Have you ever been amazed by the number of people your friend and you have in common on your Facebook friends’ lists? I wonder how he/she knows her/him is probably a thought that frequently crosses your mind. I know it does mine. Now Facebook tells us that each one of us is even more closely connected to each other than we earlier thought. The way that friendship networks of an individual constantly grows larger and encompasses greater physical distances; seems to bear this out.
Six degrees of separation
The theory that everyone in the world is separated by just six steps or is just six introductions away, so to speak was first propounded by Frigyes Karinthy in 1929 and then the concept caught everyone’s fancy when John Gaure wrote his play Six Degrees of Separation in 1990. So the theory was that there is a virtual chain or web created by the friend of your friend, and in turn their friend and so on; so that any two individuals on earth could be connected via 5 other people at most.
3.5 degrees of separation?
Facebook now says that the world is actually connected a lot more closely than this. The social network giant studied the 1.59 billion people that use this platform and said that it isn’t 6 but 3.57 degrees of separation by which human beings are separated. The degrees of separation have actually shrunk over the past five years, say researchers. People in the world are so interconnected now that this distance between people has lessened.
The theory that we are all just 5 individuals away from any other single person on earth is itself fascinating. The possibility that there are now even fewer people required to connect each earthling to any other earthling even more so. It’s a complicated methodology via which the researchers arrived that this figure, but it does seems to make sense, doesn’t it?
With the ability we now have to connect to new people and remain in touch with old acquaintances it doesn’t seem unreasonable that the degrees of separation would have shrunk. For instance many of us can and do connect to friends of friends on social networks because of shared interests or a number of other factors… simply because we can. That’s one degree reduced right there! Seems to me that Facebook is on to something here!
Author – Reena Daruwalla
