In 1967, Stanley Milgram wrote a seminal paper called “Small World” published in the journal Psychology Today. There he shared the idea of “six degrees of separation” between most people that we have all become familiar with today. What many people don’t know is that he also talked about certain people called “Super Connectors”. He found that approximately 60% of the transmissions passed through the same four people!
This was a finding worth pondering. It suggested that we are not really all connected to everyone else but rather that there are a few people who are disproportionately well connected and it is through these ’superconnectors’ that everyone connects to everyone else.
The superconnectors created shortcuts that enabled resources and ideas to hop from cluster to cluster, by passing otherwise long paths from one side of the network to the other.
They also made a network potentially fragile to breakup by the removal of just a few superconnectors from the network.
Thus 'superconnectors' form an integral part of social capital. By adequatley taking advantage of 'superconnectors' in self-organised systems, there is room for not only efficiency to be improved but the net information throughput can be increased as well.So