BigShinyThing

The Economist (subscription required) gives its usual informative and concise take on the MySpace phenomenon but uses a screenshot of a site that is very clearly not that social networking site [pictured]. Instead they’ve run with a shot from an adult dating site featuring young lovelies such as “caroline, seeking males, for 1 on 1 sex, erotic email or cyber sex” - precisely the kind of image that MySpace (it’s the new Internet EVIL!) is acting to dispel. Oops.

Everyone likes a good soundbite, and none more than the team here at BigShinyThing. Imagine our excitement at the claim, in The Economist’s (rather excellent) feature on The New Organisation, published last week, that Milgram’s famous ‘6-degrees of separation‘ is now shrinking under the impact of enabling technologies and modern organisational practices:

According to more modern work along similar lines, that number has now fallen to 4.6, despite the growth in America’s population since Milgram’s time. Being able to keep in touch with a much wider range of people through technologies such as e-mail has brought everyone closer.

Lovely. We expect that meme to be showing up in every second PowerPoint slide in the next 6 months. Lo! Not only has the Internet shrunk the world, but we have a number saying how much! You heard it first here!

But: having actually studied statistics at one sad point in our lives, we were curious both about the methodology and the precision of the number — 4.6, not 4.7 or 4.5? So over the weekend, we asked some people who should know — members of INSNA, the International Network for Social Network Analysis: the professionals in this field. The (informal) consensus was that:

1. Without knowing the methodology, the number is meaningless.
2. Milgram’s original number — 6 — isn’t magic, and was never claimed as such: Milgram’s discovery wasn’t really the number 6, it was the rather astonishing qualitative result that the minimal distance between members of huge social networks is incredibly small compared to the size of the network.

So we’re under-impressed, and if you see this claim popping up over the next few months, we strongly recommend suspicion and restraint in spreading the meme. We’re willing to believe that networked communications can bring people together, but we think that the claim that we’re lost 1.4 degrees of separation as a result — while very PowerPoint friendly — is probably not worth repeating without some serious caveats.

MediaPost reports [via Gawker] that in the most recent ABCs for North America, The Economist saw a subscription increase of 14.2 percent over the first half of 2005, whilst fellow ’serious-minded publication’ The Week saw its subscriptions climb 43 percent. According to The Week’s president, Justin B Smith, “the traditional weeklies have become less news magazines and more popular culture magazines … But [these numbers] suggest that there is a growth market for serious, global minded journalism.”

We think that the success of The Economist and The Week has as much to do with fantastic editing. Way before blogs, rolling news and the plethora of sources that we now get our news from, both publications sought to inform on a ‘need to know’ basis, on a weekly basis. The Economist’s advertising affirms this - think of the “I never read The Economist” - management trainee aged 42 poster. The Week meanwhile cleverly offers to edit all the week’s essential stories down to handy bite-sized pieces. Savvy papers like The Guardian have already started to follow The Week’s lead, offering The Wrap, an edited version the best of all the British newspaper coverage daily. And why bother to read a newspaper every day when you can look smart reading The Economistand/or The Week and then supplement your news via the web or TV?

One quibble though - why hasn’t The Week got any kind of readable and searchable online presence?