Drew’s Blog

I read an interesting blog yesterday about identifying Malcolm Gladwell’s “connectors” and “mavens” within the website Twitter.com. It is pretty cool that Denis Hancock put these two concepts together to analyze someone’s social role in society based on their actions on a website. I thought about if twitter behavior REALLY is as good of an indicator as Gladwell’s last name test.

I have said in past posts that I do not believe Gladwell’s last name test (the list from The Tipping Point) is an accurate representation of social tendencies outside of the area the names were pooled from. Despite this, I think the concept of the test is the most accurate way to judge social behavior we currently have. Hancock tries to adapt Gladwell’s test of the 20th century to a medium of the 21st.

Hancock uses Gladwell’s titles of “connectors” and “mavens” for different users with high activity on their page, or users that contribute greatly to other users’ pages. I honestly have not used twitter before so terms like “Re-tweet” and “@ reply” are new to me but a Twitter Beginners Guide told me that a “re-tweet” is putting other users’ blog posts on your own page, as a way to get more attention on the original blog post. The “@ reply” I’m assuming is just publicly responding to comments left about your post.

This theory generally works: If you are a connector, you are outgoing and know many people. In Twitter, a connector is someone who reads many blogs, helping the original poster to reach out to more people, where a maven is someone who does not promote other users’ blogs, however they have a massive amount of people subscribed to their blog, so they have many more comments from other people.

I think that this would only be a good indicator of someones ONLINE social tendencies, because people act somewhat different on the internet. Someone who is shy when it comes to face-to-face conversations, may have a lot of interesting things to say on the web. Another problem I see in applying a user’s twitter behavior to their social behavior, is the fact that the term “friend” is used MUCH more loosely than in the outside world. You could know a classmate that has never said a word, but has 2000 Facebook friends, the more “pseudo-friends” you have, the more blogs you have access to, giving you the opportunity to share more blog posts from other people. So while Gladwell’s theories can analyze someone’s Online Social Behavior, I don’t think Twitter behavior has enough relation to Social Behavior to be plausible.

The third chapter of Linked touches on the vastly connected human network and the concept of any American being linked to another person in the United States in 6 steps. The author explains it is over 3 times easier to connect 2 American as opposed to connecting 2 websites.

I honestly can believe that one American could contact any other American. I see where there may be some unreachable targets, like in the rainforests or in an African village, however in staying within the test area (the United States), I believe anyone is within reach and I will explain why.

The United States of America is not uncharted. Sure, every five or six years you will hear about a settlement in the Appalachian mountains on CNN full of people who think we live in a time without automation, but for the most part, Americans know it is 2009, and have friends who are aware of modern society.  Anything outside of a National Park has probably been trekked by man, and any pockets of unaware inhabitants are most likely non-existent. Don’t expect to see “The Untamed USA” on the Discovery Channel anytime soon.

However, I can see this experiment working fairly well in other countries if not better. Americans make many human interactions a day, even though Americans suffer from a pampering effect hindering those interactions: A            HUGE                 PERSONAL               BUBBLE.

In America everything is bigger: Cars, living spaces, offices, neighborhoods. So one would naturally assume that in having a smaller bubble, people from other countries would require fewer links to connect to another countryman. If this experiment were tried in China, I could maybe see this experiment yielding results of about 5 links between people.

I feel that it is plausible for Americans to be connected by 6 links, however I do not think the USA is the most social country in the world, and that results probably differ country to country.

Stanley Milgram’s letter experiment in the 1960′s is a more accurate representation of the connectedness of a person, as opposed to Gladwell’s use of last names to test the same thing. By having all of the subjects living in the same city, it allows you to separate who is more connected because there is a common start location. However, I feel that Gladwell’s test all depends on the ethnic groups within the area that the subject lives.

For Example: Gladwell’s list was taken from a New York phonebook, so it naturally contains many Jewish, Irish, Italian, and Hispanic names based on the ethnic population of New York, however someone living in Atlanta would find themselves deemed a sort of hermit by this particular test, because they would not know as many names on this list. Georgia and the Carolinas have a heavier African American population than Italian or Jewish, proving the test conceptually flawed.

The only valid use for this test would be only to test people living in Manhattan, the area from which the names were generated.

I do however find Milgram’s experiment to be more accurate, because if you pick a random town to pick your subjects from, and you pick a random city, you are more likely to find who is more connected, however like most tests trying to determine “connectedness”, it has some flaws.

A man from Delaware could be a complete shut-in but have one relative in Reno with whom he talks frequently. If in the small chance this man is asked to send a package to a friend who could get it to Reno, he would get it there in 2 steps, making him seem like a connector, when in reality he isn’t. This is an extreme example, but another flaw could be where you used to live. If you moved to the random city from somewhere else, you may have an advantage, however this further proves the validity of Milgram’s experiment because someone who lived in multiple towns probably has an expanded range of acquaintances as opposed to someone who has lived in one town their whole life.

Milgram’s experiment has less variables, so I believe it is MORE accurate but not necessarily the most accurate. I do not believe there is anyway to get a very good reading on someone’s connectedness, but I do know that Malcolm Gladwell’s experiment is not a good way to gauge this.