• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, June 19, 2012

Paul Adams, global head of brand design at Facebook just showed a new way of visualizing the way people interact during a presentation at the Festival of Creativity in Cannes, France today. The visualization, which he calls the “map of humanity,” is kind of like the social graph 2.0 – a visualization of the ways in which all human beings are connected. Presumably, the connectivity is drawn from a certain social network platform, but that wasn’t Adams point. His point is that it isn’t technology that connects people. It’s people.

The reason, he says, is that while technology is changing fast, “people change incredibly slowly,” and we are still fundamentally driven by some key behaviors and motivations: to build relationship and “control the way people see” us.

In fact, Adams says we are defined by the groups we belong to, which is how we create our sense of identiy.

Mathematically speaking, he says, we belong to “four to six” separate groups, with no more than 10 people in each group. “They are pretty small,” he said.