{"id":1372,"date":"2006-04-03T16:34:23","date_gmt":"2006-04-03T20:34:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/wordpress\/?p=1372"},"modified":"2006-04-03T16:34:23","modified_gmt":"2006-04-03T20:34:23","slug":"degrees-of-separation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/?p=1372","title":{"rendered":"Degrees of Separation"},"content":{"rendered":"

“The opposite to war is not peace, but the revolution of ideas.” – Frigyes Karinthy<\/em><\/p>\n

Hungarian poet, novelist, short story writer, playwright, journalist and humanitarian Frigyes Karinthy died in 1938 at the age of 51 from an illness that he said turned him from “humourist to tumourist<\/a>.” In 1937, medical consensus held that patients were more likely to survive if they could be kept conscious, so Karinthy’s skull was “trephined – split open” – and the tumour was removed using a local anaesthetic. A Journey Round My Skull<\/em> is his account of that ordeal in which his explanation for waiting so long to finally go to a doctor was “that he feared fear of the illness more than the illness itself<\/a>.” Karinthy is often cited<\/a> as the first proponent of the “six degrees of separation<\/a>” theory, due his short story Chains<\/em>, wherein he<\/a> “speculated that anyone in the world could be connected to anyone else through a chain consisting of no more than five intermediaries.”<\/p>\n

Ithiel de Sola Pool at MIT<\/a> and Manfred Kochen of IBM<\/a> constructed a mathematical equation for the theory but after two decades of trying to solve the problem shelved the project in the 1970’s. In 1967, in the first issue of Psychology Today<\/em>, an article by social psychologist Stanley Milgram appeared about experiments he’d conducted using a “small world phenomenon<\/a>” hypothesis “which suggested that two random US citizens were connected by an average of a chain of six acquaintances.” He spun a success story that was well received but his methods continue to be challenged by critics and fans alike. A most damaging review came from an admirer, Judith S. Kleinfeld, who wrote in 2001<\/a> of discoveries she’d made whilst researching Milgram’s Yale archives in order to better design a version of his study for her classroom. In the Psychology Today<\/em> article that inspired widespread adoption of the theory as fact and the creation of internet projects such as The Oracle of Bacon<\/a> – which aims to establish The Center of the Hollywood Universe<\/a> – Milgram marvelled at how quickly one “chain” was established. He failed to disclose the full results of the “first” study in which he’d asked 60 “starter” people in Kansas to send packages – through a personal acquaintance or likely contact – to the same “target”, the wife of a divinity student living in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Kleinfeld found that of 50 requests that were carried out only three packages ever reached the target. Kleinfeld also discovered that Milgram’s starters were not randomly selected but were carefully solicited from active social networks, in some cases, ones that were highly relevant to the targets’ lifestyles. “A passport of thick royal blue cardboard with the name “Harvard University” embossed in gold letters on the cover and a stylish gold logo” was the package used in the second Nebraska study. Although Kleinfeld doubts the use of fancy passports biassed the trials, it’s possible that Milgram felt the starters would view them as more important than a simple postcard so would be more compelled to pass them along. Finally, despite extensive digging, Kleinfeld could find no other research that supported Milgram’s theory, unlike another of his studies, The Perils of Obedience<\/a>. <\/p>\n

Duncan J. Watts is an associate professor of sociology at Columbia University. Small World Project<\/a> is his ongoing attempt “to create a large scale global verification of the small world hypothesis, using the modern Email equivalent of Milgram’s passport innovation.” The results of the project’s first study were published in Science<\/em> journal (vol 301, p 827<\/a>) 8 August 2003. Watts and his research team, Peter Dodds and Roby Muhamad, achieved results that are more supportive of the statistics that Kleinfeld discovered in Stanley Milgram’s archives than the popular perception of his public presentation. “We conclude that although global social networks are, in principle, searchable, actual success depends sensitively on individual incentives.”<\/p>\n

The “funneling” effect <\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

In addition, Milgram identified a “funneling” effect whereby most of the forwarding (i.e., connecting) was being done by a very small number of “stars” with significantly higher-than-average connectivity: even on the 5% “pilot” study, Milgram noted that “two of the three completed chains went through the same people”.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

