God forbade...must reading!

Six Degrees





    Dynamics seem to be the key. People may know who they know because of what they do, but people also try new things because of who they know. Your friends invite you to parties or drag you along on their favorite activities. Your colleagues involve you in new projects or suggest contacts who might be able to help you with a problem. And bosses suggest new opportunities within or outside the firm. In other words, its through your current social contracts that you often get the information to expand your horizons and, so, changing the social structure within which you move and generating the next round of acquaintances with whom you will share it.



   Individuals in social networks have their own ideas about what makes them who they are. In other words each individual in a social network comes with a social identity. By driving both the creation of the network and the notions of distance that enable individuals to navigate through it, social identity is what leads networks to be searchable.



    Talk about goals, effort and the like can lead to an oversimplified idea of the nature of the learning experience. The notions the critics bring up; ‘inner skiing’ and ‘superlearning’ are supposed counterexamples. Both a sort of passive ‘going with the flow’. Inner skiing and other ‘inner’ approaches to motor skills is that your body can do the learning better if your mind doesn’t get in the way with analysis and rules. ‘Superlearning’ applies to learning a foreign language, mental relaxation intending to allow information to go straight to the unconscious mind without being fussed over and interpreted by the conscious intellect.



   In a world spanned by only six degrees, what goes round comes around faster than you think. Just because something happens in another language, far away, doesn’t make it irrelevant. In contagions; epidemics of disease, financial crisi, political revolutions, social movements and dangerous ideas, we’re all connected by short chains of influence. It doesn’t matter if you know or care about them, they’ll have their effect, anyway. Don’t misunderstand the first great lesson of the connected age, we all have our own burdens, but, like it or not, we must bear each other’s burdens, as well.



Six Degrees- Duncan Watts