Fail Fast: Six Degrees of Separation 2.0

May 25, 2011 7 Comments

About three months ago, I embarked on a less-than-epic, although very entertaining, quest to confirm or deny the famous Six Degrees of Separation experiment, originally conducted by Stanley Milgrim.  My goal was to send out letters, as in the original experiment, and have those recipients do their best to get those letters to a named someone in Boston.  Each link in the chain would write down their name on the letter, and, by the end, we’d have a list of how many people the letter went through to get to that final person.

Well, it’s time to report out on that experiment.  Get ready to have your mind blown.

Not one letter made it to my contact in Boston.

Possible reasons:

  1. The letters got raptured on Saturday.
  2. The letters were digitized and stored in Amazon’s cloud, next to Lady Gaga’s music.
  3. People don’t send letters anymore.
My subjects – the initial recipients of the letter – primarily consisted of young Silicon Valley entrepreneurs.  Despite including about $4 of stamps in each envelope, I’m guessing that most of the initial recipients didn’t actually send their original letter.  Snail mail is inefficient, and, outside of the Google mailboxes, I’m not even sure where I would go to find our local post office.
So, let’s look at the next iteration of social connection: the internet.  We’ll turn to Wikipedia for a rundown of experiments that have been done to test for these sorts of connections on computers.

In 2001, Duncan Watts, a professor at Columbia University, attempted to recreate Milgram’s experiment on the internet, using an e-mail message as the “package” that needed to be delivered, with 48,000 senders and 19 targets (in 157 countries). Watts found that the average (though not maximum) number of intermediaries was around six.

A 2007 study by Jure Leskovec and Eric Horvitz examined a data set of instant messages composed of 30 billion conversations among 240 million people. They found the average path length among Microsoft Messenger users to be 6.6 (some now call the theory, “the seven degrees of separation” because of this.).

It has been suggested by some commentators that interlocking networks of computer mediated lateral communication could diffuse single messages to all interested users worldwide as per the 6 degrees of separation principle via Information Routing Groups, which are networks specifically designed to exploit this principle and lateral diffusion.

Right now, due to the mass amount of social data on the site, Facebook is probably our best bet for measuring something like this.  However, that would probably be an invasion of privacy.  Also, don’t join any groups that claim to be a “Six Degrees of Separation” project.  None of them have any way of measuring that, and are probably just initiatives to create ever-larger groups on Facebook.
Twitter might be another outlet for measuring degrees of separation.  However, I follow people like Conan O’Brien on Twitter, and I’m pretty sure that wouldn’t count as a connection.  Alternatively, perhaps it does, and we need to redefine what constitutes a degree of separation in the digital world.
All in all, while this experiment was ultimately a failure, I think it tentatively confirms the hypothesis that the younger generations don’t send snail mail much.  But that’s not something the US Postal Service couldn’t have told us.

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HPlus Recap: Final Thoughts

December 6, 2010 1 Comment

This was my first Humanity Plus conference.  Overall, I thought it was excellent.  You can read my reviews of the four sessions below.

  1. Re-imagining humans: Mind, Media and Methods.
  2. Radically Increasing the Human Healthspan.
  3. Redefining Intelligence: Artificial Intelligence, Intelligence Enhancement, and Substrate Independent Minds.
  4. Business and Economy in the Era of Radical Technomorphosis.

On the way to the conference, I read a blog post by the infamous economist Tim Harford.  He’s one of my personal heroes – Harford as an excellent way of making economist incredibly accessible to the laypeople.  Harford’s blog post was on using Twitter while attending an event.  ”When I indulged, for the first time, in “live-tweeting”,” Harford said, “I later had very little recollection of what any of the three potential prime ministers had actually said.”  Harford cites some interesting multitasking studies to back up his experience.

At previous conferences, I’ve been a very aggressive blogger and tweeter.  This time around, I tried to lay off a bit, and, while difficult, I do believe it helped me synthesize the information better.  That being said, I do believe that things like live-tweeting and blogging add a useful and compelling layer of complexity to already interesting talks.  This is a topic I would like to revisit at a later date.

I, like many, like to attend these conferences for the networking opportunities.  Per usual, I wish I had more time to connect with the amazing people who were also at the conference – there never seems to be enough time at these things.  I definitely met a lot of people with whom I hope to stay in touch and continue these kinds of conversations.

At the end of the day, the point of a conference like this is to speculate on the future.  It’s to get us thinking about the big picture, and what the next five, ten, fifty, or five hundred years might look like.  In that sense, the conference was a wild success.  The speakers and the attendees introduced a variety of intriguing concepts, and everyone was excited to share and exchange ideas.

Gino Yu ended his talk with an appropriate video.  I think the sentiment of the video sums up my feelings about the conference quite well, so I, too, will leave you with that.

