The Social Iceberg
I posted to my High School Alumni group the other day. It was my first post to this group.
On the front page of the group is a picture of the main entrance to the school. On it you can see the marble steps leading to the main offices.
Here’s what I posted:
When I saw the picture on the site, the first memory it brought back was those long flights of marble steps.
Ours had been trod by — let me do some quick algebra here — roughly 65 million teenage feet.
By the time I got there in 1968, the edges were so worn I could literally slide down each flight.
Made moving between classes much more efficient.
Pretty innocent, I thought.
Until…
Within hours I got:
- Likes, it’s up to 46,
- 4 – hearts,
- 1 – ha-ha face,
- 18 – comments.
I thought, “Cool – that went well.”
Until, I started reading the comments.
Don’t get me wrong, none of them were bad.
It’s just that they were all from girls (high school site remember),
And they were all about the same thing.
Here’s where you’ll need some background.
When I attended high school, when dinosaurs roamed the earth, there were two versions of the same school.
The boys’—and only boys’—school,
And five blocks away—the girls’ school.
Some years after I graduated, they decided to consolidate both schools, and since the girls’ school building was considerably larger, and probably in better shape, you know, because of the girls,
they moved all the boys into the girls’ school, and the dinosaurs ate the boys’ school, or they tore it down or whatever, and they built a new public school on the site. (The ultimate insult.)
Oh, and they also tore down the corner-store across the street that was off limits to us, where we used to sneak to get Philly pretzels, and to add yet another insult, it’s now a parking lot.
Back to the comments:
Now, when I wrote the post, I made sure to note, “Ours had been trod by…”, so it was clear that I was referring to the boys’ school.
I put, “By the time I got there in 1968…” figuring it’s only simple arithmetic to calculate that if I got there in ’68 I graduated in ’72.
You know, I know my place.
I know that the picture is the girls’ school.
But what I didn’t know, was that there was enormous social significance associated with those steps by the girls.
Here are some of the comments:
- There were no boys in 1968! It was girls only!
- Class of 1968 only Seniors were allowed on the marble stairs.
- Only Seniors permitted in 1960
- Oh how I loved those marble stairs!!!! So awesome!! Such a cool tradition!!!! Class of 1973
- I can remember a couple seniors wanting their baby freshman sisters to scrub those steps with toothbrushes , not nice
So, I added this comment to my post:
- I meant the ‘boys’ school. I don’t remember ever being inside the building on 5th Street.
Figuring, that’ll clarify things and let them know I’m back in my place.
But, then these comments came in:
- In the past (50) you got detention if you were caught near them
- back in the fifties you had to be a senior before you could use the marble stairs
- The Senior stairs !!!!
And that’s just some of them. They’re still coming in. All about the same thing.
Only one of the readers got what I was saying:
- Me too class of 71. Night of Sophomore dance, new shoes I slid the marble steps
And I realized I had just planted an iceberg in that group, the top of which was the post about stairs and what came in as comments as emotional and social memories of the stairs that not only didn’t exist in the boys’ school, but especially not in my differently wired thinking.
Here’s the part that I put in the water, the visible part of the social iceberg:
- A context,
- Timeline,
- Physical institutional structure,
- Humor.
To me it was just a random stairwell.
Here’s the part below the visible line:
To the girls’ and the farther back it went in time, the more intense it got, it represented:
- implications
- systems
- psychology
- humor
- girls’ territory
- nostalgia
- class identity
- school hierarchy
- institutional memory
- one person sees humor:
- another sees threat,
- another sees status,
- another sees exclusion,
- another sees romance,
- another sees infrastructure.
- implied context,
- timeline (not to be confused with – passage of time),
- institutional structure,
- social dynamics,
- secondary meaning,
- and unstated conclusions.
I assumed my ours clue and ’68 clue would suffice. And, it was just a funny story about steps.
Apparently the readers struck the hidden:
- Implication cluster,
- emotional association,
- and symbolic meaning.
Now, I have to assume normal males knew all along to stay out of this one. I did get some likes from guys, but they were notably silent in the comments. Not one!
But for me, and I suspect many people like me, as I was when I wrote the post, are unaware of the large portion of the iceberg lurking below the surface.
“The Social Iceberg” is getting stronger by the minute.
Just walking around….
I usually think of communication as sending information.
But socially, it’s often more like: walking around an iceberg field.
I see a little above water, unaware of the enormous submerged structure underneath.
Icebergs are bad enough. Sometimes they become minefields.
Written May 28 2026