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The concept of six degrees of separation has an origin and a science that might surprise you.
It Started As An Idea
In 1927, a Hungarian author and poet named Frigyes Karinthy wrote the play, Chains, which suggested that we are no more than five acquaintances away from connecting to any person in the world. One of the characters in the play recommends conducting an experiment in the form of a game to prove the notion true.
You could say Karinthy was ahead of his time, and not only because nearly 70 years later, the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon trivia game would be a cult hit and "six degrees" a well-known reference in our social vocabulary.
Early Research
What's arguably most interesting about Karinthy's premise is that it held a great influence on subsequent discussion of social networks and became the subject of real scientific research.
In the mid-1960s, for example, Stanley Milgram conducted his "Small World Experiment," where a few hundred participants in Omaha, Nebraska, were asked to deliver a letter to a "target" in Boston by first calling upon the help of an acquaintance. On average, the results indicated that roughly 6 steps or "hops" were required to reach the target.
Many were skeptical of Milgram's findings due to perceived bias in participant status and the experiment's high attrition rate, where only 29% of the letter chains found the assigned recipient.
Tracking Goes Global
Fast forward to 2002 and a global Internet-based search study led by sociologist Duncan Watts who was teaching at Columbia University. Watts and his team assigned participants the task of getting a message to one of 18 possible persons from a selection of 13 countries.
While only 384 of 24,163 chains reached their targets, Watts estimated that a median of 5 to 7 steps were needed for the message to reach its destination.
Microsoft and Facebook Join In
In 2006, Microsoft returned similar findings. By monitoring over 30 billion instant messaging conversations, the company found an average of 6.6 degrees of separation between any two people.
The latest research on the subject came last November when Facebook and the University of Milan applied a set of algorithms to paths of Facebook users. The scientists identified the average number of links between two people to be 4.74 globally and 4.34 within the U.S. As you might imagine, the data pool was pretty big, but I think it's important to note that no direct user participation was required.
The attempts to achieve a metric for our links with one another are admirable, even fun. In the end, though, research on the number of people we actually know and consider to be close social contacts seems the most compelling. I'll save that for a future post.
six degrees image courtesy of whatislucid.wordpress.com
