Jared Evans Global Microbrand

There is one line that you will hear often from the members (hearing or Deaf) of the Deaf community: “It’s a small world!” I had many opportunities to expand the circle of people who I know when I was a student at NTID/RIT with thousands of other Deaf college students, visited friends at Gallaudet University, lived in the Deaf-friendly cities of Rochester and Washington DC, and worked at Deaf-owned companies of DawnSignPress and Viable.

Based upon my intuition and experience, the number of interconnections between Deaf people is very high and more persasive than is seen within the hearing world. This may be because Deaf people tend to congregate in certain swaths across the country and bump into each other more frequently. While my personal observations generally fall in line with what other Deaf people have experienced in similar social conditions- it is not yet a hard evidence for a high level of interconnections.

Enter Facebook. While Facebook is far from being a true representation of the Deaf community, there is a subset of hundreds of Deaf people who actively use Facebook. For a Facebook user, the primary purpose of the site is to explictly set the relationship links to other people who they know. As these relationship links are created one by one, a social map around the user is being built at the same time. Facebook offers many things you can do with your social map such as sharing updates, photos, videos, etc. It’s a great way to publish useful/silly tidbits for your friends to see when their schedule permits them to do so.

The social maps of the relationship links between Deaf Facebook users would give a much better picture of the level of interconnectivity among the Deaf. There happens to be a such Facebook app called Friend Wheel that will actually go through all your friends and create a visual map of all the interconnections! I present my Friend Wheel which contains 324 friends with 7,769 links between each other. [click on image to see it in its full-sized glory]

It’s one thing to rely on your intution and entirely a different thing to see the astounding image that has all the relationships actually graphed out. It’s a small world after all!