Once again, my friends, I feel compelled to let someone else do most of my work for me, if you could call it that.  Must be part of my Warrier Transition training, that whole idea of a cooling down decompression campaign to help soothe the savage beast.  Anyway, I’ve been having these deja vu moments lately that seem like more than mere coincidences (running into long lost friends in Iraq, for example).  And since I’m a proponent of the S.D.O.S. theory from way back (which, BTW, was apparently proven to be true as a result of a recent collaborative effort by Google and Microsoft), I figure this is a worthy topic.  If you don’t think so, then go read something else.  

Six degrees of separation (also referred to as the “Human Web”) refers to the idea that, if a person is one step away from each person they know and two steps away from each person who is known by one of the people they know, then everyone is no more than six “steps” away from each person on Earth.  The easier way to understand this is that Person A only needs a maximum of five people in between to connect to Person B, assuming they (A & B) don’t otherwise know each other.  This theory surmises that anyone on the planet can be connected to any other person on the planet through a chain of acquaintances.  The theory was first proposed in 1929 by the Hungarian writer Frigyes Karinthy in a short story called “Chains.”

In the 1950’s, Ithiel de Sola Pool (MIT) and Manfred Kochen (IBM) set out to prove the theory mathematically. Although they were able to phrase the question, after twenty years they were still unable to solve the problem to their own satisfaction.  In 1967, American sociologist Stanley Milgram devised a new way to test the theory, which he called “the small-world problem.”  He randomly selected people in the mid-West to send packages to a stranger located in Massachusetts.  The senders knew the recipient’s name, occupation and general location.  They were instructed to send the package to a person they knew on a first-name basis who they thought was most likely, out of all their friends, to know the target personally. That person would do the same, and so on, until the package was personally delivered to its target recipient.

Although the participants expected the chain to include at least a 100 intermediaries, it only took (on average) between 5 and 7 intermediaries to get each package delivered.  Milgram’s findings were published in Psychology Today and inspired the phrase “six degrees of separation.”  Although Milgram’s findings were discounted after it was discovered that he based his conclusion on a very small number of packages, six degrees of separation became an accepted notion in pop culture after Brett C. Tjaden published a computer game on the University of Virginia’s Web site based on the small-world problem.  Tjaden used the Internet to document connections between different actors.  Time Magazine called his site, The Oracle of Bacon at Virginia, one of the “Ten Best Web Sites of 1996.”

In 2001, Duncan Watts, a professor at Columbia University, continued his own earlier research into the phenomenon and recreated Milgram’s experiment on the Internet.  Watts used an e-mail message as the “package” that needed to be delivered, and surprisingly, after reviewing the data collected by 48,000 senders and 19 targets (in 157 countries), Watts found that the average number of intermediaries was indeed, six.  Watts’ research, and the advent of the computer age, has opened up new areas of inquiry related to six degrees of separation in diverse areas of network theory.

Statist theories on optimal design of cities, city traffic flows and neighborhoods and demographics were in vogue after WWI.  These conjectures were expanded in 1929 after Karinthy (the Hungarian author mentioned above) published a volume of short stories titled “Everything is Different,” which included “Chains.”  Due to advances in communications and travel, friendship networks could grow larger and span greater distances. In particular, Karinthy believed that the modern world was “shrinking” due to this ever-increasing connectedness of human beings.  He posited that despite great physical distances between the globe’s individuals, the growing density of human networks made the actual social distance far smaller.

In his story, the characters create a game out of this notion (remember, this was in 1929).  His character waggered that, using no more than five individuals, one of whom is a personal acquaintance, he could contact the selected individual using nothing except the network of personal acquaintances.  His story led to much early thought on the idea.  In fact, the first primitive computer simulations ran in 1973 and, although limited, were able to predict that a more realistic three degrees of separation existed across the U.S. population. 

When the Psychology Today article gave the experiments wide publicity, Milgram, Kochen and Karinthy all had been incorrectly attributed as the origin of the notion of Six Degrees; however, the most likely popularizer of the term “Six Degrees of Separation” would be John Guare (American playwright, from his 1990 play of the same name), who attributed the value ’six’ to Marconi.  That’s right, fucking Marchese Guglielmo Marconi (1874 - 1937), the Italian inventor of the radio who, you may remember, figured prominently in my posts on “The Day the Pigs Ate my Sister.”

The phrase “six degrees of separation” is often used as a synonym for the idea of the “small world” phenomenon.   Although the ”six degrees” claim has been decried as an “academic urban myth,” a 2007 study examined a data set of instant messages composed of 30 billion conversations among 240 million people.  They found the average path length among Microsoft Messenger users to be 6.6 (some now call the theory, “the seven degrees of separation”).   The following provide a brief outline of the ways such ideas have shaped popular culture:

(1)  The popular games “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” and “Six Degrees of Wikipedia.”

(2)  SixDegrees.com was an early social networking site based on this concept.

(3)  In 2007, Kevin Bacon launched SixDegrees.org, a web site that builds on the popularity of this idea to create a charitable social network and inspire giving to charities online.

(4)  A Facebook platform application named “Six Degrees” has been developed which calculates the degrees of separation between different people.  It has about 4.5 million users (as of April 7, 2008), and the average separation for all users of the application is 5.73 degrees.

(5)  The UK-based game company Mind Candy is currently testing the theory by distributing a picture of a Japanese man named Satoshi.