After having had YoungPRer.com for about 2 years, it’s amazing to see that I have come such a long way to finally create this site. For the first time ever, I’ve shown my real name, developed material that can be accredited to my actual merit, and so on. This site will be the central outlet for all things Scott Lee related, and I hope you do enjoy reading it.

Right now there are a number of things I am involved with. I just recently published my first book, The Island of Yellow, which I worked on for much of the time through the years of 1998 to 2002. The Island of Yellow chronicles the story of my perspective, following a girl named Cacee Kenner over the years of 5th to 8th grade as she interacts with a social network of other kids at the intermediate school. What results, as said in the book description, is either an ascending path of positive influences or a downward spiral of self destruction. Basically what this describes is that nature of how Cacee was connected to more people than most anyone person I saw was. She knew more people than anyone I knew, and so on. Surprisingly, even though I was the introvert at the time, it was interesting to see that I also knew a surprising number of people. In terms of the concept of this “interconnectedness,” Cacee became known as a ‘Prime Connector.’ A Prime Connector was a name I developed for someone who had more connections to others than usual. Prime Connectors are important in life, because these people hold major influence over the events that happen within a group of people. Prime Connectors can have strong direct, and indirect connections.

A direct connection, is one in which you immediately know a person, you’ve talked to them before. But usually when we’re speaking of a direct connection, we are not talking about someone at the acquintance level, we are talking about knowing someone fairly well, at the least. So your best friends, your best buds, these are your direct connections. They hold the strongest influence in your life, and you hold the strongest influence with them in a likewise fashion.

An indirect connection is basically the friend-of-a-friend relationship. So you may come to know someone because someone you already know knows them. If you’re best friends with Jason, Jason may know Justin, and through Jason, you come to know Justin, etc. Indirect connections are critically important as well, because they shape the hidden bulk of social influence. Indirectly, you are actually said to be connected to all six and a half billion people that exist on the planet. There are varying degrees of connections, of course, and to speak of them as direct and indirect is not always the best thing to do – it isn’t always such black and white.

One important thing to do, is to combine these concepts. When you take into account your direct and indirect connections, you can literally begin to map out who you are connected to, and not only who you’re connected to, but also: how you can affect them, and how they can affect you. So this is essentially, on the technical side of things, the real central theme to The Island of Yellow. It is concepts of social networking on one side, and then on another side it is an elaborative drama following the ongoing breakdown or coming together of a girl’s network. But again, Cacee was not just any girl – she was an inspiration to me, the first person I recognized in my life as one of those ‘Prime Connectors.’ The entire experience was lifechanging.

I have not had a whole lot of time to really work on the book in a number of years, from 2003 to 2006, but I decided that I had better publish it now, and what more of a perfect opportunity than through the Dirty Mechanism store. Anyway, so this is just to give you a bit of extra information on the topic of the book, as well as actually some detailed summary of the book’s ideas.

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