Just how separated are we? Two cross-country hitchhikers use social media to prove it’s just four degrees

The great American road trip is woven deep into the country’s cultural fabric. Just think of Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road,” John Steinbeck’s “Travels with Charley,” and Tom Wolfe’s “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.”

Now, two millennials are throwing something new into the mix: combining a cross-country road trip with a social experiment.

Ari Gootnick, 23, from Agoura Hills, California, and Oliver Shahery, 22, from Los Angeles, want to see for themselves whether technology and social media have shrunken the world down so much such that everyone is now connected to each other through, at most, four introductions.

Embarking on a cross-country road trip in mid-June from Los Angeles, they have hitchhiked east solely through getting rides by tapping into their network, their network’s network, and their network’s network’s network.

During a politically fraught time, the whole project is “proving that we’re way more connected than we think we are,” said Shahery, who has been filming the journey and will produce a documentary of their project.

Being able to have real, physical interactions with people — “to look someone in the eye and be sarcastic with them, and not have to rely on emojis to tell emotions”—  is a huge factor in bridging differences, said Shahery, who graduated in May from Boston College with a degree in directing and production design.

The friends, who took off from D.C. on Friday to Philadelphia for the next leg of their trip, are testing out the theory that any person is now only four degrees of separation removed from anybody else, as a team of scientists from Facebook and the University of Milan argued in a 2012 paper. The idea is an update on the popular theory of six degrees of separation, developed in 1967 by the social psychologist Stanley Milgram.

The project, which they dubbed #ProjectFourDegrees, stems from a love of travel and also a curiosity about how social media is affecting our lives.

“We’re trying to create a conversation about social media,” said Gootnick, who graduated from the University of Texas in Austin with an advertising degree. “We’re not necessarily trying to define it. We don’t have a defining message here. We’re not proving that social media is incredible for our world; we’re not also proving that it’s a negative thing. But we are exploring both.”

In just over two weeks, Gootnick and Shahery were able to get rides from Los Angeles all the way to D.C., where they arrived on July 3. They have connected with close friends, long-lost childhood friends, and complete strangers. The trip has taken them through places like Yuma, Arizona; Whitesands, New Mexico; Austin, Texas; Fayetteville, Arkansas; Memphis, Tennessee; Louisville, Kentucky, and Charleston, West Virginia.

Throughout the trip, Gootnick and Shahery have documented their journey extensively on social media, in large part because they’ve needed the exposure to nail down their next ride. Doing so has made them realize just how fluidly we now shift between physical and digital interactions, said Gootnick. He described the “awesome interactions” and deeply personal conversations they have had with the different people they have met, but also the difficulty of reconciling that with the need to disengage physically, so that he can get back on his phone, get online, and find their next ride.

“I actually have to take myself out of the moment to create new moments … to disconnect for a quick second in order to create a new connection,” said Gootnick. “Is that good or is that bad? I think there’s a pro and con to that in itself.”

As they’ve ventured into communties, they’ve found that politically thorny topics like gun rights and LGBTQ rights weren’t entirely off limits, and they were able to discuss these divisive issues with people on the opposite end of the political spectrum.

Given current political and social tensions, Shahery said he had expected to run into “a lot more disagreements,” but instead found that the entrenched divisions online don’t necessarily carry over into the physical world.

“If we were just engaging online … I think the conversation would have been less productive and less healthy,” he said. “But because they were physical interactions, we were able to state our beliefs and appreciate each other for our respective differences.”

Whether they were in the red city of Louisville, or the blue city of Nashville, “there is a common human element to all these people,” Gootnick said. “And they’re not so different. They want to love. They want to engage. They want to talk. They want to take you out. They want to take you in. They want to get to know you.”

Ari Gootnick (left) and his friend and filmmaker Oliver Shahery stand in front of the Capitol Building in Washington. D.C.. on July 6. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Calla Kessler