Advances in technology can dramatically change the way people interact. From the standpoint of the 21st century, it is hard to appreciate how a unified postal service or the invention of the telephone changed the way people were connected, but these inventions changed the relation between social distance and physical distance. Today, we are in the middle of another dramatic shift in people?s ability to communicate. The rise of computer-mediated communication, such as email, has the potential to link people together from widely different places. The world is again getting smaller. The Electronic Small World Project seeks to map the social connections among people using email. Using the tools of social network analysis, we hope to construct the first images of the social topography (as opposed to the technical or physical topography) of the Internet. This social map will help us understand how information moves through society, how different types of people are connected, and how small the social world in which we live really is. |
