Separation Anxiety

Back in 1967, City University of New York social psychology professor Stanley Milgam, with the efforts of 296 volunteers, showed how closely people from all over the earth were actually linked (the famous “six degrees of separation”): “In the experiment, Milgram sent several packages to 160 random people living in Omaha, Nebraska, asking them to forward the package to a friend or acquaintance who they thought would bring the package closer to a set final individual, a stockbroker from Boston, Massachusetts. Each ‘starter’ received instructions to mail a folder via the U.S. Post Office to a recipient, but with some rules...

“Starters could only mail the folder to someone they actually knew personally on a first-name basis. When doing so, each starter instructed their recipient to mail the folder ahead to one of the latter's first-name acquaintances with the same instructions, with the hope that their acquaintance might by some chance know the target recipient. Given that starters knew only the target recipient's name and address, they had a seemingly impossible task...

“Milgram monitored the progress of each chain via returned ‘tracer’ postcards, which allowed him to track the progression of each letter. Surprisingly, he found that the very first folder reached the target in just four days and took only two intermediate acquaintances. Overall, Milgram reported that chains varied in length from two to ten intermediate acquaintances, with a median of five intermediate acquaintances (i.e. six degrees of separation) between the original sender and the destination recipient.” Wikipedia. Whew!

But that “small world” experiment was before the Internet and, more importantly, social networking, and, even more importantly, the massive influence of one particular network: Facebook. A new scientific study, through the combined efforts of researchers from both Facebook and the University of Milan traced relationships within a universe of 721 Facebook users that literally ran through 69 billion lines of “friends” to produce the latest results, released on November 21^st: “The experiment took one month. The researchers used a set of algorithms developed at the University of Milan to calculate the average distance between any two people by computing a vast number of sample paths among Facebook users. They found that the average number of links from one arbitrarily selected person to another was 4.74. In the United States, where more than half of people over 13 are on Facebook, it was just 4.37.” New York Times, November 21^st.

Not everyone buys into the metrics used in this study, however, and the notion of who really is a genuine “friend” (other than a fairly loose definition thereof in Facebook-speak) challenges the veracity of the results: “A Microsoft study in 2008, using a more conservative definition of friend, found an average chain of 6.6 people in a group of 240 million who exchanged chat messages. Eric Horvitz, a Microsoft researcher who led the study in 2008, said that network was based on people who exchanged messages, rather than those who identified as ‘buddies.’… ‘There is an issue of how many friends you actually have,’ he said. But, he said, the Internet might have altered the definition...

“Jon Kleinberg, a computer science professor at Cornell [who believes some] links might be more meaningful than others… offered the example of a man wanted for a crime. A random Facebook user might discover that she took a class with someone who rented an apartment from someone who grew up with the suspect. They may all be connected as Facebook ‘friends.’

“We are close, in a sense, to people who don’t necessarily like us, sympathize with us or have anything in common with us,” Dr. Kleinberg said. “It’s the weak ties that make the world small.” … Still, he noted that such ties were hardly meaningless. ‘We should ask what things spread well on weak ties,’ he said. ‘News spreads well on weak ties. Those people I met on vacation, if they send me some cool news, I might send that to my friends. If they send me something about a protest movement, I might not.’” NY Times. Hey, maybe Milgram’s initial study is still valid. What do you think?

I’m Peter Dekom, and I have to admit, I’d probably be more comfortable with ten degrees of separation, actually.