Messages to Taiwan

In the upcoming weeks, it will be very interesting to see how many of our class's e-mail chains make it all the way to the target person in Taiwan, and how many nodes the e-mail must go through to make it all the way there. This experiment once again shows the strength of weak ties. Most likely, you know most of the people your closest friends and family know. I know I went through all of my friends and family in my head and could easily think of the types of people they would know, and if any of these people would be advantageous in getting this e-mail across the world. It seems like it's definitely the weaker ties that will help this endeavor succeed, as they probably have more far-reaching contacts to which they can forward our e-mail.

With my e-mail list, I immediately thought of my cousin that has lived in Japan for the past 10 years, because I figured that would get the e-mail geographically closer to the target, and I know that my cousin has lots of acquaintances in Japan from all over Asia. However, I was then faced with the dilemma of whether to send this e-mail to other people in my extended family on my mom's side, because if they were to receive the opposite copy of the e-mail as my cousin and not see that he also received one, they would probably have the same mindset as myself and forward it on to him. Of course the chains could still be completed in this scenario, but it adds additional nodes, and provides a little bit more of a headache for my cousin.

This experiment will also be interesting, because as a few other people have already mentioned in blog posts, e-mail's role in society is changing. Interestingly enough, it has become a more "formal" mean of communication, when compared to texting, Facebook, etc. In fact, I had to text a few of my closest friends from home (since I know the e-mail formula for Northeastern students) to ask them what their e-mail addresses are, since I never contact them in this way. It is possible that this will be a problem all through the network and nodes. If the 4th person in one of the chains can think of a good person to forward this e-mail too, but they don't know their e-mail address and don't feel particularly obligated to put in the effort of doing a little research to find it (since they're so far removed from the chain starter, and have no real ties to them), a chain could easily die.