L.A.con IV

[PhilOsborn]

The problem being, or course, finding what you want. Here's a possible solution:

Please see the book "Small Worlds" for an introduction to what I'm about to summarize. (If you google, you'll find a LOT more.)

The Small World Network is exemplified by the following example. Imagine a whole lot of people living on a ring world, say earth's orbit sized. The people all know that the there's all these other people elsewhere on the ring, but to communicate with them past the immediate locale can be a problem. The people on the far side of the ring speak different languages, worship different Gods. etc.

In fact, for the most part, people only speak to those people with whom they share a particular location and affinity. This is efficient, for many reasons, most especially the fact that the local group has evolved standards from shared interests, perspectives, division of labor, etc. that make communication within the group much faster than communication outside the group.

The level of communication outside the group is very limited for most people. If that was all you had, then to communicate across the ring to the far side would take millions of separate connections.

However, a few people bridge the gaps between the subnetworks, linking them together locally. These people may not have the depth of involvement in any particular cluster that cluster members have, but they do know people in a lot of other clusters well enough to facilitate communication as needed.

Having those people bridging the clusters reduces that number of connections to get to the farthest point by a couple orders of magnitude.

Now let's throw in a few people who communicate across entire quadrants of the ring, over arcs spanning 15 degrees or more. Just having a handful of such people reduces the number of connections between you and the farthest point by many more orders of magnitude, getting us to the famous "six degrees of separation."

It turns out that this is a natural phenomenon. A study of AIDS victims in Africa is one of the classic cases. It turns out that most people only have sex with a few partners over a long period of time. And if it were up to them, the transmission and spread of AIDS would not be a major problem. However, a few people turn out to be network nodes, having sex with dozens or hundreds of partners. THEY are responsible for the AIDS epidemic.

So, bottom-line, what can be proven mathematically is that finding and treating - and isolating sexually (!) - these handful of network nodes has a thousand times the impact of trying to deal with everyone.

So, assuming for a moment that WorldCon members might like to reduce the number of degrees of separation generally within the Con, how can we create or enhance that? What would be the positive and negative consequences?

Note that there are people who deliberately act to reduce communication between local clusters so that they can profit from their monopoly. So you get the infamous cliques and feuds that make social life in fandom so "interesting." Then, the network nodes serve to reduce, rather than enhance communications.

What kind of social mechanisms or behavioral standards might we employ to reduce these boundary walls and clashes? Or do we want to, to begin with?

Perhaps volunteers could be recruited to serve as network nodes? Just a thought. I'll try to come up with some kind of framework for further discussion at the Con if anyone is interested.