This was 'the first time a planetary-scale social network has been available,' they observed. Researchers at Microsoft studied records of 30 billion electronic conversations among 180 million people in various countries, according to the Washington Post. The news will come as no surprise to film buffs who for years have been playing the parlour game Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, in which they link other actors to Bacon in six films or fewer. In other words, putting fractions to one side, you are linked by a string of seven or fewer acquaintances to Madonna, the Dalai Lama and the Queen. By studying billions of electronic messages, they worked out that any two strangers are, on average, distanced by precisely 6.6 degrees of separation. The theory of six degrees of separation contends that, because we are all linked by chains of acquaintance, you are just six introductions away from any other person on the planet.īut yesterday researchers announced the theory was right - nearly. It’s likely, after all, that the people on Facebook happen to be the particularly social ones, and so it’s possible that a study of the “Six Degrees” phenomenon might reveal different results if also applied to people who do not use the social network.įollow Sarah on Twitter, Facebook, or Google+.In a world of 6.6 billion people, it does seem hard to believe. While this isn’t a bad thing - after all, Facebook has more than 800 million users, it also means that Facebook is extrapolating to find its numbers. It’s important to note that Facebook and the University of Milan’s findings are taken from Facebook’s data. Milgram’s study consisted of just 296 volunteers, and determined that the average number of hops between people was about six - or 5.2 degrees of separation.įacebook acknowledges that its study can’t really be compared with Milgram’s, as Milgram’s subjects had “only limited knowledge of the social network,” while Facebook has “a nearly complete representation of the entire thing.” In other words, it’s possible that a Facebook-esque study in the 1960s would have revealed similar numbers, because Facebook is able to estimate the shortest distance between any two people using its data. The “Six Degrees” concept was first studied by Stanley Milgram in 1967.
0 kommentar(er)
