Social Network

I just got back from the Cruftlabs party, and I'm still slightly inebriated.

Parties are a strange thing. So here, we expound upon the inherent perversity of the social network. It turns out that Roman and I have been to many of the same parties in the past year, only we never knew it until tonight. He asks if that girl over there is the ex-model from the halloween party at SH, who was wearing a bumblebee costume. I reply, "No, that was Heather." And we stare at each other. We have co-existed in utter ignorance, iterated over N parties for the past year and a half. Only recently do we actually know one another. But our social network is an incestuous system. We see all the same people, from year to year, at all the same parties. Eventually, you get around to interacting with everyone. For example, I am friends with Ben through Scott, but it turns out that Ben is also friends with Chris who married my best friend Mel (from home), and we never knew it until we all ended up at the same bluegrass show one night. More telling is that the only reason I even met my last boyfriend was due to the peripheral social network; my ex-boyfriend's friends are friends of my friends. Without that strange and circuitous social connection, it would have been a very different year. And I likely wouldn't have found myself hanging out with Roman at Cruftlabs, either.

It's not strange that who we know and how we know them defines and drives a lot of our social interactions. The influence of others also defines who we are. Still, it always surprises me. I figured that life in the Big City would be different from and less incestuous than boarding school, or growing up in a village of 350, or going to the state university with everyone else. And I think it can be, particularly post-college. But the rules of engagement operate on all social scales. I wouldn't have gotten a ride home from the airport, post Burning Man, from a guy who recognized my 'Sport Death' hoodie, if he hadn't also turned out to know everyone I know (off-side, Random, Mystery Hunt, TheDan). And it was just the Icing of Surreality when Chris' ride home, who gave me a ride home, turned out to be the former employer of the engineer who just started working in my group three months ago. Think about it.

In the future, the network adapts you.