06 April,2011 09:36 AM IST | | Prachi Sibal
We experienced and then we watched The Social Network. We also grew up with theories on the Six Degrees of Separation which explains how you are separated from any individual on the planet by six steps of linkage.
Facebook came, conquered and left us rather mind boggled, leaving us with no more than one or two degrees of separation with some random individual. Social distance gradually turned into something about the number of friends on your list. Also, it resulted in everybody having dated everybody else, thus further diminishing the aforementioned social distance.
It is in this converging world, a journalist quite often encounters weird social combinations and lands up with some dirty secrets but with nowhere to spill! I'll tell you why.
Consider this; I walk into a coffee shop one fine uneventful morning and walk past a couple getting too close to each other for comfort. A few minutes later, my glance falls on the couple again, and I was horrified to identify them as A and C (for convenience). A who was introduced as my friend B's boyfriend the night before and C who was to be formally engaged to a certain D in the same week. C, though petrified on spotting me, showed no signs of untangling anytime soon. I could do no more than smile faintly and confine the incident to my
memory. C is now married to D and A has been spotted with a series of women ever since.
Another incident of this sort involved a man much senior in age that I spotted at a pub more than once dancing with a woman and visibly ducking every time I looked in his direction trying to put a name to the familiarity. A few days later, he wasu00a0 introduced as an acquaintance's husband and I stopped myself short right before saying, "I have seen you somewhere"!
The above mentioned incidents and many more have created an almost conditioned reaction of asking for the name when anyone announces an alliance so as to avoid probable mishaps in the same conversation. Also, in quite a short while you stand the risk of knowing everybody's current or ex-flame by less than a degree and become mindful of how one of those secrets might make their way out of you through a casual conversation.
A play titled Pub Crawl by Gautam Raja aptly elucidates how a harmless night at a pub with reduced degrees of separation in a city can spell utter doom. The world is converging with every passing day and Facebook might just be the first to inform you about its collapse unto a point.
