No! Not Wayne’s World. Nor The World According to Garp. Instead, your and my world. And this time according to either Thomas L. Friedman, Professor Eli Noam, or Facebook - depending on how you choose to see it.

If you ask long-time New York Times op-ed writer Thomas Friedman, the world is flat, implying that digital communications increasingly ensures everyone everywhere has access to the same growing pool of World Wide Web-provided information. This levels the playing field for all of us, he says, to impact the plethora of socio- and economic-political issues — no matter where and who we are on this globe.

This sounds promising, I thought, if it wasn’t for an off-the-cuff conversation I had with Columbia Business School Professor Eli Noam, about a year past Friedman’s book published.

In essence, Professor Noam’s stance on the Web’s ability to sway minds was that, while it indeed may level the playing field for all us netizens, the Internet was still simply a zero-sum game. As many as you would find posturing online for any cause in a certain direction, you would find the same number of individuals, posting with the same speed and velocity to argue for their side of the coin.

Fast forward, still thoroughly confused, I finally went ahead to check this “flat world” versus “zero-sum-game” thing for myself.

In comes Facebook, the ueber-popular social community. By now sporting an impressive 300! million users worldwide, I thought what better Web hang to check who seems most popular, and how that resonates with others — simply by counting the number of friends connected to each one.

First, I took a look at some of the more obvious public figures, and took note on the number of their supporters. These were the ones I thought would nicely delineate between blue vs. red, left vs. right, CNN vs. FOX, you get the picture. (For the sake of simplicity, I opted to pick only the most popular of typically many available pages and groups for each of the public figures selected. Also, by the time you check the individual Facebook fans yourself, they likely will have changed):

Barack Obama (6,853, 279) vs. Vladimir Putin (43,842)
Angela Merckel (19,704) vs. Hillary Clinton (4,797)
David Letterman (51,362) vs. Jay Leno (36,600)

Turns out, my initial picks seems to indicate a slight trend towards the left, although who knew that a relative conservative German Chancellor Angela Merckel would garner almost four times as many followers as US Democrat and Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton? (This is especially intriguing considering that 30% of Facebook traffic is from the US, yet only 3% from Germany).

And then there are some of the maybe not quite as obvious public figure picks: