Will the myriads of social media applications serve to remove degrees of separation or will they make any difference at all?

In my previous post, I reviewed the six degrees of separation phenomenon and began speculating how our new era of hyperconnectivity might serve to remove degrees of separation between people.

Here’s a quick look at a definition of hyperconnectivity:

[Hyperconnectivity] refers to the use of multiple means of communication, such as email, instant messaging, telephone, face-to-face contact and Web 2.0 information services.
It has become more common for people to use multiple communication methods to stay in touch, with a growing adoption of Internet and Web based methods. New applications seems to appear regularly.

Let’s look at how communication methods have evolved.

Type 0 (pre-Web and pre-ubiquitous Internet access)

Examples of Type 0 communication methods:

  • Postal mail and courier (letters and documents)
  • Faxes
  • Telephone calls (person to person or conference)
  • Telegrams
  • Internal network E-Mails
  • Physical meetings
  • Mass media

Many of us, and the generations before us, grew up in a world limited by type 0 communication methods. Or at least we did for part of our lives.

Type 1 (ubiquitous Internet access, Web 1.0 era)

Type 0 plus:

  • Internet E-Mail
  • Video conferencing
  • E-Mail lists
  • Usenet
  • Private forums
  • Static websites and the original weblogs

Those of us who belong to Generation X were the first generation to experience the onset of Type 1 communication methods as we went on to post-secondary education and then joined the workforce. In my case, I remember how company-wide E-Mail was first introduced into my company about 13 years ago. Generation Y would have seen these developments as they entered primary school.

Type 2 (ubiquitous high speed Internet access, Web 2.0)

Type 0 and 1 plus:

  • Social media and Web 2.0 (social news, social bookmarking, and social networking)
  • Microblogging, aggregators, lifestreaming, blog commenting
  • Audio and video blogging
  • Open IM clients (e.g. GTalk)
  • Wireless connectivity

Communication advances have generally created faster and easier to use methods. In the pre-Internet era, nothing was faster than a phone call except for a face-to-face meeting (although travel time to arrange a face-to-face meeting was often prohibitive). Today we have a number of methods that allow virtually real-time interaction and more variations on them seem to appear on a regular basis.

A real-life example

Some people choose to embrace new forms of communication as they become available.

Fast Company.tv managing director Robert Scoble is a well-known (in technology and social media circles) example of a hyperconnected person. He is well-known for publishing his cell phone number on his blog and was one of the first prominent bloggers to do so, inspiring other bloggers to do the same. He also gained attention for autofollowing every Twitter user who followed him (although he later abandoned that practice after gaining over 20,000 followers). He uses other services and gains large numbers of followers on those services.

Robert Scoble is clearly a hyperconnected individual and has met a wide variety of people through his work and social activities. Not only does he use multiple methods of communication (from Types 0, 1, and 2), but he uses them to connect with large numbers of people. If you can connect to someone like Robert Scoble (or Leo Laporte, Kevin Rose, Jason Calacanis, Laura Fitton, Chris Brogan, or a number of other highly connected social media users), the combination of technology and social connectedness might allow you to skip degrees of separation and shorten the average path length between individuals.

Or so you would think.

In my next post, I’ll talk about some of the reasons why improved technology isn’t much help in removing those pesky degrees of separation.

Previous in series Next in series

Table of contents for six degrees

  1. How hyperconnectivity really could eliminate degrees of separation
  2. The challenges of connecting with hyperconnectivity
  3. Hyperconnectivity shakes up six degrees of separation
  4. Reducing the six degrees of separation

If you're new here, welcome! Please consider subscribing to my RSS feed to stay up to date with my latest posts and articles. Thanks for visiting!

Other posts that you might enjoy reading: