You’ve probably heard about the 6 degrees of separation – how everyone knows everyone else (even former presidents or a vocalist of your favorite band) through at most 6 other people who are all friends with each other. This idea can be traced back to 1929 in a story by Frigyes Karinthy, but it wasn’t until the 1950’s that mathematicians (Ithiel de Sola Pool and Manfred Kochen, from MIT and IBM) set out to investigate this idea. Since then, this theory has become increasingly popular and well-recognized as the idea popularized. This includes Stanley Milgram’s “small world problem” randomly selecting people to try to send a package to a specific person in Massachusetts (1967) , followed by a play called “Six Degrees of Separation (1990),” and then the making of the Kevin Bacon Game and the development of the The Oracle of Bacon website, which uses the the Internet Movie Database to calculate the smallest number of connections between any given actor/actress to Kevin Bacon through costars (1996).
In 2011, Twitter and Facebook used their millions of accounts to run an algorithm to find the average smallest number of connections between any two random people. The two platforms averaged around 4.7 and this number just keeps shrinking as social media just keeps expanding.
Originally posted on Instagram August 17, 2018
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