Lois Weisberg and Six Degrees of Separation

Gladwell's piece about Lois Weisberg and The Oracle of Kevin Bacon, along with the other readings about small worlds and the idea of the Six Degrees of Separation provide much food for thought about what kinds of relationships are most advantageous in life. Kevin Bacon has not been acting for anywhere near as long as an extensive list of actors and actresses, yet he is the pinnacle celebrity that can be linked to almost any well-known actor with just 2-3 links, and to almost every actor in the entire world in 6-7 links. This is because he has put himself in so many different genres of movies, which in turn has linked him to more different types of people. While people like Jennifer Aniston and Owen Wilson may be easily linked to a small handful of famous romantic comedy actors, they are generally only in movies with those types of actors. Therefore, connecting one of them to an actor from an old western or kung-fu movie may take a bit more network-searching and more jumps than it would for Kevin Bacon.

Lois Weisberg is another example of this. She is a seemingly non-important lady from Chicago on the surface, but upon reading Gladwell's article, you learn that she is actually a very important weak tie for a very impressive number of people, and a very impressive array of famous people. Gladwell referenced how many different "groups" she is associated with in various ways, and this number was well into the double digits. Though she wasn't close friends with all of these people, simply having her presence felt in this many different social spheres proved to be very advantageous for using weak ties to meet and introduce other people.

In our own lives, people generally think of their relationships with family, significant others, roommates, and other close friends to be the most important. Emotionally, they are the most important, however they probably do not yield as many opportunities as weak ties across different network clusters do. As college students, most of us probably have at least a few different clusters of people we have strong or weak ties to, whether they are through your major and classes you are in, the dorm or apartment building you live in, clubs, groups or teams you are involved with, or any number of other things. While your roommates may be your closest friends, you probably hear about more things like weekend parties, potential dates, and maybe more important things like job or co-op opportunities from weaker ties outside of your closest relationships.