New Yorker<\/em> magazine writer and authour Malcolm Gladwell took the funneling effect and ran with it in The Tipping Point<\/em><\/a>. According to Robert Paterson, Gladwell provided aspiring entreprenuers with a sure-fire formula for manipulating gullible consumers. Paterson’s Net Version<\/a> of The Tipping Point<\/em> breaks the strategy down into easily digestible pieces. Under the category, The Law of the Few, Paterson defines the three main groups of exceptional people that Gladwell contends are essential for starting an “epidemic” that, I assume, not only refers to faddish phenomenons that are inspired by products with transient emotional appeal and generate short-lived buying frenzies, say Pet Rocks or Cabbage Patch Kids, but also refers to existing markets that are red-hot but with brighter futures, for instance, the cell phone contagion. Gladwell himself calls it an “intellectual adventure story”, a guide for people with limited resources who want to create “positive” epidemics, then goes on to say that only rare and well connected people can infect the populace. I don’t dispute these managers are capable of doing so or that their fingerprints are all over campaigns that span a vast array of products including illegal wars but they do so by tapping into established wells and exploiting those resources. He cites a breast cancer activist who instigated an epidemic. How difficult would it be to tap into that network? <\/p>\n

Gladwell’s follow-up, Blink<\/em>, that has been on the NYT<\/em> best seller list since it came out in January 2005<\/a>, appears to be a cheery endorsement for smashing one of the final barriers left standing between a sceptical consumer base and predatory retailers. It encourages people to believe that initial conclusions, the “two seconds” of thought that rush in whether one is meeting new people or considering a major purchase, are neither irrational nor should be analysed further but instead should be trusted. Most people would define these “initial conclusions” as intuition but not Gladwell. There’s at least one good reason he refuses to do so. On his promotional site for The Tipping Point<\/em> he concluded<\/a>, “Our intuitions, as humans, aren’t always very good.” <\/p>\n

The intention of this post is not to pick on Gladwell but I do have a bone to pick with Robert Paterson, who believed The Tipping Point<\/em> business plan could be used to instigate a social revolution, a rationale that Scott Ritter seems to be endorsing in his article The Art of War for the anti-war movement<\/em><\/a>. Ritter believes it is time to excise overt “leftist” or “progressive” agendas from demonstrations as it discourages “the vast majority of moderate (and even conservative) Americans who might have wanted to share the stage with their fellow Americans from the left when it comes to opposing war with Iraq (or even Iran), but do not want to be associated with any other theme.”<\/p>\n

In other words, he wants to cut off the only existing network of weak ties that researchers who actually hold a degree in science, unlike Gladwell, say are absolutely essential to the spread of epidemics, and erect some central politburo that promotes what and speaks to whom – a network that exists only in Ritter’s dreams? Even Gladwell acknowledged that his “Connector” must be a person who has “mastered the ‘weak tie'” and could “manage to occupy many different worlds and subcultures and niches. By having a foot in so many different worlds, they have the effect of bringing them all together.”<\/p>\n

If only leftists and progressives (aka socialists, commies, or whatever it is that the parties who continue to support this monstrosity of a government – conservatives, liberals, libertarians, neoconservatives, neoliberals – call “the other” these days) would STFU then conservatives opposed to the occupation of Iraq would feel comfortable raising their concerns? What are these concerns, exactly, and what has prevented them from tapping into their own vast network and crafting their own message? I actually agree with Ritter’s belief that opposition to the occupation includes people who’ve decided the U.S. is in a no-win situation. Does he believe conservatives would rush to the empty podium to declare that’s a reason to leave Iraq if only leftists and progressives would stop hogging the stage? <\/p>\n

One reason the antiwar movement has failed to bring an end to the occupations of Palestine and Iraq and will fail to stop the push into Iran as the bipartisan war criminals in this rogue government execute it is because the central planners were so preoccupied with crafting a theme that wouldn’t “upset” or alienate voters, Democrats and Republicans, they actually encouraged Americans to fear “fear of the illness more than the illness itself”, seemingly believing that if they could just get past the discomfiting symptoms the disease would never take hold. Well, it has. The illness is Empire<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The question that remains is how will Americans handle the diagnosis, like Frigyes Karinthy or Morris Braverman<\/a>? <\/p>\n

Another PR campaign that promotes locking the barn door after the horse is out is not the answer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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