the age of your friends on facebook, depending on your own age
The comment in the paper is mostly on the fact that we tend to connect with people of our age – there is a sharp spike, even at age 60.
Still this curve carries a lot of other very interesting information. The most obvious is that we tend to connect with younger people, not at all with people older than ourselves. And as a consequence, the generation in their 20’s appears to be very disconnected from the older generations.
What is the consequence? The generation in their 20’s, for which Facebook and other social networks is a normal part of the world, evolves rather independently. This is a sure source of Revolutions.
Brace! Driven by the generation born in the 1990’s, the Revolution is coming.
If you follow the news, you might have heard about this groundbreaking study by Facebook about how people are connected.
For a long time, there was the 6 degree of separation theory: anybody could be connected to anybody else through 5 other people who know each other. Interestingly, because testing this hypothesis was cumbersome in the pre-internet world, only one study was done, on a limited sample, in the 1960’s, which grossly confirmed the theory. (Upon closer study, this experiment also showed that some rare people have a much more far-reaching network than others and that they played a critical role in establishing the connection).
Today, as a large proportion of Humankind is on Facebook, our connectivity can be measured on the internet. The result is given in this Facebook report. The following curve is extracted from the report.
degrees of separation on Facebook
It shows that for the entire Facebook there are only roughly on average 4 intermediate people between any 2 individuals on Earth. The friend of your friend knows the friend of the friend of anyone else! Even more shocking, when looking at a particular country like the USA, only 3 intermediaries are necessary.
In addition these curves show that with an increased connectivity in the virtual world, with more and more people on social networks, we grow to be closer and closer to each other; each year we need less and less intermediaries to connect to anybody else. The world is shrinking in front of our eyes!
Let’s not forget that probably the same phenomenon is at work that was observed in earlier experiments: some particularly well connected individuals, few in numbers, are probably those through which most connections could be established. Still, right now, we just discovered that the world is much smaller than we thought.
As I start to be well connected on social networks I discover how I reconnect to people I lost track of, and how I manage to connect to really great, interesting people.
The world is shrinking rapidly. Don’t waste the opportunity! Join the Fourth Revolution!
I have had some requests for a quick digest of the Fourth Revolution book.
So, here is ‘The Fourth Revolution’ in 10 points:
the Fourth Revolution changes the world as we know it fundamentally: our society, our institutions, the way we live… as much as society was transformed between the Agricultural and the Industrial Age;
The Fourth Revolution root cause is cheap long distance interactive communication capabilities; that’s new and unprecedented;
the Fourth Revolution will take a few decades to spread completely, yet it changes our world quickly already, and we need to change ourselves now to thrive through it;
The Fourth Revolution development will be difficult and possibly painful at times. Yet overall, the development of humankind will allow more people to contribute to our collective cognitive capability, changing the world ultimately for the better;
The value creation capability of the Collaborative Age is orders of magnitude higher than Manufacturing or Agriculture, the latter activities will become subsidized;
The organization will become open and fluid – open to the influence of the outside, to a network of followers, a turbulent succession of temporary projects;
The prevailing leadership style will be ‘mutual learning’ leadership. The leader is not any more the person who knows the way, he is the one who catalyzes the group;
The leaders of the Collaborative Age will be the nomad K.E.E.Ns (Knowledge Exchanging Enhancing Networkers). They will drive their own career, and are fully nomadic;
It is possible to be happy being a farmer or working in a factory. It is a choice. The worst is not to make any choice. Choose now whether to lean or not into the Fourth Revolution;
On an unprecedented scale, each of us can change the world. The world can shaped the way we want, let’s do it now!
Of course each of these bullet points warrants a full development, which is exactly the purpose of the book…
The idea is dead simple but only the Fourth Revolution would allow it. Based on Google’s now huge and unprecendented database of scanned books, researchers have setup a tool that looks for the frequency of words depending on the date of publication.
The 5 million of books they use as a basis is quite a representative sample (4%) of the 129 million books ever published.
Not only that, but the tool is available online at http://books.google.com/ngrams, an interactive tool that lets you test your own words or combination of words, and look at how they evolve over time. I can testify that you can spend some time playing with it (and that’s an understatement). I just put here three examples I have done myself – all graphs range from 1800 to 2008
In the first example, using the frequency of the words “farmer”, “worker”, “employee”, “servant” and “slave”, we see how the concept of servant (yellow) disappears over time, while “workers” (red) and “employees” (green) are newer concepts.
n-gram from servant to employee
In the second example, with the words “spiritual”, “intellectual” and “emotional”, we see how the frequency of “spiritual” diminishes after 1860, while “emotional” is quite a new word growing through the 20th century.
n-gram from spiritual to emotional
In the third example, we just watch the Fourth Revolution ignite, with the words “collaborative” and “networking”:
collaborative networking chart
The incredible thing is that you can yourself do your own research, because the data from the 5 million books (approximately 500 billion words!!) is there, at the reach of your mouse, anywhere in the world.
I write about the Fourth Revolution but that does not mean I am not WOW’d by it regularly. WOW! Try it yourself on Google n-grams interactive site. And watch – the more this tool will become known, the more people will use its graphs to illustrate historical tendencies. Private people will do their own research. Humankind’s collective cognitive capability will be unleashed.
What a better illustration of the Fourth Revolution? This would have just been impossible 2 years ago. WOW.
The concept of the international workers’ day is fundamentally an Industrial Age concept. It is the symbol of the struggle of the Unions against the Corporations. It is the symbol of the struggle of the manufacturing worker for better conditions – a struggle that was finally successful as available workers became scarce when the countryside got depleted of its population at the beginning of the 20th century.
Why would we continue to celebrate this outdated celebration?
Still the 8 hours workday was the beginning of something else. It was the beginning of the availability of time for one’s recreation, of the creation of the conditions of the collaborative surplus of humankind. The 8 hours workday, and later the paid leave, gave the opportunity to many more people to have free time. Most of this time got used to receive passively broadcasted material, but a few people started to use this time to contribute to the world.
And, with the Fourth Revolution, that has now become an epidemics.
Let’s celebrate the ‘international workers’ day’ as the ‘cognitive surplus day’!
I was travelling lately and I am still amazed at how difficult it can be to get reasonably cheap access to the internet for a traveller.
Well of course there are some free computers to be able to look at some basic websites in most airports and a lot of hotels. I’m speaking about getting internet access for one’s device – computer or other device.
Want to connect your computer in wifi at the airport? You need to pay. Want to connect your computer in the hotel? Again, you are charged a small fortune.
Of course that depends on the country and some countries have understood the benefit of making free connections available – and they are often not the most developed. They are the emerging countries and the small dynamic countries like Hong Kong and Singapore.
Wonder why these countries will develop more value and will overtake the countries that still believe that connectivity should be exclusive and expensive?
Unleash value by enhancing free connectivity everywhere!
The collective cognitive capability of humankind is once again deeply transformed by a new, ground breaking communication technology. Find out HOW cheap, long distance interactive communication transforms our collective cognitive capabilities!
