuming that it lasts when we are apart, and also as performing relational maintenance, in the necessity of information flow to keep relationships alive even when there is distance between people.  I have never thought about how my decisions to tell certain family members information before others as an indication of my relationship with them, but now I am more aware of how the flow of information says something about how I feel about people.  In telling my family about my decisions for graduate school, this is the order that I called them in:

Sister

Mom

Dad

Uncle

When I look back and analyze the sequence of information, I would agree that it transitions from the level of closest to least close in terms of my relationship with that person.