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Thinking about Thinking Recap

October 22, 2010 1 Comment

In the Information Overload series, we discussed the concept of distilling information down to manageable, bite-sized summaries.  In the Thinking about Thinking series, we talked about the need for deep thought and fleshed-out ideas.

For those of you in the Information Overload camp, here’s a summary of everything we talked about in the Thinking about Thinking series.  For those if you who want to read more, click through to read the entire series, in all of its glory.

  1. Thinking About Thinking. In this introductory post on how technology is rewiring our brains, we looked at some of the reasons this series is worth your time to read.  These included our increased penchant for multitasking, the ability of internet use to change our mental processes, and our affinity for each new electronic notification text message.
  2. Do We Really Need Deep Thought? The media we consume is decreasing in size, and, thus, depth of information.  Does that mean our thoughts are adjusting accordingly?  Most scientific breakthroughs actually do require deep thought – the “Ah-ha” moment is a myth.
  3. Are We Addicted? Our Brains On Technology. This post looks at the science behind addiction, and how some of that science shows our brains react to technology in the same way they react to other addictions.
  4. The Opposite of Technology. Studies show that being in – or thinking about – nature causes our brains to make connections.  Conversely, being in or thinking about man-made environments, like cities and highways causes our thoughts to become scattered and jumbled.
  5. Getting off of Social Media. This post took it one step further, and  looked at organizations and people who are turning off their technology and social media connections.  We borrowed the term Countertrend – a social backlash to a trend – to describe the phenomenon.
  6. Conclusion: Circuits and Cerebellums. In this final post, we talked about some suggestions for dealing with all of this technology.

On Monday, I’ll be attending FailCon 2010. According to the website, “FailCon is the premier conference on start-up failures and how to prepare and recover from them.” Panelists include representatives from Etsy, the New York Times, Formspring, Twitter, Zappos, and more.  Look forward to posts about failure – then subsequent success.

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Getting off of Social Media

October 20, 2010 2 Comments

The Internet

This is the fifth part of “Thinking about Thinking:” a series of posts about how our brains react to technology.

A lot of people are experimenting with escaping from technology.  In my last post, we looked at the adventure of five neuroscientists who went on a rafting trip to escape technology.

The group was studying “how heavy use of digital devices and other technology changes how we think and behave, and how a retreat into nature might reverse those effects.”  The New York Times chronicled their adventure in an article called Outdoors and Out of Reach, Studying the Brain.

In September, Pennsylvania’s Harrisburg University of Science and Technology enacted a week-long social media blackout for all students in residence, encouraging them not to use Facebook and Twitter for that week.  The students were forbidden from using Twitter, Facebook, instant messaging and any other online communication, except for e-mail, during that week.

Obviously, students could get around such bans fairly easily – going off campus was one solution – but many students said they enjoyed the freedom from social media.

In FutureThink, written by the esteemed Edie Weiner and Arnold Brown, the authors introduce the idea of a “Countertrend.”  A Countertrend is essentially a social backlash to a ubiquitous trend.

In this case, the trend is increased use of social media.  For the first time ever, internet users are spending more time on Facebook than on other sites – most notably, Google.  The countertrend: neuroscientists, students, and others are disconnecting – even if temporarily – from social media.

In this case, the trend towards more technology use will almost inevitably prevail.  For example, at the Journalism 2.0 Summit at the Urban Hive last night, reporters from television, radio, print, web, and more noted the usefulness of social media as a tool to convey news.  More and more people are turning to social media to not just connect with friends, but consume, share, and sometimes create news.

So, technology is a part of life.  So is social media.  This isn’t particularly groundbreaking.  However, there are a lot of people very interested in exploring life without it.  There will certainly still be occasions when it will be okay – even encouraged – to disconnect from technology and social media, and experience what life was like – calamity! – before the not-so-long-ago days of 100% connectivity.

Note: Before anyone says it: yes, I did post this on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.  And yes, I recognize the irony. ;)

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Are We Addicted? Our Brains on Technology

October 9, 2010 4 Comments

This is the third part of “Thinking about Thinking:” a series of posts about how our brains react to technology.

Are we addicted to technology?  To Facebook, Twitter, and our e-mail inbox?

Researchers have found increased levels of dopamine – the chemical associated with pleasure – in gamers. Whenever we complete an achievement or pick up an item in a game, the theory is that we get a shot of dopamine.  Because these effects are similar to the increased levels of dopamine in drug addicts, some researchers have hypothesized that higher levels of dopamine can produce a dangerous cycle leading to an addiction to video games.  In China, there are even boot camps where parents send their game- and internet-addicted boys in order to cure them of their addictions.

Now, researchers are turning the focus to websites like Google, Facebook, and Twitter, to see if the same logic applies.  Do we get a little burst of excitement in whenever we see the little red “1″ in the upper left-hand corner of our Facebook page?  I’d be lying if I said I didn’t.  Are we addicted? Read more of this post

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