Community vs. Social Network

Hello Maxim,

Thank you for asking this excellent question.

To answer your question of why this is important, it is because this gives a natural scope of the potential size of community vs. the potential size of social network. Social network can grow very big, where as a large community will tend to fragment and create sub-communities within the larger community. And that is what we see today, both online and in the physical world. You can consider Russian as a huge community, but within this community there are sub-communities of people from different regions, with different religion, with different political views, etc. These are sub-communities within the larger community of Russian as a country.

The validity of this statement is never been experimentally verified rigorously. However, observations shows that it is largely true in the modern world. If you randomly pick any 2 persons in this world, it is possible to construct a chain of friends that connects these 2 people. And in fact this chain is usually pretty short: roughly 6 degrees apart.

It doesn't matter if you have a tribe that is isolated geographically or culturally, someone in that tribe knows someone outside, So everyone in that tribe is basically connected to the rest of the world through this critical person. It is hard to find some self contain social networks where people within this network ONLY knows other people within this network and no one outside. If this network exist, it is the entire earth. Until one person on earth establish friendship with extra-terrestrials, earth is the extent of the human social network. But once earthlings made contact and establishes friendship with an aliens from another planet, then basically the entire earth's social network become connected to the social network of the other planet.

Alright, I hope this address your question. 

Thank you again for asking and see you next time.