Six Degrees of Separation
Twenty Years Later...
It’s the 20-year anniversary of a project I never finished.
In 2002, I was living and working in Portland, Maine, working at a photo agency, and just getting into the world of audio.
Portland’s population was 82,000 people back then. It was a very manageable, walkable, affordable city. It’s here where I learned that small cities are great for people with creative ideas. If you worked at it, you could connect to various social networks very quickly. People were accessible. Within my first year I had met and photographed the mayor in her living room.
Around this time, I read the Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell. Published in 2000, The Tipping Point explains how social epidemics — the spreading of ideas, behaviors, and products — are like viruses. Gladwell says they grow slowly until they reach a critical mass - the tipping point - and explode. He mentions the concept of six degrees of separation, which was a sticky concept for me at the time.
“Six degrees of separation … means that a very small number of people are linked to everyone else in a few steps, and the rest of us are linked to the world through those special few.”
-Malcolm Gladwell
Then, a little social network website called Friendster popped up on my radar. It felt like an answer to a prayer I hadn’t uttered yet. It was the precursor to MySpace and Facebook - and I loved that it connected me to all kinds of handsome strangers all across the country.
The best thing about Friendster was you could see anyone's profile and understand how you were connected. You could click on a stranger’s profile and it would tell you the name of every person in between you and that random person:
Evan→ Melissa→ Laura→ Nikka→ Adam→ Kate→ Jesse → Monique→ Mario
There might be only one friend between you and someone you thought was cute. Or it could be, sadly, a list of 7 or 8 people.
I was mesmerized by this visual Rolodex that linked people’s lives so plainly and it felt like all kinds of opportunities - dream jobs, soulmates, best friends - were just one message away. It’s hard to locate this feeling now, but back in 2002 the world was so small on the Internet. Friendster was helping me search for my tribe.
I was obsessed.
I wanted to watch and follow a visual pathway of connection. I wanted to see how individual lives were connected. How the world was glued together.
So I created a documentary project to visualize these ideas that enchanted me.
This grid of Polaroids might be hard to understand at first, but bear with me:
Each row is a pathway of people who are connected to each other.
Person #1 knows Person #2.
Person #2 knows Person #1 and #3.
Person #3 knows Person #2 and #4 and so on.
But, no, Person #1 and Person #6 have never met.
I called it 6x6: Portland
The Process
I started with my co-worker Betsy. I went to her house and took a Polaroid photo of her behind a red bed sheet. I carried it around in an old bowling bag with my mini-disc recorder and shotgun microphone.
Then, I recorded an interview for about an hour.
Click to listen to Betsy introducing herself:
Then, I asked Betsy to give me 3 to 4 names of people in her life who were on the fringe of her social network, and explicitly I wanted people who were different from her in a few ways. Who in her life had a different cultural background, race, sexuality, or gender identity? I wanted this next person to catapult the project into a whole new sector of life experience. As a queer kid in Maine, I wanted to see a diverse world of human connection.
I reached out to those people and maybe one person got back to me.
I’d set up a time for an interview with them - meet, photograph, interview… and I continued that process until I had a pathway of six connected people.
Making one pathway of six people felt too easy, so I did six pathways of six people, thirty-six interviews in total. It took me over two years.
I applied for a grant - the Rebel Blend Fund Grant - from a local business, Coffee by Design. It was named after their best selling craft-roasted coffee.
I later learned that an employee at Kinko’s - who I would chat with as I printed my book projects - also worked part-time at the coffee shop. He spoke well of me in the application review process, further cementing that it’s who you know and who knows you.
I was very new to the art of the interview. I’d knock on people’s doors knowing very little about them. I didn’t prepare questions beforehand, and I wish I had the foresight to ask each person a set of the same questions. But this ‘blank slate’ method forced me to stay in the moment and follow my curiosity about someone.
Sometimes this yielded a story that got below the surface.
Many times it did not.
I was too shy to follow up on an interesting anecdote. I’d miss an opportunity and take my line of questioning in the completely wrong direction.
This project truly was my Interview Boot Camp.
After I completed the 36th interview in March of 2004, I moved to San Francisco and these voices languished on outdated mini-discs for years. I recently borrowed a mini-disc recorder from my friend Kate and digitized them.
What’s Next?
In the coming months, I will contact and speak with as many people from the project that I can find. I want to give them back their interview, and reconnect them to the voice of the person they were twenty years ago.
A few participants were older and some of them I’m sure are not with us today. After some Googling I found the obituary for one man, Ron Spinella - Pathway 1, Person 4. I wondered if his wife has a recording of his voice and laugh somewhere. I’d like to give her husband’s voice back to her.
I’ll be posting the six pathways over the coming months and will also endeavor to produce each pathway as a short podcast episode.
Watch this space!
I’d love to hear your thoughts on 6x6 - and hear about the unfinished projects you have in your archives!
What a great project. I think the idea would fascinate many people who might want to make their own version.