Six Degrees (or Less) Between You, Me & Everyone Else

Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. You know the game (if you don't check out the Oracle of Bacon), and you know it came from an actual theory called Six Degrees of Separation. So my goal here isn't to dive into the scientific studies or even discuss the validity of them. However - I recently ran across an old article by The Guardian called "Poof! Just six degrees of separation between us." The article notes that Microsoft Messenger connections indicated that the theory was pretty accurate (Microsoft came up with 6.6 degrees, but close enough).

Not long ago, I was going through a tough divorce. During that time we moved from our home on the Aegean Sea coast of Turkey to the Pacific Northwest of America, which was quite random (but I didn't have much say in the matter if I wanted to see my kids). While living like a hermit in an unfurnished apartment in Oregon, looking for a job in a town where I didn't know anybody, I started using Quora.

Quora, if you don't know, is a Q&A platform that gets quite addictive...especially when you are bored and looking for a way to exert some tiny measure of control back into your life, by answering questions you may (or may not) actually be qualified to talk about.

I started talking about Turkey. I love Turkey; when I retired from the Air Force, my Turkish-American wife wanted us to live there and I was more than happy to. So when she opted to move back to the US unexpectedly, it was painful to get ripped away from that life and hurled back into the rat race that is American life.

I was looking for meaning, and for a way to reconnect with Turkey...and I found it on Quora.

There was a ton of negativity on that sight, regarding Turkey. And I could tell most people writing nasty things knew very little about the place and had probably never been there. I had; I've been stationed there in 2001 while on active duty, and I'd retired there in 2015 with my family while in my mid-40's. We stayed for two years.

I was very familiar with Turkish culture, so I started to defend it in my answers on Quora. The way that site works, the more answers you write about a topic, the more questions you get fed. And I discovered there are actually a lot of Turkish users on the platform who were upvoting my answers. Soon I was one of the most viewed writers about the topic of Turkey and all related topics. I didn't feel like I deserved to be, but it was happening...in part because here I was, an American military veteran standing up for a nation I wasn't from.

And the people of that nation were loving what I was saying!

Eventually, I did become the top viewed writer after the original top viewed writer (Harun Resit Aydin) decided to quit the platform over harassment issues he was facing. But I didn't want to be the most viewed; I didn't think I deserved it because I mostly wrote opinion answers, not in-depth, deeply-researched material. And again, I'm not even Turkish, so it seemed odd for me to be in that spot.

So I started a non-political space on Quora called Amazing TURKEY! to help promote the works of others who were also saying positive truths about that country and its people, culture, food, and history. Soon I decided to invite a couple of the space's readers to be admins, so I could step back.

What does this have to do with the article about Six Degrees of Separation?

Because, when the article is speaking about Microsoft Messenger, social media, and other online tools used to connect people, it makes me think we are potentially redefining the very concept of "separation."

When this six degrees theory was first introduced, the idea was also called the "6 Handshakes rule." But the Internet has changed how we socialize with others.

It is possible to have a completely valid and significant relationship with someone you've never met in person.

And actually the theory doesn't even require that the relationship be important, only that it is a social connection (Facebook reports 3.57 degrees of separation...).

Most of us never exploit the full power of social media and the Internet to forge connections with complete strangers living on the other side of the planet. If anything, we might take time to argue with such people, or to complain about such people. But there is so much more we could be doing.

I know, because I did it.

I've made friends with strangers online, people living on another continent, people whose government is currently not getting along well with my country's government. Typically when governments don't get along, many citizens will take up an antagonistic stance against that other country, stereotyping the entire population and making the worst sorts of remarks about them. And that population, in turn, might do the exact same thing.

Then public sentiment supports taking actions to hurt that other nation, to want to fight them or punish them somehow because they're all "bad" and we're supposedly all "good." But things are never that simple.

Human nature tends to make us trust those we know more than we would ever trust total strangers. And we'll trust friends of friends more than strangers, too. Yet we're all friends of friends of each other. There's no excuse to treat one another the way we do online so often, with mistrust and sometimes downright hatefulness.

It is time to adjust our attitudes and our behaviors online. Because there is such a short distance between us. The world is getting smaller and soon we may live in a world where there is only one degree of separation. We need to learn how to get along better, and we can practice doing that right now.