The Fourth Revolution Blog

In the same Facebook paper that describes how our world is much smaller than we thought, and is shrinking, there is another very interesting curve.

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.

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!