When I worked at Walt Disney World in 2004 as a part of the College Program, my role kept me in Magic Kingdom, primarily in Fantasyland.
Fantasyland is home to Ariel’s Grotto, the Mary Poppins Carousel, and of course, the It’s A Small World ride. After spending 9 months in close proximity to that joyous ride (if you stay sane), you’re likely to think one of two polar things: engaging with 150,000 unique guests each day proved Walt lied about the ginormous size of this earth, OR you leave believing accepting that it is a small world after all (simply due to repetitive conditioning and not because of any hard evidence whatsoever).
As surprising as this may be, I didn’t buy the small world theory. At least that was until I joined Facebook shortly after leaving the happiest place on earth. I became “friends” with basically every person I’ve ever met (and their friends that I added just because I thought they were cute) and started to explore each of their worlds. The more connections I made, the smaller and smaller the world felt.
Then Twitter. More connections. And I connected to people that were connected to more people and those people were already connected to people I knew.
Social Media is undoubtedly contributing to global shrinking. It’s become easier than ever to connect and share your thoughts, collaborate with like-minded people, find communities you “fit in”. It’s absolutely remarkable.
You can always be connected to someone. 6 degrees of separation feels more like 3.
What does that mean to you? Has your world shrunk due to social media? Did Walt get it right all those years ago, is it a Small World After All?
First of all, It’s A Small World is my favourite ride at Disney (my stomach is too sensitive to handle real rollercoasters – Sad I know!)… Secondly, thanks for the little mention of my Twitter.
I’ve personally always believed it’s a small world and social networking definitely makes me feel that way too. There have been a couple of times where I’ve been following the trail of friends of friends on Facebook to discover that they’re connected to someone I’m connected to. I’d really love to see an app (and perhaps one exists) that can automatically crawl your Facebook connections and create some kind of interactive spider diagram so you can better visualise how people are connected to you. I don’t think this concept would work as well with Twitter as we all have simply too many connections and for me at least, many of them are not real life friends (yet).
On the other side of the Twitter coin, I’ve found myself bumping into or meeting more Twitter friends in real life than Facebook ones (most of my Facebook connections are back in the UK), so it does make my world somewhat smaller in that way.
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I would skip that ride, but old Walt made a good poing. It is a small world, and social networking sites have definitely helped prove him right. For example, through Twitter and Facebook, I’ve been able to connect with people in Taiwan, which is a great source of comfort for me. During a particularly bad typhoon earlier this year, I couldn’t get in touch with my parents on the phone. So many of my Twitter connections in Taiwan jumped in and sent me up-to-the-minute information about my home town. That helped me get through a stressful evening until I finally heard from my parents and knew they were okay. Social media has brought my home and the world closer to me, and that is a good thing in my book.
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This post was mentioned on Twitter by JessicaRandazza: @Shih_Wei Thank you, Veronica. Feeling is mutual. You and @alextrup both are included in my new post http://bit.ly/6bMzE2...