[quote name=\'Mr. Armadillo\' post=\'229349\' date=\'Oct 28 2009, 08:33 AM\']5% would mean that the average American "knows", on average, about a thousand people.
I'm no sociologist (although I do have a minor in that), and it depends on our definition of the word "knows", so I can't really state for a fact whether or not that number is wholly accurate. It feels a bit high, though.[/quote]
Do you think? Looking at Facebook, I have 174 friends. That's just on Facebook, just people I know personally (save for about three), and people I know and like well enough to have accepted to be on my friends list. (And not being a friend whore, that's a higher bar than many.)
That doesn't count a lot of people I know at work, people I know who are friends of mine who aren't on Facebook, old school buddies who haven't found me on FB yet or aren't there themselves, and a whole lot of people who I know but who I wouldn't spit on if they were on fire. 174 people, just on this one isolated service, and 98% of which I know and have interacted with personally.
(And that doesn't include a single one of my relatives, either. Just counting parents, grandparents, brothers, cousins, aunts and uncles, alive and dead, that's probably another 30-40, easy. Maybe more.)
So if anything I would suggest that 1000 actually feels a bit *low*.