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WASHINGTON: It really is a small world. The idea that there are only six degrees of separation — only a handful of people between you and anyone else in the world — holds true on the Internet, researchers said on Thursday.
An experiment in which Internet users were asked to find any one of 18 strangers by using their online connections showed it took, on average, only five to seven steps using friends and acquaintances.
The results, published this week in the journal Science, illustrate how social networks operate and show they have become truly global, the team at Columbia University said.
“The Internet is just a tool for doing this. It is all about social networks,” said Duncan Watts, who led the study.
The findings can shed light on epidemics, cultural fads stock markets and organizations surviving change, he said. “This notion of a small world can explain all sorts of connections,” he said.
Two men, one in Croatia and one in Indonesia, proved the most elusive, while a Cornell University professor got the most hits, Watts said in a telephone interview.
“You might think this guy is really special,” said Watts. “(But) I know the guy pretty well. He is a normal guy. He is not particularly gregarious. He doesn’t travel very much. We had other people we thought clearly were more connected than him.”
People are more likely to try to find people they think will be easy to find, said Watts, who calls himself a mathematical sociologist.
“We realized the demographics of our users — they were US-based and heavily college-educated,” he said. “People get the name of a professor and they say, ‘This is easy, I could see how this would work’ and they do it. Whereas if they get someone whose name they can’t pronounce in a country they can’t point to on a map, they say ‘I don’t know.’”
MORE THAN 60,000 SEEKERS: Watts and colleagues signed up more than 61,000 people from 166 countries for their experiment.
They were asked to reach one of 18 people, including an archival inspector in Estonia, a technology consultant in India, a policeman in Australia and a veterinarian in the Norwegian Army.
“Participants were informed that their task was to help relay a message to their allocated target by passing the message to a social acquaintance whom they considered ‘closer’ than themselves to the target,” the researchers wrote.
On average it took five to seven intermediate steps.
His team is conducting another experiment, outlined on the Internet at http://smallworld.columbia.edu/.
The idea of six degrees of separation first arose in 1967 when US psychologist Stanley Milgram wrote about “small world” theory in Psychology Today magazine.
Milgram found that volunteers in Nebraska and Kansas were able to contact strangers in Massachusetts using a network of friends, business contacts and acquaintances.
The theory took on new life with “The Kevin Bacon Game,” which uses actor Kevin Bacon as the “target” and other film stars as intermediate steps, and a Broadway play called “Six Degrees of Separation” about a con artist.—Reuters
