{"id":217,"date":"2009-09-20T13:13:53","date_gmt":"2009-09-20T02:13:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scriptorum.imagicity.com\/?p=217"},"modified":"2009-09-20T13:13:53","modified_gmt":"2009-09-20T02:13:53","slug":"six-degrees","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/village-explainer.kabisan.com\/index.php\/2009\/09\/20\/six-degrees\/","title":{"rendered":"Six Degrees"},"content":{"rendered":"

[Originally published in the Communications column for the Vanuatu Independent newspaper.]<\/strong><\/p>\n

Everything \u2013 and everyone \u2013 is related. We\u2019ve always known that. Philosophical treatises on the unity of, well, everything have been around for about as long as humanity has been able to chew on a stalk of grass and contemplate the world.<\/p>\n

The only real difference between our understanding of this inter-relatedness past and present is that we moderns have scientifically developed models to lean on. One of the most easily grasped is Six Degrees of Separation. Put simply, this concept states that the vast majority of people in the world are related to one another through no more than six other individuals. A fun way to demonstrate this concept is the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon game, which shows that virtually every movie star working in Hollywood today has worked with someone who\u2019s worked with someone (etc. etc.) who\u2019s worked with Kevin Bacon.<\/p>\n

Once you start to think about it, the only interesting part of this theory is the number \u2013 we\u2019ve always known we were all connected, at least in some esoteric sense. But until recently we\u2019d never been able to properly quantify that relationship.<\/p>\n

Now that the numbers are well known, so-called social networking services such as FaceBook, MySpace and countless other sites that trade on the common tastes of \u2018friends of friends\u2019 have capitalised on that to provide services over the Internet.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Some of them are genuinely interesting. A lot of Internet radio stations, for example, are able to structure their playlist to your individual taste. They do it by performing statistical analysis on people who listen to similar music, the presenting you with welcome \u2013 and often surprising \u2013 listening selections.<\/p>\n

Amazon has done a lot with this concept, helping people choose new reading materials. In spite of the odd rather bizarre suggestion (suggesting that someone who read Barack Obama\u2019s biographies might also like Mein Kampf), they\u2019re generally able to introduce people to book choices that they might not otherwise have made.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s another \u2018inter-relatedness\u2019 concept that\u2019s quite relevant in this hyper-connected age. Known as the \u2018Butterfly Effect\u2019, it posits that the tiny air disturbance caused by a butterfly flapping its wings in China could result in a hurricane forming over Port Vila. Tiny actions, in other words, can have significant repercussions in very complex systems.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately for many of us, the Butterfly Effect is not so well understood, especially where social networks are concerned. Countless millions of people have embraced their newfound ability to connect with the world through social networking services, but only a tiny minority realise the implications of their actions on these networks.<\/p>\n

It comes down to this: If they appear online, those tiny little moments of foolishness that we all experience can be amplified, stored and reproduced on demand for a global audience. Perhaps the most egregious example that comes to mind is that of a young woman who posted to FaceBook, in graphic detail, her appreciation for the \u2018strong and powerful\u2019 male attention she had received the night before.<\/p>\n

While her friends were quick to let her know that the whole world was watching, the Internet can be unforgiving. Gleeful spectators posted screen shots of her post to other sites, ensuring that her naivet\u00e9 will remain on display for years to come.<\/p>\n

One might think that the lesson to be taken from this experience is, \u2018don\u2019t say private things in public places\u2019. That\u2019s true, as far as it goes, but there\u2019s another aspect to this that many people haven\u2019t properly considered: What about the actions of others?<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s pretend you go to a costume party and get a little carried away in your consumption of refreshments. Someone pulls out their camera phone and starts snapping you and your equally… er, enthusiastic friends striking goofy poses, hoisting your drinks triumphantly and leering at the camera. It\u2019s all in good fun, and nobody there objects. But then….<\/p>\n

But then, days later, your friend posts these photos on FaceBook so that those who couldn\u2019t attend would know what fun they\u2019d missed. They use FaceBook\u2019s \u2018tagging\u2019 feature to identify everyone in each photo. Everybody has a chuckle and thinks nothing of it.<\/p>\n

