Business - Written Monday, July 30, 2007 by Don Tapscott - 6 Comments

How many degrees of separation are there now?

When I recently sat down for a dinner with Anthony Gold, who some people might know as the open source guru at Unisys, he posed these two very interesting questions:

Is it still six degrees of separation out there?

Is there still a need for “super connectors” to pull us all together?

As Anthony expanded on in his blog, the reason he asks these questions is a curiosity about how much more accessible everyone is in the age of the Web 2.0. After all, the six degrees of separation theory was based primarily on an experiment that involved how snail mail moved from Nebraska and Kansas to a stock broker in Massachusetts (participants were asked to send the letter to someone they knew on a first name basis that they thought would be more likely to know the broker than themselves) in the 1960s – things have changed a little since then.

For example, if you’re over 30 (which I am, even if you can’t tell from my Second Life avatar), think about how many people you were connected to in your mid to late teens. In all likelihood it was a relatively small group, most of the people probably lived pretty close to you, and over time you lost touch with many of them (particularly if you or they moved). After all, it takes a lot of work to maintain relationships with multitudes of people when phone and mail are your only options, and only a special few can (or bother) to do so – a.k.a. the “super connectors” made famous by Malcolm Gladwell.

Now contrast that with today, and how connections can be made, maintained, and in many cases rediscovered through Facebook, MySpace, various other community sites, and the like. There is no denying that we are becoming more connected, and it’s far easier to maintain these connections (even the ones you might want to be rid of…) – which takes us back to Anthony’s questions.

Exactly how small is the world getting, and in the world of social networking are super connectors waning in influence?

In turn, Anthony posted a few thoughts on how this issue could start being investigated, in addition to some of the challenges tied to it (particularly in defining what exactly a connection is). Does anyone have any other thoughts on how we might figure this out?