I have been writing a few posts lately and find that sometimes I am not too sure if I have already written about something.  I suppose if I use the theory in my post Better than 10% then there is not too much new in the world and repeating myself is more the norm than a problems with old age memory loss.

Often a post takes me more time in linking it to other posts than it does in the actual writing.

I was thinking about all this linking and realised just about everything in our lives in linked in one way or another.

It also got me to thinking about the old adage regarding the ‘chain-of-evidence’.  For some reason we always referred to it as a chain.  The problem with this is that if one link is broken then the chain is broken.  I always thought that this was wrong.  I believed that the evidence was more like a rope.  A rope is made up of many strands and that if one strand broke then, so long as not too many break, the rope can still hold the load.  I think the chain idea is perhaps one full of pedantic excuses to avoid taking a chance in putting on too much strain.  In the Policing world of course this translates into filed reports and discontinued prosecutions due to the focus on one link in a chain instead of the entire rope.

This link and chain idea occurred to me when I was thinking about my circle of friends and the interconnection between them.  I think we have all gone to a party of a friend when it appears that we don’t know anyone there, or have a connection with them, other than the host.  This is either a time to get a fictitious call from the baby sitter or take a chance at experiencing your hosts ‘links’.  Often it is that we find at least one person or maybe a few who you have connections to other than via your host.  The ‘Adelaide is Small’ or ‘Six degrees of separation’ comments pepper the conversation surrounding your new found connection.

I always wondered about the six degrees of separation theory and after a bit of ‘Google Research’ and Wikipedia ‘confirmed fact’ found the theory that we are all connected by no more that six personal associations is reasonably valid.  Obviously with the advent of Facebook and other social and business connection sites that separation could be less.  Facebook recently did a study reported on Wikipedia that connections via Facebook have an average separation of 4.74 degrees.  In the modern world our separation from each other has basically come down by one; of course .74 of a person means that each of us has to have 4 connections and the final connection by a really small person!  Although this is pretty impressive I would recommend that you take into account your teenagers ‘friends’ list which may go into the thousands – of course all good, true and close friends!

It dawned on me that all my links in my posts, although annoying to format, were a drop in the ocean compared to the links in my life.  Previously in my post  Better with Friends I described who I allowed to live in my head because they ‘paid rent’ or in other words added to my life in some positive way.   But, the links in my life do actually have a mind of their own even if I don’t let them live in my mind.

So?

If we each have so many connections and we are all so closely connected, how come, most of the time it feels like we aren’t.  Being with other people can feel like one of the most disconnected experiences in modern society.  Do you ever walk down the street looking through other people and being looked through, avoiding eye contact, searching the faces in the crowd for a smile, scared of contact being seen as inappropriate or menacing  or weird or ‘awkward.’  How is such a ‘connected’ world with only 4.74 degrees of separation sometimes seem like we are all so separated and even osolated from each other.

I mentioned in my post  Better People I Didn’t Know about the death of Robin Williams and that we often have connections with people and didn’t even realise it until they are gone.  I don’t think this means we have to become stalkers or the friend (we know the one) who appears to be unable to function without a crowd, but, I do think that we have to attempted to nurture our links and try and make connections meaningful and not just the occasional “Like” on a picture of last nights dinner.

Considering the above I thought I will let Robin Williams have the last say.