Anybody can be found in 12 hours!
If you ask an average Joe how soon a person can be tracked down using social media and the Internet, he might not have the right answer for you. But if the average Joe happens to be Alex Rutherford from the Masdar Institute of Science and Technology in Abu Dhabi, who took part in the ‘Tag challenge’, it’s come down to just 12 hours.
That means, anybody, sitting thousands of kilometres away, is just half-a-day away from you.
Here’s the history to it. Way back In 1967, American social psychologist Stanley Milgram sent out 160 packages to individuals in an American city, asking them to then forward the packaged to a single individual, living in Boston, but only through people they knew on a first-name basis. On an average, he found that the parcels reached their destination via five pairs of hands. That study came to be known as ‘6 degrees of separation’. Similar experiments on social networks yielded results such as these - Microsoft said people on its Messenger network are separated by 6.6 degrees of separation, and Facebook said its members are separated by only four degrees.
While these experiments got amazing results, they left out one important aspect - how quickly is it possible to track down a ‘random’ individual across the world using the Internet?
In the Tag Challenge, the competitors had very little clues, sometimes only going by a mugshot, the name a city, or the fact that the individual was wearing a t-shir. Alex Rutherford and team won it by identifying three of the five individuals in just 12 hours.
Their data shows that social networks are able to tune their geographical communication to suit the task at hand in just 12 hours. But Rutherford and co. say it may be possible to get participants to react even more quickly using appropriate incentives.
There is, however, the unanswered question of how reliable the tracking might be in the event that false data and identities form the basis of the search, making it a wild-goose chase. Well, with complete strangers being just 12 hours away, the world has truly become a small place!
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