thraxil.org:

connectors, etc.

by anders pearson Mon 25 Nov 2002 16:51:11

crazy weekend. <a href="http://reagle.org/joseph/index.html">Joseph Reagle</a> was in town with his brother. Lani and i met up with them and another of their friends at a vegan restaurant downtown. it's always interesting to meet someone in person that you've only known from an online context. i've been reading <a href="http://www.goatee.net/">goatee.net</a> for quite a while now and his <a href="http://goatee.net/anarchists/punk-ethic.html">Anarchist's Punk Ethic</a> has had a profound effect on how i've been examining my own life and political views since i first read it. so when you meet someone whose work and writings you've been following for a while, it's a strange mixture of knowing a lot about the person but still having no idea what they're really like. Joe at least came with <a href="http://www.miromi.org/">mimi</a>'s blessing so i wasn't too surprised when he turned out to be genuinely cool and friendly in person. since mimi is a mutual acquaintance, she naturally came up in the conversation. Joe mentioned a book called <a href="http://www.gladwell.com/books2.html">The Tipping Point</a> by Malcolm Gladwell which apparently examines cultural and political phenomenon using the techniques of epidemiology. in particular, Gladwell identifies a certain portion of the population as "<a href="http://www.gladwell.com/tp_excerpt2.html">Connectors</a>". Connectors are basically people who know a disproportionately large number of people. we all agreed that mimi is the textbook example of a connector. she knows absolutely <em>everyone</em>. when she used to live in nyc, we couldn't walk more than 20 feet down the street without her running into someone she knew. when lani and i visited her in berlin it was exactly the same and she hadn't even been living there for a whole year. also when we were over there, lani discovered that mimi was good friends with one of lani's close friends from high school back on the west coast. so meeting Joe was pretty cool. the food was excellent too. lani wouldn't stop talking about the food for the rest of the weekend. on sunday we spent some time hunting for a winter coat for lani but with no luck. then we went to penn station to wait for <a href="http://www.livejournal.com/users/ishovi">Josef</a>'s train to come in (and eat krispy kreme's while we waited ;). unfortunately, Josef had lost his cellphone earlier and didn't actually know that we were going to be meeting him at the station. so he got in, called lani from a payphone but we didn't hear the phone ring. we spent about half an hour walking in circles around penn station looking for him without any luck. eventually we gave up Josef, decided that he'd be ok on his own for a while and headed out to brooklyn to visit Cheryl in her new apartment and have a couple beers in a calm, sane environment before we went to Daphne's birthday party. that turned out to be a good idea. Daphne's probably another likely candidate for being a 'connector'. the party was at some tiny, no name bar down in alphabet city. loud and full of people. there were a lot of bates folk so i didn't feel entirely out of place. Josef even managed to find his way there and meet up with us. it was fun but we really stayed way too late. so getting up for work this morning was not fun.