the story behind betweenness

be·tween·ness: the quality or state of being between two others ¹

It's the space in between that creates meaning in conversation, determines a poem's melody, and gives time to order puzzling lines of thought. But if we are honest, we rarely grant it moments of conscious attention. In a world that bombards us with buzzing headlines, multiple images on our screens every second, and a perpetual soundscape, we, quite literally, drown in the noise. But what happens when we start engaging with the room in between?

A personal exploration

While the term originates in a mathematical conception, it has a rather metaphorical meaning for me. As a child, I started to think about the differences between me and other children in school, pondering on how these relationships were different from those with adults around me. I often felt isolated from people my age. I clearly remember the sensation as an unsurmountable barrier, in my head that separated me from others. These feelings and thoughts are clear evidence of the discernment of this space.

While difficulties to adjust to social surroundings are no particular case while growing up, my clear awareness and conscious decisions around it certainly were. I however only realized this in conversations with friends many years later.

I’ll give more detail to paint a clearer picture. I have always been very quiet in groups. Some might say that I was simply a reserved child, but I know better. I never had issues with confidence in a way of sharing my thoughts or opinions, when I had them. My problem was another: In many situations, there was a void, and I had no words to share. And if I tried so, they seemed either forced or unimportant. I felt a tension between the person I was by myself and the one I felt like I was expected to be in social settings. This internal conflict was eased tremendously once the division of roles was explicit when the metaphorical space between me and the other was clearly marked out.

What I experienced, and now consider distinctive, was my way of coping with these tensions. I remember a thought, that popped up on the screen of my mind when I was probably eleven or twelve years old.

“I am me, when I am alone. But who am I with others around me?”

This early introspection made me realize that I could be creative. I started to observe people I was fond of, peers, but also my parents’ friends and the protagonists of my favorite novels. When I noticed traits or behaviors I admired, I wrote them into my journal and tried to understand, what made the person radiate or behave in that way, and later, started a period of trial to acquire them too. In a way, back then, I started to consciously design my social self ². After a while, the traits and behaviors that aligned became second nature to me.

The lines above tell a story of me as a child, measuring and experimenting with the social space between myself and others. There are numerous other ways to engage with betweenness as between everything there is, there is anything that is not.

thought-provoking sparks

a mathematical concept: betweenness centrality

In an article about neuronal networks, I stumbled across the mathematical concept of betweenness centrality³. Technically it captures how much a given node is in-between others. This metric is measured with the number of shortest paths between any couple of nodes in a network that passes through the target node. The target node would have a high betweenness centrality if it appears in many shortest paths. The metric is used in neuroscience to trace the formation of neuronal pathways but is also utilized to capture a person’s role in a network. It aids in the analysis of information flows and helps to identify individuals who play bridge-spanning roles.

a social experiment: six degrees of separation

The concept made me remember a conversation I had with a friend the other day on a walk through a park close to my room in Berlin. Because of a coincidence, we were in awe of how small the world is sometimes, and he thus shared with me the theory of six degrees of separation⁴. Intrigued by it, I spread it in conversation and realized that the idea that we are all connected by six degrees, six other people, is indeed entrenched in our folklore. I simply haven’t heard about it before. The notion grew out of work from Stanley Milgrim, a social psychologist. In the 1960s, he experimented with a few hundred people from Boston and Omaha, who tried to get a letter to a target - a complete stranger in Boston. They, however, could only send the letter to a personal friend whom they thought was somehow closer to the target than they were. When Milgram looked at the letters that reached the target, he found that they had changed hands only about six times. This finding has since been enshrined in the notion that everyone can be connected by a chain of acquaintances roughly six links long. These findings spark important implications on the nature of social networks, social scientists today however assert that the preliminary picture is more complicated than Milgram realized, but admit that it looks like his main finding of six degrees is in the ballpark.

useful emptiness: more than a stylistic device in Japanese art

While the two conceptions above focus on social space between humans, spaces between objects are omnipresent in our world, starting with molecules, in their tiny presence, and having an open end really, when it comes to the nature of our planets. Artists recognized the potential of spatiality and spark life into their work by pausing deliberately in music and poetry or smuggling negative space into their photographs. Japanese art knows useful emptiness and titles it Ma⁶. Its conceptions of space are influenced by Shinto, a spiritual tradition that places almost as much importance on the spaces and relationships between objects and people as it does on the objects themselves, this means that all things are made up of not only themselves but also the space and relations that they affect. In the 4th century BC, Lao Tzu wrote the following poem, explaining Ma:

Thirty spokes are joined together in a wheel,

but it is the center hole that allows the wheel to function.

We mold clay into a pot,

but it is the emptiness inside that makes the vessel useful.

We fashion wood for a house,

but it is the emptiness inside that makes it liveable.

We work with the substantial,

but the emptiness is what we use.

While the concept should be clear now, its implications might not. Julian Baggini, a contemporary philosopher, in his book, How the World Thinks: A Global History of Philosophy⁵, tells of a study, where people were shown paintings with slight differences - in comparison with Americans or Europeans, people with an Asian background were more easily able to detect changes in the background, while Westerners kept focusing on adjustments of the subjects themselves. These findings suggest that eastern culture maintains closer intimacy with the space in-between.

I find it extraordinarily captivating to think about how our perception of reality can change if we are ready to adjust our focus from time to time. More even than changing perspective and trying to shed light on a situation from another human's eyes, but entirely rearranging the way we think about reality itself.

What is the first thing that comes to your mind, when trying to engage in this thought experiment?

¹ Merriam Webster. (n.d.). Betweenness. In Merriam Webster Dictionary. Retrieved on September 22, 2022, from https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/betweenness

² Mead, G. H. (1913). The Social Self. In Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods. 10, pp. 374- 380

³ Golbeck, J. (2015). Betweenness Centrality. In Science Direct. Retrieved on September 25, 2022, from https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/computer-science/betweenness-centrality

⁴ Morse, G. (2003). The Science Behind Six Degrees. In Harvard Business Review. Retrieved on September 25, 2022, from https://hbr.org/2003/02/the-science-behind-six-degrees

⁵ Baggini, J. (2018). How the World Thinks: A Global History of Philosophy. Granta Books.

⁶ Eastgate, T. (2018). Useful emptiness: conceptualization of space in Japanese art. In The Oxford Student. Retrieved on September 25, 2022, from https://www.oxfordstudent.com/2018/12/14/useful-emptiness-space-japanese-art/