IN 1967 Stanley Milgram, an American social scientist, conducted an experiment in which he sent dozens of packages to random people in Omaha, Nebraska. He asked them to pass them on to acquaintances who would, in turn, pass them on to get the packages closer to their intended final recipients. His famous result was that there were, on average, six degrees of separation between any two people. In 2011 Facebook analysed the 721m users of its social-networking site and found that an average of 4.7 hops could link any two of them via mutual friends. A small world is now, it seems, even smaller.
Can this be used to solve real-world problems, by taking advantage of the talents and connections of one’s friends, and their friends? That is the aim of a new field known as social mobilisation, which treats the population as a distributed knowledge resource which can be tapped using modern technology. It could potentially be used to help locate missing children, find a stolen car or track down a suspect. Social-mobilisation researchers have been examining its potential through some unusual experiments.
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