When last we spoke, we looked at how people are gaining access to multiple communication methods that provide additional contact points. Many of you who read this blog have experienced this growth in websites, applications, and services that are Web variations on a personal conversation or telephone call. But does it really make it any easier to connect with people that you don’t know?

You may recall these three diagrams from yesterday’s post:

When you look at the diagrams in sequence, you can visualize how we have acquired more channels that allow us to “talk” and to “listen” to other people “talk” than those generations who came before us. The powerful thing about these channels is that different groups of people use them. With the right combination of contacts across services, you can effectively remove degrees of separation by going right to the source.

I used Robert Scoble as an example yesterday, but while he is certainly hyperconnected, he’s not necessarily the best example of the power of this phenomenon.

Why?

Simple.

As I mentioned yesterday, he publishes his cell phone number on his blog. That means that all you need to do to contact Robert Scoble is to give him a phone call. (It might not be THAT easy, but stay with me.) Of course, the easiest way to find that phone number is to get to his blog, which is less than ten years old. Prior to that, Robert Scoble might have been harder to find and he was a bit less well-known.

CEOs, professional athletes, actors, etc. generally don’t publicize their cell phone numbers, so they are harder to call. However, a number of them have blogs, so you can try to contact them via their blog comment section or by E-Mail. Type 2 communication tools come to the rescue again. Blog comments are the only way that I can think of to get Wil Wheaton’s attention, as an example, although we could have a mutual acquaintance that I’m not aware of.

If you’re really lucky, you might be able to take advantage of the “friend of a friend” phenomenon and get in touch with someone who you couldn’t normally contact. Web technology may allow you to build these intermediate contact points in ways that we couldn’t do previously. I might be able to get in touch with someone outside of my day-to-day existence if I tap into my network of contacts.

By tapping intelligently into my own personal network, I could halve the “six degrees” that separated me from a lot of other people before Web 2.0 was spun. Heck, maybe I could even reduce them to one degree.

The fly in the ointment in the Web

But, of course, this is all bullshit.

Newer communication technologies really aren’t making it that much easier to connect with people that we don’t know.

Actually, that’s not true.

The technologies aren’t the problem - we are. Here’s why:

Receptiveness or openness

Put simply, you can’t communicate with someone if they aren’t willing listen. Social media early adopters (hello you!) are willing to both talk and (normally) listen. Some people are really, really good at casting their ear into cyberspace and absorbing conversations. Others aren’t. To be really blunt, there are a lot of professionals or celebrities who probably don’t see any benefit in opening themselves up to multiple voices, so they won’t.

People have got to be open to listening. Are you really as open to multiple conversations as you could be? Or should be?

Attention bandwidth

Much has been made about the collective onset of attention deficit disorders throughout modern society. Despite how you feel about that particular issue, there’s no doubt that the sheer amount of information and stimuli in our environments, especially if you use a computer or similar technology at work, has increased significantly during the most recent decades.

Even if you are open to listening, there’s a lot of people and things trying to get your attention. The same holds true for everyone else. Everyone’s fighting for fractions of attention share.

Quality of connection or Dunbar’s number

Dunbar was a researcher who did some experiments and theorizing to try to make some conclusions about the ability of human beings to form meaningful relationships with other people. Malcolm Gladwell used this idea, encapsulated in Dunbar’s limit of up to 150 meaningful relationships per person, in The Tipping Point.

There’s been some debate about Dunbar’s research, based partially on the study of simians, and his conclusions. Some researchers think that the actual number of relationships could be closer to 300.

Well. This is all fine and good. However… if you look at Twitterholic and check out the list of the Top 10 Twitters, they all have at least 27,000 followers (number 1, Kevin Rose, has about twice that number).

I’m sorry, but it’s just not possible to form meaningful relationships with that many people. You would spend all of your waking hours, and then some, trying to maintain relationships with tens of thousands of people. So, even if your target is receptive to being contacted and they have some attention share available, you’ve got to compete with the masses - again.

Are the six degrees of separation unbeatable?

So, to summarize:

  • People have to want communication outside their normal set of connections (the first degree)
  • People have to have attention time in order to be contacted
  • There are already too many people wanting their disposable attention space

Maybe we just can’t get past these limitations. Maybe the technology is good, but human beings just fail at this problem. Maybe the average of six degrees of separation is a human limitation that we have to live with.

Or do we?

Tune in next time for the final installment, in which I try to suggest some ways to deal with this situation.

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

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