We've always heard about Six Degrees of Separation. Now let's see if evidence backs it up. As explained in the Mercury News, "The world's population has almost doubled since social psychologist Stanley Milgram's famous but flawed 'Small World' experiment gave people a new way to visualize their interconnectedness with the rest of humanity. Something else has also changed - the advent of online social networks, particularly Facebook's 750 million members, and that's what researchers plan to use."
You can join in. Social scientists at Yahoo! and Facebook have launched the Small World Experiment, "designed to test the hypothesis that anyone in the world can get a message to anyone else in just 'six degrees of separation' by passing it from friend to friend. Sociologists have tried to prove (or disprove) this claim for decades, but it is still unresolved.
"Now, using Facebook we finally have the technology to put the hypothesis to a proper scientific test. By participating in this experiment, you'll not only get to see how you're connected to people you might never otherwise encounter, you will also be helping to advance the science of social networks."
Photo credit: Film-Buff Movie Reviews, where they play Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. I chose this picture of young Kevin because this weekend I saw a trailer for the Footloose remake. Some things should probably stay un-remade. (I was there to see Crazy, Stupid, Love, which I highly recommend. Kevin's in that one, too.)
Not a fair comparison. We are separated by far less people than back in the Kevin Bacon days, since we have many more "friends". (Isn't everyone at least 4 degrees from Barack Obama?)
Might be fun anyway....
Posted by: Ralph Winters | Tuesday, 16 August 2011 at 01:35 PM