A few degrees and a sandwich

The idea that I might only be a few people away from any person in the world is somewhat comforting, but also somewhat useless if you look into the power relations between each of the links. I was thinking about it and tried to map my connection to Barack Obama. It's only three degrees. I worked for Diálogo, under a boss that was appointed by the previous president of Puerto Rico's public university. The ex-president is Senator Alejandro García Padilla's brother, and García Padilla had a sandwich with Obama this summer! (do add a hint of irony when reading that last part)

Ok, now all I need to do is meet each of these individuals in a context where they might introduce me to next link. Sounds easy enough.

The problem, of course, is that the associations between the links differ in terms of strength, importance and power. If you make a diagram of a network, its visual structure will lack a top-down order, and in some cases this works. My boss was “above me” in terms of hierarchy, but the relationship I have with him -a very nice friendship- does not manifest that. That's because of his personality and the that he conducted himself as a boss. However, the link between the university's president and him does have an above-below kind of order within the university's structure, but also in the way they acted with each other.

If I skip to the García Padilla-Obama link, there's a whole set of factors that make it so that Obama exercises power over García Padilla in real terms (he is the President), and in how García Padilla probably perceives him. There are cultural and historical factors that come into play, like the colonial relationship between Puerto Rico and the US, and some people's perceptions that Americans are larger than life. The way it was framed in some of the media was that it was a huge honor for García Padilla to be having a sandwich with Obama. I felt it was humiliating that our politicians would go so out of their way to impress a man that only spent a few hours in our island to get money. Either way, power comes into play.