Only Connect

It’s old hat, but I love how our lives are all intertwined in strange ways. This was true even before the Internet — especially in gay circles, where, for instance, we’ve long been able to make diagrams of who’s shagged whom. You and your acquaintances (or you and strangers) can play your very own Kevin Bacon game.

Malcom Gladwell wrote about this in the New Yorker a couple of years back in a great article, definitely worth reading, called Six Degrees of Lois Weisberg:

We’ve all met someone like Lois Weisberg. Yet, although we all know a Lois Weisberg type, we don’t know much about the Lois Weisberg type. Why is it, for example, that these few, select people seem to know everyone and the rest of us don’t? And how important are the people who know everyone? This second question is critical, because once you begin even a cursory examination of the life of someone like Lois Weisberg you start to suspect that he or she may be far more important than we would ever have imagined — that the people who know everyone, in some oblique way, may actually run the world.

So, holy cripes, one link today from Jonno — our own Lois Weisberg, our gay Kottke (unless Kottke’s actually gay, which he says he’s not) — and my hits go through the roof. See, we’re all connected.

One reader, after finding this blog through that link today, wrote me:

This whole thing is a facinating process that reflects the very best of the web. Give us time and we’ll come find you, slowly crawling across the thin strands of web that connect us to each other.

Apparently, he’s right.