With the advent of the internet, the world seems infinitely smaller than it has ever been in the past. When the experiment was performed, doubtless six degrees of separation seemed infinitely short, unbelievable in a world with six billion people. As times have changed, however, this fact seems less startling. In a world where I can now find my own public high school records with a quick Google search, it doesn’t seem so far-fetched at all.

Put into terms of finding ‘any random person’, things begin to find new meaning. If you were to give me the name and address of someone in the US to make contact with, I certainly wouldn’t try to decide who of my closest friends to contact, or try to go through any job that I might have. Use of Google in conjunction with someones residence and/or career makes it quite likely that one can find the person on the first page of a search. If they aren’t, it is a simple step to find a well-connected person in their place of residence whom you can pass on the request to.

Put into terms of the Watts-Strogatz model, the internet magnifies the value of ‘k’, our random connections, immensely. We are ‘randomly’ have the capacity to find literally millions and millions of people, instead of the few hundreds whom we are connected to otherwise. In a similar vein, with the scales of resolution model, the model changes in the sense that while our local circle remains small, the outer circle becomes massive, leading to fewer ‘changes of resolution’ necessary to find a person.

Its not hard to envision that the average, middle-income person is connected to another within a degree of connectivity, or perhaps two, when anyone can find anyone else in their own town/city/block, and its easily possible find someone from their town/city block.

Its a small world.