Until…. Until one day, your employer calls you into the office and, pointing to these same photos, accuses you of degrading the organisation\u2019s good reputation. You\u2019re fired, all because of someone else\u2019s lack of discretion.<\/p>\n

Sound improbable? Think again. This is exactly what happened to an elementary school teacher in the US some months ago.<\/p>\n

Now, these are just the visible effects. The amount of information being gathered by marketing companies, credit agencies and countless other state- and privately-owned organisations is truly incomprehensible to most. It\u2019s becoming commonplace now for prospective employers to conduct credit and criminal background checks on applicants. Suppose you had a few foolish years in your youth that wreaked havoc on your credit rating. Suppose you were a bystander at a party that got out of hand and were arrested along with the actual trouble-makers. There is an ever-increasing chance that you won\u2019t get called for an interview, regardless of how qualified you might be, or how you might have changed in the intervening years.<\/p>\n

In the past, it was always possible to pick up stakes and make a fresh start, but now the Internet follows us everywhere. This column is a case in point; two young women\u2019s moments of naive foolishness are recorded here for posterity. Without the power of people to spread their ridicule instantly across the globe, you might never have been offered these object lessons.<\/p>\n

Of course, you might never have needed them, too.<\/p>\n

Vanuatu is a unique society in many respects, and one of those is the constant, open scrutiny that everyone is exposed to. We all know that our weekend exploits are going to be recounted around town (and if the Dobber gets wind of it, possibly publicised, too). It\u2019s not at all unusual to meet someone whom you haven\u2019t seen in weeks, and be asked why you were talking to so-and-so yesterday.<\/p>\n

We also know that living in a small town involves a good deal of tolerance. Personal foibles and momentary lapses provide good fodder for gossip, but unless you\u2019ve done something really astoundingly hurtful or dangerous, nobody\u2019s likely to keep a tally of your mistakes \u2013 or hold them against you, even if they do.<\/p>\n

FaceBook and its social networking counterparts, with their hundreds of millions of members, are essentially one really (really) big village. Not everyone is so friendly and forgiving.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s a simple and very conservative thought experiment: Let\u2019s say you have twenty FaceBook friends. Let\u2019s say that each of them has twenty friends, and so on. Your immediate circle of friends is quite small. But the next circle consists of 400 people. The third circle is 8,000 large. The next one again numbers 160,000. And that\u2019s only four degrees of separation.<\/p>\n

The next time you\u2019re tempted to post a silly comment or an angry tirade to a social networking site, consider how you want to be remembered, for years to come, by a few hundred thousand of your closest friends.<\/p>\n

Those butterfly wings are looking pretty powerful now, aren\u2019t they?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Vanuatu is a unique society in many respects, and one of those is the constant, open scrutiny that everyone is exposed to. We all know that our weekend exploits are going to be recounted around town (and if the Dobber gets wind of it, possibly publicised, too). It\u2019s not at all unusual to meet someone whom you haven\u2019t seen in weeks, and be asked why you were talking to so-and-so yesterday.<\/p>\n

We also know that living in a small town involves a good deal of tolerance. Personal foibles and momentary lapses provide good fodder for gossip, but unless you\u2019ve done something really astoundingly hurtful or dangerous, nobody\u2019s likely to keep a tally of your mistakes \u2013 or hold them against you, even if they do.<\/p>\n

FaceBook and its social networking counterparts, with their hundreds of millions of members, are essentially one really (really) big village. Not everyone is so friendly and forgiving.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,5,10],"tags":[76,205,382,547,557],"class_list":["post-217","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geek","category-journamalism","category-soft-core","tag-butterfly-effect","tag-facebook","tag-myspace","tag-six-degrees","tag-social-networks"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/village-explainer.kabisan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/village-explainer.kabisan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/village-explainer.kabisan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/village-explainer.kabisan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/village-explainer.kabisan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=217"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/village-explainer.kabisan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/village-explainer.kabisan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=217"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/village-explainer.kabisan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=217"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/village-explainer.kabisan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=217"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}