So tonight as I was procrastinating doing all my work I was, of course, on Facebook. However, as I was looking on the newsfeed, I saw an interesting group that one of my friends joined called “I wish I were your derivative so I could lie tangent to your curves.” When I scrolled down to the wall postings, I saw this website that everyone kept posting and told people to join. I was curious so I went to the URL. When I got to the site, it explained this game called LOST. Basically, it is a project by a group of students who wanted to see if seven million people could be connected. In order to see if this was possible, a person has to be invited by seeing a certain URL for the game starting with www.lost.eu that is followed by a few characters like www.lost.eu/51f3. The only way to lose in this game is if by the seventh day that one has joined, they have received no points. To gain points, you must invite people. For every person that one invites, they receive one point and for every person that those people invite, one receives a half point. Whoever has the most points when the group has reached seven million is the winner and wins a certain monetary amount.
Now what does all this have to do with globalization you ask? Well seven million people is quite a large number. This group originated in
Europe and is already all the way to the states. Imagine just how many people this will reach by the time seven million are contacted. Already in its third week of existence, people on all six populated continents have joined. According to one graph on the website, membership has increased exponentially, as it should. The real question is how fast will the group reach seven million people?
The concept of the group has a lot to do with the theory of six degrees of separation. Meaning, that everyone in the world can be connected through six people. I certainly think that this is a plausible idea. Especially now that we have technology such as the internet that so many people have access to. However, there still are many places in the world that have limited or no internet access such as Africa and parts of
Asia. Yes, these places may be hard to reach, but they are coming closer and closer to becoming more developed countries.
Anyways, I think that this group serves an interesting purpose and I think it will be fascinating to follow the numbers. Also, I think it will be interesting to see if the group continues to grow exponentially or if it will hit a plateau before it reaches the coveted seven million members. So here is my cordial invitation to you all to join; all you have to do is click on this link www.lost.eu/51f3 and set up a username and password and you are set! Just don’t forget to invite other people and check occasionally to see how this globalization experiment is coming along.
