18-months ago I set up the Geordie Jetsetter Geocaching project as a means of exploring how a physical object could be passed through a network connected by a community.
Don’t get me wrong this was never a grand sociological project. More a game of curiosity. Fun even. But it has fallen into line with the theories of social networks defined in the 1940s and 50s.
Geocaching is a web 2.0 sport where GPS equipped geocachers search for geocaches and share their experiences online. A geocoin is a special coin that has a unique tracking number so that its progress from geocache-to-geocache can be tracked online through logs on the Geocaching.com web site.
My project saw a series of three geocoins released in a geocache at Newcastle United Football Club in the winter of 2008 with the goal of reaching Newcastle in Australia, Newcastle in South Africa, and Newcastle in the US.
The South Africa and US geocoins have been lost in transit after travelling 620 miles and 6,000 miles respectively.
The South Africa geocoin has got as far as Southampton on the UK’s south coast but hasn’t been moved for nine months so is presumed lost while the US geocoin reached California in April 2009 but is now reported lost.
Only the Australian geocoin is still on the move. But it’s a long way from its intended destination. It’s currently in mainland Europe having been moved by 15 people to its current location in a cache outside Zurich.
It’s disappointing that after being moved on 26 occasions by difference members of the Geocaching community, travelling a distance of 7,300 miles, only one geocoin remains in play. But then the theory says that without strong interpersonal ties a network will eventually break down.
The photo was recorded in the log of the remaining Australian geocoin in Switzerland.
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Just reading this last night, the problem you’ve had was twofold. Geocaching is based on no social links rather than a large network with loose social networks.
The second challenge you had is that you didn’t have the social pressure that say a university involved in academic research has. In fact the very nature of geocaching may lead to a feeling of diminished responsibility of the task, since there are always others who could be relied upon.
We’ve seen these things work in the past, of course. Mostly with garden gnomes, if I remember properly. But in those cases, gnomes were handed from one node to another in person.
Ged makes a good point (I think the two in fact facets of the same point); the famous Milgram experiments worked through pre-existing social networks; your experiments are based on ad-hoc nets. With total anonymity comes no social pressure.
Milgram’s experiments uncovered a few highly-connected hubs through whom many/most of the paths passed, and who made the results possible. There’s no opportunity for this here — all the hand-offs are done at a distance, and no one person has any choice/control over the next person in the chain.
Ultimately, this is more like the Where’s George experiment.