Bridge Nodes

Look at me. I am the bridge node now.

If you modeled human relationships as an undirected graph, you'd probably find a bunch of communities, subgraphs of the relationships that are highly clustered. There's a lot of research into this stuff, but when you're in one of these you don't often realize when you are a bridge node.

This often means, in a memetic sense, that information traversal will often occur or not occur solely through your action. In some ways this is good. My wife is my bridge node to communities of more working class people. And that's been good since I have a little more understanding of people's lives outside of my San Francisco bubble, and many of my friends have no conception of that.

But often the way it manifests is that I transmit some memetic virus to my friends who are otherwise not within its area of transmission. Commonly, this is some sort of outrage-bait of some sort or the other. So if you're one of those, you can often improve a community substantially by just choosing to firewall appropriately.

Alternatively, I suppose, you could just mute the acquaintance of yours who is causing this.