Organizing Google+ Circles by Emotion and Underlying Agenda

I was a little frustrated by the limits of G+ circles organization. For those of us who love to micro-organize our data, it may be necessary to add prefixes and suffixes to circle names to keep them straight. I want to organize my circles by the usefulness of the information, but it changes depending on my mood or the mood of the source.

Sometimes I only want useful information and there are times when the people in my circles on G+ would rather share something funny or aesthetically pleasing. Some people balance what they share between news, humor and art, others are urgently and diligently focusing their scrutiny on economics and politics.

I attempted to find other ways of categorizing posts based on their intrinsic rather than extrinsic qualities.

Splitting the inference into conscious and subconscious subcategories takes practice but is not impossible. Through study of Communication, Psychology and Semiotics a language is developed to articulate every component of stimuli contained within a message on a specific medium, the immediate response expected from the receiver in a given circumstance, the following near-term responses from the original message, and the cumulative effective response over the long-term from a specific series of messages.

Analysis of messages exposes distinct common patterns of intent, the balance of intent can be weighed between conscious or subconscious. Propaganda, if done correctly, is typically covertly masked under innocuous, overt, emotionally distracting stimuli and relies on its cumulative effect to build up an engineered response to be triggered by a specific event in the future.

Most messages on G+ are intended to be overt, direct and include consciously as well as subconsciously implied material. In other words, we get the overt message + intended implication through juxtaposition with other elements, but the message also contains the back-story behind why the message was posted in the first place. Here we get into psychological profiling by studying a collection of posts from the same source, the choice of images, topics, source links, adherence to rules of language, etc. Given enough material one could discover if someone was being fed information to post or was applying one's own effort.

Google+ has a "Discover" sub-section of the "People" section with preconceived circles where members are categorized by Politics,
Science & Nature, How-to & DIY, News, Technology, Entertainment, Education, Sports, Auto, Health, Fun & Interesting, Featured on Google+, Food & Drink, Music, Photography, Travel, Lifestyle, Art & Design, Family, Popular on YouTube, Books, Games, Connect with Google, Fashion and Beauty and Causes.

These general categories are on the conscious level,  uncontroversial and homogeneous. Each category can be set as a column header for rows representing levels of a certain nature I can't quite articulate. There could be levels considered criminal or explicit. Perhaps adult material exists in all of them at one point.

Posts may be useful and benevolent or otherwise. I created a spreadsheet (a work always in progress) to see if I could further organize them into categories based on context and motivation. Keep in mind these change like the wind.

Abraham Maslow's Need Hierarchy has potential for G+ Circle organization. I thought it would be clever to assign the Greek alphabet to these tiered categories since it seems to be popular on certain sites for Trolls to refer to certain people as "Beta."

It's possible to organize circles by how we perceive a member's status on the chart or our own. For example, I would like a stable career, a wife and children and live in a big house in a nice neighborhood, but I'm single, childless and live in a one-bedroom apartment. I consider my status within the Basic Needs level (Delta/Epsilon) because I feel a need to improve my status.

Aside from sharing updates with family and friends which I have restricted to Facebook, I don't need to see posts on G+ by someone who is self-actualized (Alpha) and sharing photos of their tropical retirement vacation or photos of their children graduating from college. These should be shared privately. It seems that members from the lower tiers would like to know how to get higher, but would prefer to see technical rather than bragging posts.

I suppose the argument against that sort of sharing would be the threat to one's own uniqueness if one's own techniques were too widely shared, raising up competition from below. Such desire to limit information to within a few select people is the foundation of social stratification.

In the Esteem Needs category (Beta) I don't see many people sharing that they just started a new career or promotion, or sharing the secrets of their success.

My interpretation of the structure unravels at the Belongingness and love needs category (Gamma) because it seems everyone on G+ at one time or another is submitting posts seeking affirmation or validation from others like themselves. I sometimes assume this to be the fundamental motivation driving social media and may encompass the entire framework of communication. Sometimes.

Epsilon are usually children or anyone entirely dependent on others for support. I'm not sure if such people have ever ventured into the social media space without direct supervision. It's possible.

My posts are usually affinity-seeking, cathartic expressions fraught with innuendo that seek to change minds and raise awareness about circumstances, but aren't they all? Even after graduating I'm still a student to communication.