Degrees of Separation from 9/11
http://www.slate.com/articles/briefing/articles/2001/10/lifes_odds_and_sept_11.html
Disclaimer: This post may be upsetting to some, as it refers to the events of 9/11, though it intends neither harm nor disrespect. If anything, I believe it helps explain why 9/11 had the societal impact it did by looking at how easily it affected all of us.
Given the timing of this first post, I thought it was appropriate to take a look at an older article instead of a more recent one, one discussing the likelihood of a given person having lost someone in the Twin Towers. The author discussed how bizarre it seemed that so few people he knew had lost someone directly in the tragedy. By his reasoning, if the average American has a “personal social network” of about 290 people, what is believed to be a low estimate (derived from surveys), then the 6,000 or so lost in the towers on 9/11 would be expected to know about 1.8 million people. That number seems rather high, but then the article discusses various factors that reduce that number substantially. Chiefly, due to how social networks work, one person who knew someone in the Towers was likely to know more than just that person, whether due to location,similar occupation, or any other of a number of factors that contribute to what the article called the “lead-in factor.” After accounting for that, the probability of a given American knowing someone lost in the towers directly decreases substantially, though the article points out that about 80% of those surveyed knew someone who lost someone in the towers. As the article succinctly puts it, “We are all mourners at the second degree.”
I was led to this topic after seeing my father’s annual social media post honoring a lost high-school classmate of his, on which many people wrote to recall fond memories. That made me wonder how many lives had been touched by those tragically lost, and also wonder within what degree of separation most of us are from the tragedy. As the article pointed out, there are only two degrees of separation for most Americans, which explains the massive impact that 9/11 had to those (like me) who were too young to understand it. Beyond that, though the degrees of separation was what I was seeking to find, I found that the rest of the article related very heavily to concepts covered in class. The fact that a given person who knew one person in the towers probably lost multiple friends, while most people probably lost none, is a reflection of the triadic closure principle. While ordinarily a good thing, the triangles within our networks clearly and unfortunately amplify the effects of mass tragedy. Contagion rarely affects just one person in someone’s network; good or bad, it’s likely to affect a significant part of the network or miss it entirely. In the case of 9/11, it affected us all in some way.