Ask the World: The Power of Networks

Fantasy author Neil Gaiman is on tour. At the time I’m writing this, he’s in the air on the way to the Philippines. Later in his tour, he’s going to be going to Russia. For some reason - translation, lost email, who knows? - he didn’t know where his tour would take him in Moscow, and people were asking. He could just have sent the Russian publisher who’s organising that leg of the tour an email, and some time later, he would probably have had a reply. However, he also opted to ask on his own blog if anyone knew.

There was, of course, a reply, and it had the information about signings in Moscow. Somone else, however, had also written in to ask why he’d ask the general public, rather than the publisher. He replied:

“I don’t think asking the world was weird. It worked, after all - the information came in from the world before it came in from the publishers.”

And therein lies something very interesting - you can get an answer faster by throwing it to the four winds than you can by tracking down someone who definitely knows, and asking them directly. Now, Neil has an advantage in this - every post he makes is read by more than a million people. He can get an answer faster that way than, perhaps, almost anyone in the world. But all that means is that there’s a threshold point there, and like any threshold measured in numbers, it’s moving.

Certainly, when I’m asked a question about a subject I don’t know a lot about, my current reaction goes “I don’t know - but give me half an hour, and I’ll find someone who does.” I can put the question out on Twitter, on Facebook, on a private mailing list or chat channel, and I’ll have some sort of pointer back within a few minutes. My first-reach network is about 300 people, and with retweets or forwarding by a few reliable connectors, I can ask that question of about a thousand people.

This isn’t wholly new. There’s a story from about five, six years ago, probably apocryphal, about a reporter who came up with a brilliant new trick for research - he’d get his topic, and create an inaccurate article on Wikipedia about it. By the time he got up the following morning, the good citizens of the world would have repaired his article to the point where it was accurate and informative, often with references, footnotes, and illustrations.

And this is, of course, the old maxim of “It’s not what you know, but who you know” - except that in most cases, it’s not who I know, but who is known by those I know.