Networking

There's so much that we share
That it's time we're aware
It's a small world after all
- It's a small world by Sherman and Sherman

There was a study made by Stanley Milgram in the mid 1960s which concludes that a person is only 6 persons away from any other person in the world. A hypothetical situation to better illustrate the study made, the President of Iran is has an adviser who has a friend in Syria who has a cousin in Lebanon who hired a Filipina whose mother is your yaya. Simply put, the study suggests that this world is a small world after all. Another study regarding the same subject was made by Granovetter. He said that the weakest ties you have is actually the strongest. In the interviews he made, he found out that only 16% of the people from the pool got their jobs through a contact whom they saw often whereas 84% got their jobs through contacts whom they saw occasionally or rarely.

This makes me think about the possible benefits I could derive from networking accounts such as friendster, multiply, etc. Maybe I should add those people whom I only know by name - though there are some in my account - just so I would have a stronger social capital. Social capital, as defined by wikipedia, is "a core concept in business, organizational behaviour, political science and sociology, defined as the advantage created by a person's location in a structure of relationships. It explains how some people gain more success in a particular setting through their superior connections to other people."

Now why through the internet? The answer is simple, because it is convenient and is getting cheaper and cheaper. There is a saying that it is not what you know but who you know. This might be one of the ways to expand who you know on a theoretical level. Nonetheless, it would be great, i think, if the government could provide people who are at a disadvantage from gaining social capital by including this as an objective in building infrastructures that would give other people access to the internet.