The answer is no. MIT Technology Review reports on work published by researchers at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem:
Goldenberg and Levy say that while it is just as easy to email somebody who lives on the same street as somebody on other other side of the world, it turns out we have a huge preference for sending messages over shorter distances... Their conclusion is that far from reducing the importance of geographical location, electronic communication appears to have increased it, probably because people swap more messages with those they have personal interaction with. If that's true, why have we gone so wrong in thinking the world is getting smaller? One source of confusion, argue Goldenberg and Levy, is the famous six-degrees-of-separation experiments peformed originally by Stanley Milgram with letters and later by Steve Strogatz and Duncan Watts using email. These seem to indicate that a "small world" effect is at work in social networks.The major problem with this criticism is that it misunderstands the point of the Milgram and Watts-Strogatz work. Milgram, Watts, and Strogatz had little data on the dynamics of the network. They were studying the network structure. This looks like sensationalism to me.
If you asked any of them whether they would be surprised to hear that the frequency-spectrum of communication is spatially clustered, I'm sure they would say no.
Comments