emac 2322 It's A Small World After All

Photo provided by: http://www.flickr.com/photos/kruse/91118309/


It's a small world.

How true is this phrase? Well with the internet birthing social networks left and right it is becoming more true by the second. These social sites are allowing us to venture out of our circle of friends and travel across the world in one click. Take Twitter for example. You can be directly connected to celebrities that most likely (unless you are one) would never be in the same friend group as you in real life.

Duncan Watts writes about how we "don't have friends but we have groups of friends" and that these "groups are connected by virtue of individuals who belong to more than one group." What he's saying is that before social networking we were constricted to only the groups we were born into and the groups in which we had mutual friends, essentially. Meeting random strangers who had no affiliation with any of the people in the groups we hung out with was severely uncommon and therefore our connection with the entire human race as a whole was very small. Now,thanks to these social sites such as Twitter and Facebook, we can all be connected in one way or another.