A question one would like to think about is whether the small world phenomenon has been changed with the increase usage of the internet. With online communities, the ability to meet people who you have never actually physically met, does this make our world even smaller? Watts and colleagues at Columbia University (New York) conducted an email experiment to find out whether there was any effect [http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn4037]. They found on average 5-7 emails had to be sent in order for the subject to be found. This was the sort of results that Milgran found out when he first proposed the experiment, so perhaps the world wide web does not affect the size of the world.

Thinking about online communities, it is true that we are able to meet more people than we were before. However, as we do not see each other face to face, it is possible that perhaps people do not tell the whole truth of who they are. Someone you were randomly chatting to on an online forum would not be someone you would think about sending the letter to in order to find the subject. I would argue that the world wide web’s impact is not so great as the impact of improved transportation systems around the world. Nowadays, it is possible for someone in China to be connected (through 5-7 steps) to someone in South America without the world wide web. This is just because of the transportation system that allows many people to travel globally. If this experiment were to be done before it was common for people to take airplanes, or even to take ships, the chance of someone in New York being connected to someone in Australia is minimal.