Broadcasting Brain

The concept of six degrees of separation is an idea that continues to fascinate a lot of people, including the hyperconnected.

Techcrunch featured an article yesterday that suggests that the degrees of separation between people are shrinking as technology improves as more people share their passions and interests online.

As you may recall – I wrote a series of articles about hyperconnectivity and six degrees of separation a few weeks ago - the six degrees of separation concept was popularized by writer John Guare in the 1990s, represented in both a play and a movie called Six Degrees of Separation. The concept, describing the average number of connections that separate people, emerged from experiments conducted by Stanley Milgram in the 1960s.

The Techcrunch article discusses a study conducted for French mobile carrier O2 which, while not necessarily indicative of the general population, showed that their test group of people could link to a random set of strangers by using shared interests within three degrees.

Put another way, if you were in an online group that identified you as being, say, a baseball fan, then you could connect to other baseball fans within these groups with no more than three degrees of separation OR you could connect by using your network of baseball fans to connect to a random stranger.

It’s an interesting study. Again, even in a hyperconnected age, I wouldn’t feel confident in saying that we have consistently halved the degrees of separation between everyone in the world – the O2 study doesn’t make that claim either. However, the collection of hyperconnectivity, social media sites that feature shared interests, and a growing desire to communicate with a wider range of people will likely continue to reduce the six degrees of separation.

As always, I’m curious to know what other people think? Is the world really getting smaller? Do you find it easier to connect with other people that you barely know who lives many, many miles away from you? Is hyperconnectivity important?

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Carl Bialik’s Wall Street Journal blog The Numbers Guy takes a look at the whole six degrees of separation phenomenon that I discussed at length a couple of weeks ago. In my posts, I discussed ways to eliminate degrees of separation between individuals, mainly through the Internet or Web.

Carl looks specifically at the Microsoft Messenger experiment of June 2006 which tried to calculate an average degrees of separation between Messenger users. The Messenger study arrived at a value close to 7.

If you believed news reports this week, you’d think that the six-degrees theory — first advanced in a test using the mail in 1967 — had been proven. Microsoft researchers announced that a study of the company’s instant-message traffic in June 2006 showed that the average number of people needed to bridge any pair of users was 6.6. The median number was 7, and the longest was 29.

The authors readily agreed with me that this is far from proof of the average distance between any two people on Earth. Some limitations of the study cause it to overstate our connectedness, while others serve to understate it. Still, the Microsoft numbers represent a major advance in our knowledge about the fragmentary nature of the online population, and certainly are more rigorous than the original six-degrees experiment from more than four decades ago.

Carl brings up the very reasonable point that these are imperfect experiments. The tools to accurately measure degrees of separation would be tough to find and implement.

Does that mean that the whole theory is hogwash?

No.

It means that we don’t know for sure and we can’t prove it for certain. And that’s OK.

Maybe it’s better to start off on the premise that we are all connected in some way and then try to figure out how. Whether it’s 1 degree or 1 million degrees, the vast majority of us are connected in some way.

Not to mention the fact that we are all connected by the facts that we share the same planet and have the same basic biological needs. Unless, of course, you’re reading this from some other planet or construct in some point in the future, in which case you can stop laughing at your primitive ancestor.

Earlier this week I described some of my thoughts about how Web 2.0 technologies could help us remove degrees of separation between people. In particular, social networking allows individuals to make some form of connection with each other without meeting in person. However, there are some realistic limits on how readily or deeply individuals will widen their social circles to include people they’ve never met in person.

My most recent post ended on a bit of a negative note, suggesting that new technologies really aren’t going to help us get directly to the person that we’d like to communicate with if they aren’t willing and able to reciprocate.

Now I’m going to try to bring things back up to a more positive note. I don’t think that social media and Web 2.0 are completely useless; if you’ve been reading this blog long enough, you’d know I’m a believer, although I stop short of “drinking the KoolAid”. At the same time, I think that many people are becoming more open to communicating with people from all locations and walks of life, particularly through social media.

So, how can we succeed in this environment?

I think there are a few things that we can do to try to get in closer contact with the people we’d like to talk to by combining some tried and true methods of networking with today’s newer technologies:

Just try

Bloggers almost always have a contact form or an E-Mail address that you can use to contact the blogger. In some cases, these are for show but there’s little intent behind them. It’s understandable that some people don’t have the time or energy to respond to every request for contact and information. At the same time, don’t let that deter you if you think you have a valid reason for getting in contact with someone.

