Six Degrees of Separation on the Internet
Matthew Yglesias:
It's Not How Many Followers You Have, It's Who Follows You: [O]ne of the secrets of the faux-meritocracy of the internet. Furnas may appear to be a mild-mannered law student with only 325 Twitter followers. But in an earlier life he was a key player in a ton of CAPAF’s policy products and he’s extremely well socially and professionally connected to the younger cohort of political media people. So that 325 includes reporters and editors from The Washington Post, Politico, Slate, Good, ThinkProgress, Mother Jones, and the Nation and think tank folks from CAP, Third Way, New America, and the Manhattan Institute. Given that particular nexus of people, it’s hardly a long and winding path to wide exposure for something interesting.
This, I think, is an illustration of something important. People sometimes talk about the Internet as if it somehow supplants or replaces personal relationships. But in practice, it often acts as a force multiplier for them…
I think that is both right and wrong. Some of the human neurons in the global distributed brain will fire once a day, some ten times a day; some respond to only one possible input, others have up to a thousand possible inputs. But if what you say resonates, you can get it out there and into the mix.
Whether getting it out there will in the end change anything is, alas, a harder question...
