When I started teaching a
blogging class at my library I became fascinated with this concept. (Not as enchanted as I was with WYSIWYG – I
mean how can you not be charmed by an apparently random group of letters that
actually means something and is super fun to say out loud?)
Nevertheless “six degrees of
separation” is a fascinating idea and I used it in the class to demonstrate the
potential impact of the students’ blogs as well as the interconnectedness of
humans – something that has perhaps grown exponentially since the advent of the
world wide web.
You’ve probably heard of it,
right? According to Wikipedia, six
degrees of separation “is the idea that everyone is approximately 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, on average,
to connect any two people in six steps.” It was championed by Frigyes Karinthy in
his 1929 short story, Chains and
popularized by a play written in 1990 by John Guare, later turned into a film.
Various experiments have been conducted to try to prove the theory, both
mathematically and socially, and while no definitive proof is there, the
results tend to support it. And there is
Network Theory, which looks at how networks form and work in society, not just
in people’s social lives, but also in disease transmission, job searching, how
the web works and so on.
Six degrees of separation seems to go along with the phrase “small world”,
something we say a lot as in, “Man, it’s a small world!” and “What a small
world, isn’t it?” So
it’s not surprising that Columbia University embarked on a project they named
“Small World” in order to test the six degrees of separation theory in
cyberspace using email to send information to a friend, to pass to another
friend, and so on in order to reach a specific targeted person in as few
contacts as possible. This was similar
to the snail mail experiment run by a psychologist in the sixties to test the
theory. Although both experiments were
flawed the results seem to support the six degrees idea.
As far as networks of any kind or many kinds go, we may be intimately
connected to people around the world without knowing it, especially since we
don’t know them! But when we talk about
blogs the world is very, very big.
Statistics show that the average blog is read by perhaps two dozen
people - after all, there are billions of blogs on the world wide web. Hmmm, wonder if we could do an experiment
with connecting people through the blogs they read? Would the six degrees of separation theory
still hold or not?
If you want to read more, check out these websites:
http://www.c6.org/oracle/ The oracle of bacon at Virginia
http://oracleofbacon.org/how.php Kevin
Bacon
http://abcnews.go.com/Primetime/video?id=2724092
Primetime TV tests the six degrees theory
http://www.socialdesignsite.com/content/view/76/73/ Small World
