6° of Stranger
Details
What does it mean for something - or someone - to be "strange"? What does it in fact mean for someone to be "a stranger"?
Nowadays, can we truly ever experience any thing or person as "strange" as our ancestors presumably did?
What impact might our replacing the adjective "strange" and the noun "stranger" with new terms have on our collective social and political cultures? How would our attitudes towards other individuals or groups of people be if we removed all notions of "strangeness" from our assessments of them?
Should the fact that we no longer truly experience strangeness be a sufficient reason for us to behave very differently from how our ancestors did?
Alien, foreign, unfamiliar, unknown, weird, bizarre, eccentric, inappropriate - or merely different - how are all these common perceptions and judgments interrelated?
We can, and do, of course often find ourselves applying the description "strange" not only to people, but to things, ideas, experiences, phenomena... in fact potentially to anything and everything.
If, however, nothing in our world and in our individual or collective life-experiences is any longer experienced truly as strange, how is this impacting our relationships to the world, to others, to life, to knowledge, and to the unknown in general?
How big is our world actually? Even if we choose to systematically replace the word "strange" with "foreign", how foreign is anywhere or anyone in our world these days?
"6° of separation" can also be framed as "6° of proximity"...
The 6° phenomenon, moreover, observably applies not only to distances among people, but also to distances among everything, including all our ideas, actions, languages, customs, beliefs, knowledge, etc. not to mention the propagation of toxicity and malevolence...
The question then becomes no longer if, but how are we each connected and related to any (and every) other particular person, thing and idea in the world?
It can be mind-boggling just how much we do not know (>99%?) about which shared people, places and experiences we in fact have in common with any one of the vast majority (<99%?) of the people we encounter in our daily lives...
Just as in our collective culture we are becoming increasingly more demanding when it comes to being informed about what ingredients are in the foods we buy and what the supply chain has been of items we purchase, so too might we want to know more truly and clearly how any given person has ended up in our lives - and all of the hundreds, even thousands, of ways they are in fact connected to us without our realizing?
This session will be a celebration of the phenomena of connections, friendships, threats, and, ultimately, of "strangeness".
Recommended watching (33.17): https://youtu.be/CYlon2tvywA?si=vUrcibsjQM6cQeCZ
Ideas explored in this video:
- "Small world" problem/paradox/networks
- Shortcut links
- The strength of weak ties
- Propagation of disease
- Watts-Strogatz modelling
- Barabási: hubs, natural growth, preferential attachment
- Prisoner's Dilemma
- The power of choice
Further reading:
https://plus.maths.org/content/six-degrees-separation
It's A Small World:
https://youtu.be/2rTZ9UndNeI?feature=shared
Image: photo from kaleidoscopefightinglupus org modified according to my instructions by ChatGPT (requiring much pulling teeth and tons of patience 😬😅)