Six Degrees of Separation

Today, our resource informationalist at school was providing us with various tools to use to best maximize our reader pool when blogging. I was curious to know whether or not my friends were the only ones reading my blogs. So on this blog, The Blak Umbrella, I was looking under the "Stats" tab and found that people from the U.S., Germany, Russia, and even 1 person from Malaysia read, or at least stumbled upon, my blog at one point. As a result, this ultimately got me thinking about the world's interconnectedness. Ostensibly, the internet can have two people across the world connected within a matter of several button pushings and mouse clickings. It's becoming easier and easier to connect with strangers.

For example, chatroulette is a website that allows one to video chat with strangers. At the push of a button, a new stranger will appear.

Omegle is a website where one can simply have a conversation with a stranger. It's like facebook chat except there are no user names, no pictures of you, no webcams, and the amount of personal information you choose to give out is up to your own discretion.

The scary thing is how easy it is to utilize these social websites. You don't need to sign up for anything, nor create a profile. Anyone and everyone can access it as anonymously as they want.

Here's a fun fact that I heard awhile back (not sure if it's true): you pass a person at least 7 times before actually meeting them. I constantly think about this idea when I meet someone new: how many times have I passed you before in my life? This weekend I just met a volleyball coach at a coaching clinic. He looked very familiar and I couldn't help thinking: how many times have our teams been in the same tournaments? Did you go watch USA play Poland this summer too? Were you sitting in front of me? And then another question: do you know my uncle (who is a volleyball coach too)?

I wondered if he knew my uncle because the volleyball world is so small and I couldn't understand where I knew him from. Then I played a game with myself: I wonder how many degrees of separation there is between him and I. Who does he know who has a friend who has a friend who has a friend who is friends with me?

This summer in the magazine Muse, I read about the idea of the six degrees of separation on Facebook. If you were to pick any stranger in the world on facebook, you could most likely find a friend of theirs who has a friend who has a friend (and so on for six times) who is friends with you. I think this theory might be true, especially since I've befriended people on Facebook who live across the country and and yet we have at least 1 mutual friend. If I were to befriend someone from Denmark, I think it could be possible to have on average, a sixth degree of separation with that stranger. Crazy, isn't it? Want to know something crazier? In this ABC article from November this year, Facebook's recent experiements show stats that say the sixth degree is now the 4.74 degree!

Our connectedness as a world shows the power of influence we have on each other, be it through our ideas or simply through our social connections, our interconnectedness makes the world smaller and the strangers on the streets less..strange.


Read more about six degrees on Wikipedia (There are more links if you scroll to the bottom where it says "external links". There are some fascinating ones.)

Read about the "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon" trivia game. That's just funny and yet so incredibly mind-blowing.


Picture source:
http://futurefilm.files.wordpress.com/2010/07/footloose.jpg