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-----Original Message----- >I couldn't agree more with Carter Butts. Another question, however, which >doesn't appear to receive much attention is whether the "Small World" >phenomenon matters very much. In most of his work, Milgram liked to create >a splash by producing a flashy and counterintuitive phenomenon and then >move on. >The point is whether the links in the chain which appears to tie two people >together are successively activated outside a deliberate experimental >context. I happen to be two steps from Queen Elizabeth (through a former >academic colleague who became a politician and then a high government >official in London) and hence three steps from most world leaders. The >practical significance of this is nil. >Ed Peay While the likelihood of successfully "activating" the chain that links you with any other person may be very small, is it not enormously more likely than "activating" where there is no chain (of equally short length)? Granovetter (and others since) showed that it can matter in finding desirable employment. Perhaps the effect is not the kind of thing we imagine. You seem to be suggesting that your 2-step to the Queen might provide a basis for some significant part for her majesty to play in your life or vice versa. It may be that such ties DO work in that way for a portion of people so connected -- I guess the number of people 2 links from the Queen is quite large -- it may also be that the significance for most is nil, and/or it may be the effects are subtle or indirect. Can you be certain that link has not had some indirect impact in your life? Playing on the idea that any particular path may be meaningless while the overall set, by virtue of the activation of some small portion of paths, IS meaningful, I wonder, if we isolated a population of people 2 steps from the Queen, and compared them against a randomly selected group with similar demographics, would we see no difference? No doubt the quality of the tie (e.g. content, strength) beyond simply knowing the person is crucial. Does anyone have data on how much "larger" the world gets when more restrictive definitions of a network tie are used? Perhaps we should ask how the world would be different if most pairs of people were 60+/- steps apart rather than 6+/-. Blyden Potts