Pray For Our Pastors

DOCUMENTING DEGREES OF SEPARATION

I just created an account on Facebook. I am absolutely intrigued by this website. For those who aren’t familiar, it’s a web version of the “face books” colleges put out every year so that freshmen can see who else is in their class: names, faces, and interests.

Of course, putting this on the web makes the thing explode with possibilities. Enter “Glee Club” under “Clubs and Organizations,” and you can click on it to see who else on Facebook is in the Glee Club. Type your high school name in, and Facebook will give you a list of everyone else on the site who went to that same school. Take the time to punch in your course schedule, and (you guessed it) Facebook will help you identify who else shares your classes. And at every turn, people can see your dating interests, political views, and favorite bands, and you can see theirs.

The function I find most interesting is “Connections.” Once you’re in, you can add your friends to a friend list. And since they have friends on their friends lists, before you know it, you can see how many degrees of separation you are from any other person on the site. There’s a guy in your Calculus class who shares your interest in mountain biking and chess? Under “Connections,” you can see how many links of friends it would take to get to him.

On this note, as I surfed around on this site, I’ve seen confirmed some of the findings of Milgram’s famous experiment on “super-connectors.” Milgram gave letters to 100 people in rural Kansas and told them these letters had to end up at a stockbroker’s house in urban Boston. The people were instructed to mail their letter to someone who might be able to get it closer to the final destination. Not surprisingly, most of the letters arrived after having passed through about five or six intermediaries. confirming the theory of “six degrees of separation.”

Interestingly enough, though, these paths were not entirely random. An overwhelming majority of the letters flowed through just three of four people. Milgram dubbed these people “super-connectors.” In social networks, apparently, we are all connected to each other within six degrees of separation, but the way that is possible is that we are close to a super-connector who gets us access to a bunch of other people.

And in fact, on Facebook, you can see who are the super-connectors at various college campuses around the world, because when you go to a random person’s page, you see that your path to that person somehow flows through one or more super-connectors. We’re all connected on our college campuses, and it’s the super-connectors that make those connections possible.