It's a small world—even online, as social researchers have discovered.
In a recent study, scientists observed members of the online community LiveJournal.com, to track how relationships form in cyberspace. The researchers found that, even with the world at their fingertips, most users tend to select friends from their own geographical areas.
With more than 500,000 users in the United States, LiveJournal is a popular Web forum that allows its users to create and customize their own online diaries.
One of LiveJournal's features is a "friends" page that enables users to view journal updates of people they have chosen as their online friends.
When researchers examined the profiles of journal keepers, they discovered that users tended to form friendships in cyberspace with people who lived near them in the real world.
"People tend to make friends according to a particular pattern, based on the geography of their friends," said Andrew Tomkins, a research scientist at Yahoo! in Sunnyvale, California.
This tendency to make virtual friends based on geography also creates the so-called small world phenomenon, in which strangers learn that they share several acquaintances. "This pattern that people somehow happen to adopt is the only way to form small worlds," Tomkins said.
Tomkins co-authored the LiveJournal study, which is reported this week in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science.
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Previous experiments have shown social networks to be "navigable small worlds" in which a person can transmit a message to another random person through a short chain of friends.
The concept gave rise to the famous phrase "six degrees of separation," after a 1967 small-world experiment by the social psychologist Stanley Milgram. His study found that two random U.S. citizens were connected by an average of six acquaintances.
Studies have shown that in online communities, two strangers can usually find a connection with only a few degrees of separation.
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