The power of familiarity.

Familiarity is a fucking potent deciding factor in our lives. I've started noticing this lately quite a lot. If you have the choice between a restaurant you went to 2 weeks ago and LOVE, or a strange restaurant that just opened, you will almost always go with the familiar restaurant. If you have to get a haircut, most people wont trust a new barbers/salon, and will go to their familiar haunt.

This familiarity branches out though. It is natural to go to the places you recognise.

However, you will also go to the places your peers recognise. For instance, Nandos, the chicken restaurant. Lots of people go there and enjoy it. Though, people only started going there so much because it became one of those "cool" places to go to. The kind of place you can put in a Facebook status,(jst chillin wid dave nd lisa at nandoz!!<3) and get 35 likes on it. The same principal applies to all those facebook groups that people like, which are basically just about posting up wierd little quirks you experience in your daily life, and seeing if other people like the page, hence letting you know you aren't insane.

Like, a group called "Running down the stairs because you think you're being chase!". I'm sure we've all been there at some point.

This sort of thing wasn't common knowledge though, until the advent of Facebook. One person made a group similar to this, it made people smile, and like it, because together, a sense of familiarity was formed, and people felt that much more normal about their own little quirks. And so started the influx of "quirk groups". Again, familiarity dictates what sort of groups are made, based on how popular certain ones are. The quirk groups get a lot of likes because people connect with it, and so more people make similar groups, safe in the knowledge it will do well.

This is all pretty harmless for the most part. Though, there is a more sinister aspect to this control familiarity has on our lives. It is the reason for things like disdain for the "different" or "abnormal". Anything which is unfamiliar, is shunned, whilst the familiar is embraced whole heartedly. Restaurants that could potentially become your favourite, may end up shut down because people want to spend their money on the latest cool food joint.

People will show no thought about killing insects, or smaller, uglier animals, because everyone else is happy for it to happen, and will squash a spider rather than throw it out the window. In short, familiarity will not only dictate the positive portion of our lives, but the negative also. If enough people do something unsightly, it becomes "familiar" and the fact that so many people find it acceptable, means the negative act immediately becomes justified. A more gruesom example of this is the kind of "home-made retribution" you may come across in certain countries, where a thief who is caught will have his hands broken on the streets, or a rapist will be publicely executed.

The more I think about it, the more I see familiarity dictating pretty much everything that occurs in our society. What I can't figure out though, is if it is just the human instinct we have for latching onto routines, or if it is a more artificial trait drilled in through our modernised world.