;)
-----
Mikol Graves (diggs@cc.gatech.edu)
http://www.lcc.gatech.edu/idt/students/mgraves
Today's lunatic fringe will tell us where tomorrow's
mainstream computer industry will come from.
-- Jean-Louis Gassee
On Fri, 21 Feb 1997, tharpold wrote:
> Peter Freeman writes,
>
> >Some years ago (20?) a sociologist (I think at Harvard or MIT) ran
> >an experiment on this priniciple and found that at least for the
> >well-connected people in Cambridge the number of links was less
> >than 3. He asked a group of people (probably a class in Socio 101)
> >to get in touch with various people like Mao Tse Tung (ruler of
> >China at that time), the Pope, etc. by finding someone who could
> >call someone who could...
> >
> >This sounds like a modern version of the old boy's network.
>
> Revelations of the linkages of the apparently unconnected groups we
> travel in are often uncanny.
>
> My wife is of Mennonite heritage. That group has historically been
> somewhat closed in terms of marriage, gene pool and circulation (a common
> trait of persecuted religious minorities, alas) -- such that connections
> with apparent strangers are surprisingly common. There is a practice
> called the "Game" among modern Mennonites that involves asking a few
> pointed questions of new Mennonite folk you meet (questions about
> education, background, etc.), which usually reveal that the interlocutors
> have much in common. This kind of inquiry is especially fruitful when you
> visit a new fellowship (a congregation) for the first time --
> connections, no matter how unlikely they may seem to outsiders, always
> emerge. Example: The first time we visited a Mennonite fellowship in West
> Philadelphia (where we went to grad school), it took only five minutes of
> conversation to discover someone there whose brother had been a
> schoolmate of my wife's sister when she attended boarding school in
> Zaire. As unique as that kind of tie might seem, I've seen similarly
> "unique" revelations of this kind many times in the years since.
>
> TH
>
> ----------------------------------------------------
> Terry Harpold
> Asst. Professor, Literature, Communication & Culture
> Co-Associate Director for Internal Relations,
> Graphics, Visualization & Usability Center
> Georgia Institute of Technology
>
> terry.harpold@lcc.gatech.edu
> tharpold@cc.gatech.edu
> http://www.lcc.gatech.edu/faculty/harpold/
> http://www.cc.gatech.edu/gvu/people/terry.harpold/
>