Small world phenomena are often useful, and definitely nifty. But people have many reasons to want to keep different parts of their networks from ever overlapping. While it's cool to discover that your kindergarten teacher also taught your college roommate after moving to another state and switching to fifth grade, it's not so cool for that teacher to bump into you when you're 25 years old and heading to a demonstration at the local BDSM convention.
People have many strategies for keeping things separate: they may have multiple email addresses, use different names or nicknames in different contexts, avoid discussing things outside of certain circles... Groups centered on activities that carry significant stigma (like BDSM, certain aspects of which are illegal in Massachusetts) may have internal community standards that help group members enforce divisions between certain aspects of their lives, the most basic of which is to avoid sharing information about other members of the group in any other context.
But there is still the risk associated with smal worlds of encountering someone in the "wrong" context, if that other person isn't aware of community standards, chooses not to obey those standards, or judges the context to be appropriate for sharing.
(This post inspired by the new member orientation for a local kink group that I attended yesterday. The orientation explicitly tells people to avoid outing fellow group members and gives several strategies for doing so.)
[Crossposted to Dreamwidth]
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