A Large Scale Game of "Telephone"

Mark Twain's "Two Little Tales," similar to Milgram's "Six Degrees of Separation" experiment, concluded that a message can reach a target through a chain of persons who are more closely connected to the target. I agree with Grannis in that I am skeptical of this determination. Grannis points out that 71% of the chains in Milgram's experiment failed to deliver the message to the target in Boston. The lack of success in this experiment can be compared to that of a children's game of "telephone."

Most of us have played "telephone" at least once in our lives and know how skewed the message usually becomes by the time it reaches the end of the chain. There's always the kid who screws up the message on purpose to be funny. This can be compared to the person in the Milgram experiment who doesn't find the message important enough or worth passing on. Then there's the child who doesn't hear the message correctly and is forced to improvise what to say. In essence, this child might as well say nothing at all because the message has been lost. This can be compared to a dead end in Milgram's case, such as when a person does not know who to relay the message to. This comparison may be a stretch; however, this is my view of the Milgram experiment and Mark Twain's "Two Little Tales"-a large scale game of "telephone," where successfully completing a chain does not seem very likely.

I believe that the successful delivery of a message comes down to such factors as the inclusion of opinion leaders, the relation of the message to network norms, and the comfortability one feels in communicating with weak ties. I'm interested to see how our class emailing experiment will turn out.