What a small world we live in... no, REALLY.

The world is so incredibly HUGE... until you start connecting the dots.

The internet is so incredibly, unfathomably HUGE... until you start connecting the dots...

Users online are not hard to trace. It's not as big as you comprehend it to be. It just seems that way...
The world is so incomprehensibly small in reality

6 degrees of separation

Is a proven mathematical theory that you can achieve a connection with any person on the planet through a link of no more than 6 people.

All Roads lead to Rome and All Rivers Lead to the Sea ;-)
My signature (the one sporting pink font) reading "we are one" is a idiom of these same sociological concepts.

IInformation Overload

Is when you process mass amounts of information from many different sides and sources over a period of time on a subject or idea and the end result leaves the consumer with a skewed conclusion or opinion that does not represent the original meaning, intention or truth.

Information overload is a phenomenon comparable to "Chinese Whisperers" AKA The Telephone Game
The Telephone game is played when one person whispers a message to another person and that same message is then passed along through a chain of people which finally the last person to receive the message announces what it was that was whispered to them. The result of the final message is often very different from the original whispered message due to accidental or deliberate erroneous communication.

Information overload is initially propagated by only one source that spreads like wildfire. The information can be in the form of a statement, a story, a claim, or a rumor. [It] can be spread through various forms of mediums and media such as verbal communication between people face-to-face, the internet, radio, publishings, newspapers, and news broadcasting corporations.

Information overload can and does often lead to mass confusion that hampers our ability to see what is really happening in the world; what is fact and what is fiction. It is spread in pandemic fashion through a carrier, similar to disease. The carriers in this case, like the rodents of the black plague are, you guessed it -- "us"

Product Placement

It's like products on the supermarket shelves... 6 rows by 12 feet across dedicated soley to choices of salad dressings...

20 freezers dedicated solely to brands of pizza...

But now look at this scientifically based on ingredients. Categorize the dressings and pizzas by ingredients, OK, now further categorize them by chemical compounds, and then down to elements. If you've done this you'll realize that most all the the dressings and pizzas share the same exact ingredients and chemical compounds.
Elements, such as Cn(H2O) -which is sugar, then there citric acid, and then you have flour C6H10O5 which is essentially starch, which is essentially cellulose, which is essentially a polymer of glucose, so on and so forth... If you've done this then you might realize that the rest that if "left" (slight variations of ingredients in the pizza and dressings) is just "noise" to make the world and the choices you have seem more complicated.

] The Internet

Yahoo

Yahoo has run out of desirable usernames/e-mail addresses in only 12 or so years before they had to "recycle"inactive member accounts so they may be reused by new members who register.

I've personally ran into the same 4 people online during various years in various, very different locations online (from 2004-2014) and a couple of them even more than once! People whom which I had no real significant relationship with, connection, or things in common other than that we shared a passing-by or brief conversation. What are the chances? Higher than you can naturally fathom ;-)

An example of this is when I happened to run into one user on ATS that crossed paths with me, be it 7 years later from hence we cyber-met "briefly" 7 years prior. We were not closely acquainted and shared no significant common interests.. The only token of remembrance was the user name -- this person remembered mine, and contacted me asking if I remembered them from a brief interaction that took place 7 years prior ;-)

It might make you think...what about the x amount of online users who constantly change their user names and e-mails like dirty socks over the years? Who's to say "anonymous user x" who's sitting in front of you wasn't that one guy named xbuffalochickenz12 that you talked to on a physics website in 03? Would you even know it? Probably not. But then again maybe you would ;-)

Buried websites

The only thing about the internet that I perceive as unfathomably huge is the mass quantity of buried websites and content.

This is content and information that you will not come across in web browser searchers unless you are "specifically" looking for it using specific phrases or keywords. Specific as in VERY specific, even as specific as knowing the exact address and sub-addresses that have to be inputted into the main browser window. Methods to find buried content is often found by quite literally, going down the rabbit hole and usually almost always start out somewhere familiar.

Anything and Everything leads to anything and everything you are looking for

Just one example of this is when I found a list of 14,000 "specific" yahoo accounts posted on a buried blog that had been inactive for 7 years, my account was listed among the roughly 14,000. The specific list was posted on the person's personal blog in 2005. I don't even recall exactly the steps I took to come across this information, but I do know that nobody can find it unless they know where to look. I noticed when I went through the list I remembered so many of the accounts that were listed... I recalled coming across more than at least 200 of the accounts listed just from visual memory.

...By now you might be wondering what's the point of spewing all of this nonsense!?

...Well keep reading

The person who posted the list on the buried blog fascinates me. The reason they fascinate me is because it sparked my curiosity due to the fact that this person, without a doubt, "manually" spent A LOT of time online to collect the accounts for a specific purpose (which I do know), and further digging on this person shows that they have has manually observed/corresponded personally with every single person who's account was listed :O -- I remind you that that is over 14,000 people.

Blah blah blah! get to the point and tell me why is this rambling story relevant?!

It shows that even a huge website like yahoo with it's millions of user accounts is still a small world in terms of interaction. Out of the millions of members, there lies only a certain percentage of members who used certain services of yahoo regularly. In terms of statistics as in the ratio of members who had moderate activity, low activity, and almost ever day to every day activity can be easily monitored, to a great extent, MANUALLY! And to make it even smaller, imagine what can be done using software and algorithms to place "every" account yahoo has ever had into a category based on activity, or other various categories. :O

cont...

What in the hell did I just read and why in the world would I care about yahoo or your stories? Besides, I don't even use Yahoo!! So boo!

The point of this thread isn't specifically about yahoo, or my stories, if you look in between the lines at the bigger implications of it all.
No, I'm not being deceptive, ambiguous, vague, or any other word used to describe mystery. ;-)

Happy hunting and gathering... and remember, you, he, she, I, we and them are no more than 6 steps away.

Gee, makes me wonder if any of us ATSers are connected,
elsewheres besides ATS itself.

1 out of 6 people we know connects us somehow to the rest of the world?

reply to post by unb3k44n7


Mate, I mean S%#T mate, damn you really remind me of someone...do I know you from somewhere, I'm sure I know you, actually you may even know a mate of mine, I met him through a mate...

I dont know what to say,

on 1 side, I dont believe in that 6 degrees of separation

on the other side, texts on the internet has been indexed by thousands of entity and can be retrieve on demand, even buried ones. Data retention is 30 years I think, after you are dead, somebody might email you regarding that pudding pic you took.

I dont think the world is small, but certainly its becoming smaller, because we all connected, not by 6 degrees, but by technology, probably 3 server hops ?.

reply to post by unb3k44n7


S&F for you. I had a teacher in college that talked a lot about this, its really neat. I was standing in NYC many years ago wearing my NBCCSA jacket waiting to get in to see a Daily Show taping when I get a tap on my shoulder, an elderly man asked where I got my jacket, we got to talking and both him and his wife had been teachers at a school in the same town. We talked for a while, they actually knew my grandfather from earlier in their teaching careers. It really drove the 6 degrees of separation deal that my wacky teacher had been talking about.
Does your username happen to reflect where you attended university by any chance? Just wondering...

reply to post by awh666


No, I've never attended a university in my life.

Just about everything I know of and speak of is obtained from self-education, personal experience, freethinking and observation.

I've had a somewhat of a rough and eventful life thus far, but it's allowed me to see from so many perspectives