Social networking in its oldest form
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-14859116
This very recent news story is about a man, Harold Hackett, who puts notes into bottles and then sends them out to sea from his home in Prince Edward Island, Canada. He includes his address in the bottle so that anyone who finds it can write back to him and say where they found the bottle. He has been doing this for 15 years, and has received over 3100 responses to the 4800 bottles he’s sent out (that’s a 64% return rate). It’s amazing that you can make such long-range connections without the help of a computer or modern social network like Facebook. This video implies that some of these connections are relatively strong – he receives hundreds of Christmas cards and gifts. Aside from the pollution aspect, I think this is a very interesting way to establish connections with other people around the world. I think it would also be a very interesting project for him to plot where all his bottles made it to, how long it took for them to get found, and then post that data for others to analyze.
This news story directly relates to the first topic of the class, “Graph Theory and Social Networks”. We can apply Harold’s network to the terms we covered in this part of the course and then analyze his network. For example, his network is a network of people, where the people who write back to him are nodes, and the communications by bottles and letters are the edges. Again, the unique thing about this network is that it exists on a global scale, but the edges were created using a message in a bottle as opposed to a Facebook message, phone call, or some other electronic communication.
Another main topic that Harold’s network can be applied to is the concept of local bridges. A and B are local bridges if A has a lot of friends and B has a lot of friends, but A and B have no friends in common. In other words, there is no C with both an A-C and a B-C edge. What Harold is doing in his network is making many local bridges. His bottles make it as far as Africa, Ireland, Iceland, Great Britain, France, Russia, and Scotland. The chances that Harold has a mutual friend with the person who received the bottle randomly out everyone in those foreign countries are extremely slim. Because of the scale of this project, it is unlikely that any of the people who have received bottles know each other. If we hold these assumptions, Harold has created thousands of local bridges. He is the only tie between his group of friends, presumably based on Price Edward Island, and another network of friends, based in Ireland for example. Another thing to note is that all of these local bridge connections are, by definition, weak connections. If they were strong, then a different one of Harold’s strong connections (C) would force the network to complete strong triadic closure, creating a weak connection between C and the person who received the bottle and eliminating the local bridge.