Six Degrees of Separation: Urban myth or Fact?

It’s a small world – no, it really is; and it keeps getting better at getting smaller. Today the world is more interconnected than it has ever been (I mean, hey, you could find my blog!). Information technology has brought us ever closer to everyone else, and nomophobia (mobile phone separation anxiety) is increasingly a thing these days. If you’re a “glass half-full” kind of guy, all of these have been for the best, and boy do they hold incredible opportunities as well. And just like that we’re all set to talk about the six degrees of separation.

Heard this story of a little boy on a farm, miles away from any civilization, who had a tall dream to reach the queen, in the 20^th century you’d probably say "NOT A CHANCE" – and for good reasons too.

Six degrees of separation as a theory says we are connected to everyone else by no more than six intermediaries. That would mean we’re connected to everyone on the planet in at most six links in a chain of friend of friends. – And you better believe that… or not yet!

So how accurate is this claim? Is it another academic urban myth? Well, for one thing, it’s no hard science. There are dozens of experiments out there which corroborate the claim and even as many which haven’t, but it depends on how the tests are carried out. Notable of these tests was The Small world problem experiment by Stanley Milgram in 1967, where he randomly selected people to send packages to a stranger. The senders knew the recipient's name, occupation, and a general location. They were instructed to send the package to a person they knew personally who they thought was most likely, out of all their friends, to know the target recipient personally. That person would also do the same, and so on, until the package was personally delivered to its target recipient.

Although the participants expected the chain to include so many intermediaries, it only took (on average) between five and seven intermediaries to get each package delivered. This shed light on how closely we’re all connected as against what was originally thought.

Duncan Watts, a professor at Columbia University, in 2001 recreated Milgram's experiment on the Internet. He used an e-mail message as the "package" to be delivered, and surprisingly, after reviewing the data collected by 48,000 senders and 19 targets (in 157 countries), found that the average number of intermediaries was indeed, six. So what does it all mean for us and why should you even care?

New areas of study related to six degrees of separation in diverse areas of network theory such as power grid analysis, disease transmission, graph theory, corporate communication, and computer circuitry have sprung up following the compelling evidence from research and the advent of the computer age.

When the first social networking site launched in 1997, it was aptly named Six Degrees. Today, sites like Facebook and Twitter have considerably lowered the number of intermediaries in the chain below six. And as for that little boy on a farm, while the story may be urban myth, what today isn’t is his tall dream; come to think of it, there are no really good reasons today for which you could say "NOT A CHANCE".