500 Words on Thursday | Written by Lee Schneider
The Internet lets me astral travel. This past week I was hired by a company in South Australia and prepped a film shoot in Florida. I have a researcher in Austin who wrapped up a project for me today and an SEO analyst who lives in Oklahoma who’s starting another. It sounds like a lot of bouncing around, the sort of light-speed tasking that drives some people crazy, but I find that I thrive on it because it lets me move consciousness around. But I can see that not everyone’s having fun moving ideas around the world like I am.
The Wikileaks guy, a former computer hacker who makes sensitive information public, seems to be leading a hellish life on the run after leaking information that powerful governments would rather have remained unleaked. I wouldn’t want to be the guy other people want to kill because he has exploited information networks effectively. But I like knowing things, and if that means knowing what brand of beer might be vegan, or that one intelligent individual in a group won’t necessarily make the group smarter, or that Malcolm Gladwell thinks that online activism is a waste of time, that works for me. I even like disagreeing with Gladwell just this once and can easily find others who feel he blew it this time.
This is more than just gadget-porn, more than mind candy, more than realizing how great Skype is or that my phone knows when it’s home so it can turn on WiFi. This is about consciousness.
Consciousness, of course, is the original virtual reality, no goggles or joystick required. Right now we have an opportunity to spread consciousness around the world and work with it in ways only mystics have dreamed about. Stephen Dinan has written about efforts to spread peace using Twitter, and an author friend of mine is using the interconnectedness of all media to tap into the universal truths of creativity and intelligence. Some embrace this opportunity to move information at amazing speed. Others are running away as fast as they can.
I have friends who don’t use email. So I have to call them on the phone, which is ridiculous. I would feel sorry for these friends, but when email becomes obsolete in a few years, they will look really smart because they will still know how to talk. I have clients who need to be told what html stands for and how embedding doesn’t have anything to do with sleeping with supermodels. I know people who have film in their cameras.
Nobody knows where this is going, whether it will ever be worth it again to use film or speak into an analogue device, or learn how to fix a radio. Something surely is lost, but I prefer thinking about what is gained. We now have, in the words of my author friend, a tremendous playroom/shed/hackerspace to mess around in. It used to take a lot of time for information to be transformed into knowledge and finally, to wisdom. I think of scholars studying, yogis wandering, mystics gazing inward for decades seeking insight. In the online world, however, time, like distance, becomes compressed, and I think the distance between information and wisdom will be shorter, too. Especially when you can move consciousness around.
Photo Credit: Roger Price via Creative Commons License
Everyone is connected by six degrees of separation.
I like the sound of that. The phrase it’s a small world after all has been seared into my mind by singing robots at Disneyland. (Do you have that song stuck in your head now? Sorry.)
Six Degrees became a popular phrase after a play from John Guare called “Six Degrees of Separation” became a hit, but the idea has been floating around since 1967, when a social psychologist named Stanley Milgram wrote it up in the first issue of Psychology Today:
“Fred Jones of Peoria, sitting in a sidewalk cafe in Tunisia, and needing a light for his cigarette, asks the man at the next table for a match. They fall into conversation; the stranger is an Englishman who, it turns out, spent several months in Detroit. ‘I know it’s a foolish question; says Jones, ‘but do you by any chance know a fellow named Ben Arkadian? He’s an old friend of mine, manages a chain of supermarkets in Detroit…’”
Milgram never used the phrase six degrees of separation, but he believed his research proved that anyone in the United States was connected to everyone else by about 5.5 personal links. Kevin Bacon, an actor often believed to be connected to all other actors by six degrees, liked the idea and started a foundation to connect people to worthy causes.
“You’ve probably heard of the Six Degrees concept. Any one person (including me, Kevin Bacon) is connected to any other person through six or fewer relationships, because it’s a small world.”
-www.sixdegrees.org
Milgram did his experiment using the US Postal Service. He mailed folders to people he called “starters” and asked them to help him get the folder to a target person in a distant city. They would do this by mailing the folder to someone they knew who might in turn know the target person. Milgram reported that it took six jumps to get the folder to the right person. Amazing!
Amazing that is, until subsequent researchers like Judith Kleinfeld checked Milgram’s original notes and discovered that some of his other studies didn’t go so well.
Very few of his folders reached their targets. In his first, unpublished study, only three of 60 letters—5 percent—made it.
- Psychology Today
That hasn’t stopped Six Degrees. Malcolm Gladwell wrote an essay called Six Degrees of Lois Weisberg. Yahoo! scientist Duncan Watts is also working on Six Degrees with computer models. Watts did a version of the Milgrim experiments using emails instead of letters. As Fast Company reported, Watts used a Web site to recruit 61,000 people, then asked them to ferry messages to 18 targets worldwide. It took six links to get the message to the target. That would seem to validate Milgram’s work, but not all researchers are convinced.
There is a powerful network linking us all, and maybe Milgram had the right idea – even though his research was flawed. I hope he did get the idea right – because eight degrees from Kevin Bacon just doesn’t sound as good.
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Written by Lee Schneider, founder of DocuCinema.
I know where ideas come from. They come from coffee. While living in Italy, I drank five espresso coffees a day and had lots of ideas. One of those ideas was this: Sleep is a symptom of caffeine deprivation. Unless I wanted to become a professional insomniac I needed an alternative. Switching to green tea has worked but the lower caffeine content results in just 62.5 words per cup. Large vats of it must be brewed by the kitchen staff even to write this blog.
Getting enough caffeine in me to feel the neurons charging is only part of the story. The ideas have to come from somewhere – but where? The first theory involves sweat. 
Albert Einstein said, “It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer.”
Hard work isn’t always the answer, but changing perspectives might be, like stepping into the car or into a shower. After stepping into his bath, Archimedes figured out how water displacement could be used to calculate density. Could be the water, but closing your eyes also works. Researchers call this “gating” of visual input, and it might cause solution-related brain activity to burst into consciousness. The ah-ha moment! Dreams are a great resource, too. I’ve had some very big ideas in dreams, and after I wake up I write them down. They usually go like this: “Mungle bubble car mouse tree bliff.” If anyone can make sense of that, drop me a line.
It gets interesting when big ideas visit several people at once. Newton and Leibniz discovered calculus at the same time. Three mathematicians “invented” decimal fractions simultaneously. Does that mean that scientific discoveries are just “in the air” — waiting to be grabbed up by a receptive mind? Can ideas be the product of a collective super-consciousness? That would mean that ideas don’t only come from inside. Instead of a theory of sweat, this is a theory of spirit.
According to Elizabeth Gilbert, author of “Eat, Pray Love,” the Greeks believed that the “genius” was a magical, divine entity living in the walls of the artist’s studio. When the artist was working, the genius would come out to help. As Gilbert put it, this was a psychological construct to protect you from the results of your work. Your ideas were not yours – they were on loan from higher sources. If your work bombed, it was not entirely your fault. You just had a faulty genius. (Can you give your genius a cup of coffee?) This changed in the Renaissance, when human creativity was put at the center of the universe. Brilliance was being a genius, not having a genius.
Whether I have a genius living in the wall of my office or not, I believe that ideas come from having a prepared mind, and yet there is that undefined something that makes me wonder if a larger consciousness comes into play. 
Television, for example, was invented by several people at once, including a Mormon farmer who was mowing hay in rows and realized that an electron beam could scan a picture in horizontal lines. Then he went in to take a shower. Where do your ideas come from?
Stay curious and see you next Thursday.
