All together now

In James Cameron’s “Avatar,” a force called Eywa runs through every living thing on Pangaea, the futuristic planet home to the Na’vi, an advanced humanoid race that has learned how to tap into wisdom of their planet and lives in harmony with their surroundings.

Recently surpassing $1 billion in global ticket sales, the movie itself has spoken to how widely media can be disseminated, how quickly information can travel and how the world at large can be won over by a single film in today’s society. By now, how many of us haven’t seen the winter blockbuster with the glow-in-the-dark forests, helicopter-sized dragons and slightly uncomfortable alien love scenes? To think that both you and some stranger in China have been exposed to the same cultural phenomenon attests to the fact that all of us can share something in common with someone whose life we may never understand.

Looking back on this past decade, it is incredible how quickly technology has advanced and how the popularization of social media has transformed our lives. Instead of interacting only with our nuclear family and close circle of friends, Google, Facebook, Twitter and other networking tools have allowed us to communicate with anyone in the world, making us all much more interconnected than we would have thought 10 years ago.

In “Avatar,” military officers dismissed the researchers, who saw various living organisms literally communicating with each other through some mysterious network, as New Age nuts. Could it be that James Cameron anticipated that in the future, we would have scientific evidence to prove what we don’t yet understand? Is this all just some Hollywood hocus pocus, or are we all really connected?

Although social media has only recently made these connections apparent and accessible, this concept of connectedness among all living things, is not new but has been around for ages. In Buddhism, for example, like Eywa but without the anthropomorphic characteristics, a fundamental law called dharma, a rhythm of life and the universe, pervades everything in the world. Particularly, Nichiren Buddhism emphasizes that you and your environment are one. As a result, every cause you make has an effect in the world. This “butterfly effect” of every individual’s thought, speech and action has far reaching consequences.

Recent social science research has made the existence of this mysterious medium in which networks operate seem less far-fetched. For example, professor Nicholas Christakis at Harvard University, co-author of “Connected,” said in a September interview on National Public Radio’s Talk of the Nation: “And in a way we think of networks as a kind of—as a kind of matrix in which we’re all embedded, or if you will, like the Force in ‘Star Wars,’ you know, it surrounds us, it affects us all, it’s there everywhere. And, you know, most people nowadays are accustomed to talking about networks and they think about online networks that they can see but what they may not realize is that they’re actually embedded in these living, breathing networks that surround us all, all the time, and have always done so.”

He and co-author James Fowler have found that we are not only linked by six degrees of separation, but our lives are impacted by three degrees of influence. They found that a wide range of attitudes and feelings, such as political views and happiness, and behaviors, including smoking, drinking and overeating, are influenced not only by one’s direct circle of friends, but by one’s friends’ friends’ friends.

We see this phenomenon take place at Duke. From Friday night when West Campus is bustling until 2 a.m. to Saturday at noon when the line for Alpine Bagels never ends to Sunday night when the libraries are packed, ours is a community so closely knit that we seem to move in unison.