SIX DEGREES OF SEPARATION

SIX DEGREES OF SEPARATION

Six degrees of separation is an idea that states that all people are connected through six or fewer social connections.

This idea was first proposed in 1929 by a Hungarian author and poet named Frigyes Karinthy. Karinthy once wrote a short story titled 'Chains,' In it, one of the characters challenges the others to find any person on earth to whom he cannot connect through fewer than five intermediaries.

This was the origin of the six degrees of separation.

To truly appreciate the beauty of this idea, we must look at an example. Imagine you have 45 friends, and each of those friends has 45 friends who are not also your friends, and each of them has an additional 45 friends. Each of whom has an additional 45 friends who again have 45 friends, and they have 45 more.

Then in less than six steps, you would be connected to 8.3 billion people, more than the people present on earth today.

This theory has opened us to countless possibilities. A commoner may be connected to the Queen or Jeff Bezos, but these might be the easy ones; what about a shop-owner in Brazil or an office employee in America ? This theory really means that any two people worldwide are connected through less than six steps.

This theory remained just fiction until, in the 1960s, a Harvard psychologist Stanley Milgram tried to prove it. He picked people from several U.S. cities and asked them to forward the letters to get them to reach a specific person.

This experiment wasn't largely successful, but of those few letters that managed to make it, the average number of connections was six.

Three decades later, a couple of college kids invented a game called six degrees of Kevin Bacon, in which you try to connect any actor to Kevin Bacon ( the famous Hollywood star) through just six steps. Bacon once claimed to have worked with everyone in Hollywood, hence, his central role in this game. The vast majority of actors are connected to Kevin Bacon through less than six connections.

These examples tell us how well connected our world is, but they don't tell us what's under the hood; how does such inter-connectedness occur? In the modern world, we often tend to be friends with people near us and form clusters.

If this were always the case, it would take thousands of steps to reach around the world, yet, somehow, the world is so well connected. The reason behind this is random acquaintances.

People rarely benefit from their small social groups as their friends will be friends with each other; rather, people are much more likely to benefit from a random acquaintance. It is through them that one can get connections with people very far from their social circles.

This is what makes six degrees of separation possible.

A researcher named Granovetter published a paper called the strength of weak ties, in which he points out the importance of these weak connections with random people.

With the advent of Facebook and Snapchat, our social circles have expanded exponentially. Many believe that the number of steps has dropped to four degrees. This theory has fascinated people for nearly a century, not only because of how bizarre it is but also because of how reassuring it is to know how closely humanity is connected.

The fact that in this world with 7.26 billion people, you can meet anyone with just six steps. It truly is a small world.