In my experience, there’s one blogger who’s extremely responsive to communication requests, despite what you might think to the contrary. This is a very famous A list blogger and author who is well known for not allowing comments on his blog. But, try E-Mailing Seth Godin and you may be in for a surprise. It’s likely that he will respond to you as long as you are not obviously spamming him. I’ve traded several different E-Mails with him and it’s been cool.

I’ve also gotten in touch with other people using E-Mail. That’s worked. With some people, you may need to change the medium. Maybe a Twitter message or an IM will be better. We know that some people are receptive to phone calls. Heck, blog comments can work really well. Check all of the different media and try to find one that works. Just don’t be obsessive about it.

Persistence and marketing through good (no, great) work

The best way to market yourself is to do great work. It doesn’t matter what it is: blogging, articles, audio, video, photography… just be the best you can be at any given point in time. Then try harder and work smarter next time. And keep repeating so that your skills and experience grow.

If you’ve done something good, great, amazing, or remarkable, it gives you a way to introduce and market yourself. There are lots of other blogs that you can read that can give you ideas about how to create better. I’ve got some ideas on this blog as well. The point is that you’ve got to work on it. Create, analyze, get feedback, learn lessons, and create more. Build your material over time.

People love talking to other people who do great stuff.

Connection, recommendation, and introduction

I think that recommendation, referral, and intermediate connections are potentially the most powerful way to remove some of the degrees of separation. Social networks have grown tremendously in the Web 2.0 era. MySpace and Facebook, and other applications, have really captured the personal, non-work site of networking (although in some cases they do include pieces of your professional life, depending on your profession.) However, I think that LinkedIn has the potential to be the most powerful personal recommendation application out there.

There are three major reasons why I think LinkedIn is the winner in this space:

1) Connections: I find that the Connection functionality in LinkedIn is superior to anything Facebook has. Between that and the detailed work and personal experience that you can store in LinkedIn, you get a powerful “social graph” that allows you to see how you are connected to other people.
2) Recommendation: in the past we had references that we put on our paper resumes. These references were the people who would vouch for our character and our performance. LinkedIn allows us to store public recommendations (in public view!) that persist over time. Giving and receiving a recommendation is like exchanging social capital (the ability to communicate and work with other people).
3) Referral: by maintaining a trusted and respected social graph, you can refer strangers to other people with a sense of trust and integrity. LinkedIn provides that kind of referral service. It also provides an Introduction service (only available to paid users, alas) to help you out in a cold-call situation.

Facebook or MySpace might have bits and pieces of this functionality, but (to my knowledge) they haven’t put it together the way that LinkedIn has. LinkedIn’s connection and recommendation network gives it a strength similar to eBay Buyer/Seller reputation – it’s golden if you follow the rules, but if you abuse it, you’ll lose it.

LinkedIn might not be the ultimate social networking application, but it’s great at what it does.

So how does this help us remove degrees of separation?

It might not help with direction connections, at least not initially. However, through intelligent use of networking and social graph monitoring, you can find potential referrers that you never knew about before. These potential referrers may not be well known, but they may know a surprising large number of people. Some of these people are the “connectors” from Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point – they thrive on meeting and introducing different people. If you can get in contact and get their trust, they can help you get in touch with other valuable people. As these individuals become social media users, the ability to remove degrees of separation will only grow over time. You don’t even need to exclusively seek out connectors. You never know the value of any person who you might meet. The Golden Rule can go a long way in helping you make connections.

Some parting thoughts

As technology evolves to allow us to do more things faster and more easily, the importance of people skills and networking seems to become even more important. On the one hand, there are many more ways to contact an individual as we’ve evolved from type 0 to type 1 to type 2 communication methods. However, most people still have limits on their ability to build numerous relationships and to process data. That’s why, despite the limitations, it’s important to develop a broad-based group of contacts as well as to prove yourself to be trustworthy and talented.

This kind of strategic and tactical networking may seem manipulative or distasteful and that’s the way I used to look at it. To a large extent I still think it’s manipulative if the wrong (selfish, damaging, abusive) intent motivates interaction. However, if you keep reciprocity and respect as guidelines for conduct and look for the famous “win/win” situations, networking is a powerful tool which can do wonders when used correctly. I have a lot of respect for that and I’m no social butterfly!

These four posts have spent a lot of time discussing my thoughts and ideas on this topic. I don’t consider myself to be a social networking expert, but I have learned a few things that I thought were worth sharing. If they help you meet your personal goals and objectives, then that’s great!

