As Kieran Healy explores on his “Using Metadata to find Paul Revere”, simplifying the networks through using metadata that begins with 1’s and 0’s to connect members (listed in rows, summing up to 254) who belonged in same organizations (which started with only seven), and multiplying the matrix with another matrix that sums up to 254 people again, or in a similar sense, using 7×7 for multiplying different organizations, can create a social network that connects millions of people.
“Notice again, I beg you, what we did there. We did not start with a “social networke” as you might ordinarily think of it, where individuals are connected to other individuals. We started with a list of memberships in various organizations. But now suddenly we do have a social networke of individuals, where a tie is defined by co-membership in an organization. This is a powerful trick.” (Healy)
The difference between this project and other social networks is, as Healy mentioned, that the team wasn’t tying to create a social network but created a metadata with list of organizations and their members, which enabled the project to have a multiplied result of metadata.
Such whole concept of connecting people through their common denominators, from family and mutual friends to organization relations, had become a huge boom when Six degrees of separation was first publicized. The theory that everyone is connected through six or fewer separations to anyone in the world was first studied in 1929 by a Hungarian author Frigyes Karinthy. As the theory continued to develop, in 2001, a Columbia professor Duncan Watts recreated this concept on the digital world in an experiment where he attempted to deliver a package to a random group of people, the result of the average intermediaries was six.
“I read somewhere that everybody on this planet is separated by only six other people. Six degrees of separation between us and everyone else on this planet. The President of the United States, a gondolier in Venice, just fill in the names. I find it A) extremely comforting that we’re so close, and B) like Chinese water torture that we’re so close because you have to find the right six people to make the right connection… I am bound to everyone on this planet by a trail of six people.” (Six Degrees of Separation Website)
The theory has been widely popular, especially after the actor Kevin Bacon has launched SixDegrees.org, connecting him to any actors or actresses in the world; and the same concept has been used on many social media platforms ranging from Facebook (mutual friends), LinkedIn (n-dgree connections), and Twitter (follow suggestions).
This concept of creating matrix of metadata is shrinking the world and re-defining the “small world” as a part of science-backed digitization, and it’s only very interesting to see where this technology can be used to create other forms of connection than mere personal connection, forming a new type of networking system and bringing professionals together to collaborate etc. creating even bigger and unimaginable impacts.