6 Degrees of separation: Myth or Fact ?

Have you ever tried to contact Brad Pitt, Oprah, Roger Federer, Sachin Tendulkar (The God) or our Bhai a.k.a Salman Khan? You might be thinking how a Mango people like us, will ever get to contact them personally. But recently I came across a very interesting theory: “6 Degrees of separation” which can help us to do the same.

As per Wikipedia: Six degrees of separation is the theory that everyone and everything is six or fewer steps away, by way of introduction, from any other person in the world, so that a chain of "a friend of a friend" statements can be made to connect any two people in a maximum of six steps. .

In a world of 6.6 billion people, it does seem hard to believe. The theory of six degrees of separation contends that, because we are all linked by chains of acquaintance, you are just six introductions away from any other person on the planet. The idea of six degrees of separation has been around for over 80 years. And, with social networking sites booming, more people are connecting across the globe than ever before.  The world is shrinking…figuratively speaking.

The idea of 6 degrees of separation was first coined by Frigyes Karinthy in 1929 and popularized by a 1990  play written by John Guare .But since the inception of this idea, people always debated whether this notion is just a cultural myth or a fact of life. But recently Microsoft researcher has done their extensive research to substantiate the idea that 6 Degree of separation is actually a fact.

By studying billions of electronic messages, they worked out that any two strangers are, on average, distanced by precisely 6.6 degrees of separation. In other words, putting fractions to one side, you are linked by a string of seven or fewer acquaintances to Madonna, the Dalai Lama and the Queen. The news will come as no surprise to film buffs who for years have been playing the parlor game Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, in which they link other actors to Bacon in six films or fewer.

Recently due to surge in the social media platforms, this idea can be validated very easily.  Facebook, the online social network, has a 'six degrees' application to test the theory through the connections of Facebook users. Facebook's data team released two papers in November 2011 which document that amongst all Facebook users at the time of research (721 million users with 69 billion friendship links) there is an average distance of 4.74. Probabilistic algorithms were applied on statistical metadata to verify the accuracy of the measurements. It was also found that 99.91% of Facebook users were interconnected, forming a large connected component.

On the similar line Twitter conducted the same study on 5.2 million twitter friendship and found out the average distance is 4.67 steps. The second most common friendship distance is four steps. On average, about 50% of people on Twitter are only four steps away from each other, while nearly everyone is five steps away. After visiting an average of 3.32 people within the friend network, Twitter users can expect to find one of their followers. The results, released in April 2010, are:

Although LinkedIn has yet to do a study of the magnitude of Facebook or Twitter, LinkedIn, perhaps more than any other social network, was set-up about the idea of degrees of separation. In LinkedIn case, it’s 3 degrees of separation which are:

1.     You already know them

2.     You know someone that knows them

3.     You know someone that knows someone that knows them

The value is not only less degrees of separation but more opportunities to form relationship as this chart shows:

So in the next decade we can easily assume that our social circle will be so vast that the degree of seperation may reduce upto 2. The upsurge of social media involvement of many World  leaders like Mr. Narendra Modi. Mr. Barack Obama and many more it is easy to predict what will be the future. So Are you excited to know all fellow citizen of new unified world in next 5-7 Years?