And what do you think about these “six degrees of separation” thoughts and ideas? Why not share your thoughts in the blog comments section?

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.

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.

The phrase six degrees of separation is permanently etched into our collective psyches. The idea that every person in the world is generally no more than six degrees or connections removed from each other is a powerful, sticky concept that resonates with many people. Web 2.0 technologies, a continuation of the advancement of communication capabilities, may be helping us cut that average in half, especially through social networking sites like Facebook and microblogging services like Twitter. Or will technology be stymied by human nature? In this series of posts, we’re going to explore the concepts of connections and networking and try to determine whether or not they effectively serve to flatten and shrink our world.

Six degrees of separation

This catch phrase was inspired by the results of the “small world” experiments conducted by social psychologist Stanley Milgram in the United States of America in 1967 in order to determine how long it would take to get a letter from one stranger to another. After the results of this test were analyzed, Milgram’s team determined that the average path length, or the number of connections required to get from one point to another, was approximately 5.5, which rounds up to six.

Over time, the phrase “six degrees of separation” was coined and made popular by the entertainment world. John Guare’s 1990 play of the same name helped to entrench the phrase into popular culture. The Milgram experiments were also referred to in Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point in his descriptions of how fads and ideas can spread through society.

The limiting factors of the “six degrees” experiment

The small world experiments were conducted using postal mail in a limited number of scenarios. The world of 1967 did not have the same communications tools that we have today, not as dispersed and as highly used as we currently do.

However, subsequent research has yielded some interesting results. Researcher Duncan Watts tested this theory using E-Mail in 2001 and determined that “six degrees” was the average path length between participants located in over 157 countries. Jure Leskovec and Eric Horvitz used Microsoft Messenger as their medium of choice in 2007 and found an average path length of 6.6, which is similar to the findings in the other two studies.

It’s worth noting that in all three examples, the messages used a single transport mechanism (postal mail; email, and a single instant messenger service).

The potential shortening effect of hyperconnectivity

Those of us who work and/or play in the social media world have seen a significant growth in the number of communication methods that can be used via the Web. Although many of these services are variations of common functionality sets, they have separate communities of users with significant overlap. If you belong to one online community, it’s very likely that you’ll belong to several. In fact, in this “hyperconnected world”, many of us belong to multiple online communities and we use different communication methods depending on our needs.

Is it possible that we can shrink the size of the world further than the experiments of Milgram, Watts, and Leskovec and Horvitz have shown by using hyperconnectivity to remove degrees of separation?

In my next post, I’ll discuss the pros of using hyperconnectivity to remove degrees. Following that, I’ll look at the constraints on the effectiveness of hyperconnectivity and I’ll present some conclusions on the topic.

Stay tuned!

EDIT:  Sept. 3/08 - Techcrunch has an interesting post about apparent shrinkage in the degrees of separation

Thought for the day:

Invisible webs surround us all. These webs link us in ways we can see and ways that we can’t. It would be useful if we had the proverbial social graph available to us at all times so we could detect any relationship that we might have to people we’ve never met, while finding out more about them at the same time.

The advantages:

• Ways to connect with people in advance, to make greetings less awkward and more profitable.
• Avoid making stupid social errors.

The drawbacks:

• Loss of privacy and security - we don’t always want to know everyone that we meet.
• Loss of mystery, unpredictability, and the sense of discovery.

This functionality can be approximated today, but not reliably.

Do you think its time will come? Will it be a good thing or a bad thing?

I joined Facebook about a year ago.  You might say that Facebook was my first step, along with user-generated content sites like Helium, into social media.

Like a lot of people, I went through a period of intense usage, backed off Facebook quite a bit to focus on other things, then I came back to it on a limited basis.  I’ve renewed some old acquaintances (some really, really old ones, for that matter) and added a few new ones.  It really hasn’t affected my non-virtual life, but it was really nice to get back in touch with a few old friends, especially those of us who used to hang out in my hometown about a dozen years ago.  :: suddenly feels old ::

It’s odd how Facebook becomes a given in your life: an essential service, if you will.  Twitter and this blog have become more important parts of my social media experience, but Facebook will always have a place.

Which is weird since I only started using Facebook a year ago.  Will I be using it in five years?  Ten years?  Twenty five years?  In the retirement home?  It’ll be interesting to see.

Now over to you.  Do you use Facebook?  How long have you been using it?  Do you spend a lot of time using Facebook each day or barely a moment?