DUCKPOND

Human beings are social animals. The motivation to communicate seems among the strongest needs of human beings. The desire to maintain links with family intuitively makes sense, yet gossiping around the water cooler is less apparent.

To my mind one of the best illustrations of the primary of communications illustrated in the case study by efforts and expense that people in Tasmania were prepared to go to so as to be connected by the technology of the day, telegraphy, to the outside world. I suppose that one can imagine the extreme distress that people would experience if some future space exploration lost communication with Earth or other humans, even if they had sufficient food to survive. One can predict that the ability to sustain communication with Earth will be one of the most important priorities of any future human space explorations.

As has been noted elsewhere, Peter Whoriskey in The Washington Post reports on the confirmation of the theory that people that each person on the Planet is on average about seven contacts away from any other person. It is not something that I would spontaneously believe but here some of the evidence:

The “small world theory,” embodied in the old saw that there are just “six degrees of separation” between any two strangers on Earth, has been largely corroborated by a massive study of electronic communication.

With records of 30 billion electronic conversations among 180 million people from around the world, researchers have concluded that any two people on average are distanced by just 6.6 degrees of separation, meaning that they could be linked by a string of seven or fewer acquaintances.

The database covered all of the Microsoft Messenger instant-messaging network in June 2006, or roughly half the world’s instant-messaging traffic at that time, researchers said.

“To me, it was pretty shocking. What we’re seeing suggests there may be a social connectivity constant for humanity,” said Eric Horvitz, a Microsoft researcher who conducted the study with colleague Jure Leskovec. “People have had this suspicion that we are really close. But we are showing on a very large scale that this idea goes beyond folklore.”

The reporter explains that the Microsoft study went further than earlier studies:

“To our knowledge, this is the first time a planetary-scale social network has been available to validate the well-known ‘6 degrees of separation’ finding by Travers and Milgram,” the researchers said.

For the purposes of their experiment, two people were considered to be acquaintances if they had sent one another a text message. The researchers looked at the minimum chain lengths it would take to connect 180 billion different pairs of users in the database. They found that the average length was 6.6 steps and that 78 percent of the pairs could be connected in seven hops or less.

Some pairs, however, were separated by as many as 29 hops.

“Via the lens provided on the world by Messenger, we find that there are about ‘7 degrees of separation’ among people,” they wrote.

Microsoft Messenger use is most intense in North America, Europe and Japan, and in the coastal regions of the rest of the world. While the study sample is huge, there is little way of knowing whether Microsoft Messenger users are as socially connected as the rest of humanity.

What seems to me to be the case is that as with other human skills, for example linguistic skill, some people are gifted in their networking ability, and once shows us how it is done the rest of us follow. Some people put together the technology, others develop the social significance of the technology. Shakespeare did not invent paper, pens, ink or script, or for that matter words and grammar (the dharma of language) although he added to both. The Donna Noble character in Doctor Who is at the opposite pole from Shakespeare but she is an active participant in the process. And she can be a noble woman even if she is not an aristocrat.

We can mistake actions, but when people speak and write they reveal more than they realize, unless they are journalists, politicians and other types of professional liars. The readers of blogs might know their authors better than they suppose. The global reach of the connectivity of blog writing is something that interests me because I hope it breaks down the closed tribal thinking when we are faced by global issues.

POSTSCRIPT:

Social animal has the historical resonance, but perhaps more exactly what I meant was the talking animal – and self talk, masquerading as thinking, goes on when nobody else, sometimes mercifully, is around.