This week I was invited to join a Facebook group called Six Degrees of Separation. (I didn’t.) Presumably, the idea is to see how many people will join if the invitations spread “virally”, where the underlying premise is that every human being on the planet can connect to every other one through a maximum of six degrees of connection (a fallacy… but that’s another story).

The Jewish Daily Forward?

I don’t see why you need a Facebook group, though. In the last six days, I have received the names and email address of 200+ complete strangers. Also the email addresses of about 50 distant acquaintances. Oblivious friends and family forward on a joke or a news item to 20 (or 30 or 40…) of their dearly beloved, putting all the addresses in the CC field instead of the BCC field.

Most of these tidbits have been forwarded five or six times without being pruned, expanding their populations in proportion. It’s lucky for my friends (and their friends, and theirs…) that I’m not a direct marketer trolling for contact information. It’s creepy for me to think that all those people now have my name and number.

Six degrees of email separation from everyone on the planet? Can you imagine the spam?