Six Degrees of Lois Weisberg
NETWORKS I
Gladwell (1999). Six Degrees of Lois Weisberg
Lois Weisberg has an extraordinary ability to meet people (and making new friends) and connect them each other. She is the Commissioner of Cultural Affairs for the City of Chicago and during her entire life she has hang out and built relationships with people from different backgrounds and jobs: musicians, doctors, lawyers, politicians, environmentalists and so on. Without any doubt, Lois is capable to reach someone outside her “world” (and, equally important, that person responds to her) and has also the gift to easily bring people together, so that in a certain sense she’s the type of person who seems to know everybody.
These people who know everyone are really important since they make the world work by spreading ideas and information and connecting varied and isolated parts of society. As a matter of fact, Lois is the epicenter of the city administration (she is a connector), even if she is far from being the most important/powerful person in the city. Nor she is charismatic – not in the way we think of extroverts and public figures as being charismatic – and for sure she doesn’t represent the image of the Washington society doyenne (one of those people who identify you, take you to lunch, give you the treatment): her social life is very different.
In the mid-eighties, Lois was one of the most important civic activist in the city, but what was more surprising about her was that, for example, “somehow she managed to be plausible as flea-market peddler to a bunch of flea-market peddlers, the same way she managed to be plausible as a music lover to a musician like Tony Bennet”. It doesn’t matter whom she’s with or what she’s doing, she always manages to be in the tick of things.
Once, hosting in her house for 2 years a young Chinese man who wanted to improve his English, Lois had been even capable to create a link between Chicago’s North Side reform politics (since Lois’s house was the site of top
Gladwell (1999). Six Degrees of Lois Weisberg
Lois Weisberg has an extraordinary ability to meet people (and making new friends) and connect them each other. She is the Commissioner of Cultural Affairs for the City of Chicago and during her entire life she has hang out and built relationships with people from different backgrounds and jobs: musicians, doctors, lawyers, politicians, environmentalists and so on. Without any doubt, Lois is capable to reach someone outside her “world” (and, equally important, that person responds to her) and has also the gift to easily bring people together, so that in a certain sense she’s the type of person who seems to know everybody.
These people who know everyone are really important since they make the world work by spreading ideas and information and connecting varied and isolated parts of society. As a matter of fact, Lois is the epicenter of the city administration (she is a connector), even if she is far from being the most important/powerful person in the city. Nor she is charismatic – not in the way we think of extroverts and public figures as being charismatic – and for sure she doesn’t represent the image of the Washington society doyenne (one of those people who identify you, take you to lunch, give you the treatment): her social life is very different.
In the mid-eighties, Lois was one of the most important civic activist in the city, but what was more surprising about her was that, for example, “somehow she managed to be plausible as flea-market peddler to a bunch of flea-market peddlers, the same way she managed to be plausible as a music lover to a musician like Tony Bennet”. It doesn’t matter whom she’s with or what she’s doing, she always manages to be in the tick of things.
Once, hosting in her house for 2 years a young Chinese man who wanted to improve his English, Lois had been even capable to create a link between Chicago’s North Side reform politics (since Lois’s house was the site of top