Six Degrees of Seperation

Ever heard about the famous phrase "Six Degrees of Seperation"? I first encountered the phrase from a Lonely Planet travel programme which was called "Six Degrees" the title of which was obviously inspired by the phrase. I was randomly surfing the net and reading when the phrase suddenly popped into my brain, so I decided to Google it (one of the new words entered into the Oxford English Dictionary in 2004 as another random bit of trivia) and to check it up on Wikipedia. As a side note, it has always been completely amazing to me how the internet has completely transformed communications and information today. As a small kid, I was well known (or so I am told) for being insatiably curious, and one of my pastimes was to flip randomly through the World Book encyclopedia, looking up random facts. Now, if any random bits of information pop into your head, the resources are always there at your disposal 24/7 and completely instantaneously. The whole technology and information revolution have become concepts that have been made rather hackneyed from overuse, but it we were to just think of it anecedotally, I think we would really find how much it has changed things, in very many subtle ways. I personally cannot live without checking email at least once a day (and oftentimes more like a dozen times a day) nor without checking out the news on the internet. Yet, I remember that I only really had my first email account when I was 15 (less than 8 years ago!). I remember writing up a school project when I was 13 on an old 386 computer with a word perfect programme that did not even have a spell checker, and playing my favourite computer game by inserting a floppy disc and booting it up from DOS. That is completely unimaginable now. I could go on, especially about mobile phones, in particular and about the internet, but I think the general idea is clear, and I have no doubt that every else has their own memories - the more so the older one is. I mean my parents used to type up their essay on Olivetti typewriters for goodness sake!

Just in case you think that the above was a major digression, it isn't. The phrase the "Six Degrees of Seperation" it very closely associated with the idea of human connectedness. The idea is that each person in the world is seperated from any other person by no more than 5 intermediaries. Now, that might seem quite surprising and unbelievable at first - after all there are more than 6 billion people in the world and counting, surely we cannot be that closely related and interconnected. That hypothesis was put to the test by Stanley Milgram, an American Sociologist in 1969, who randomly selected people in the American mid-West and asked them to deliver packages to a complete stranger in Massachusetts. They were given the stranger's name, occupation and general location but not their actual address and were told to send the package on to the person they thought was most likely to know the stranger, and instruct the next person in the chain to do the same. At the end of the study, Milgram found that it only took an average of 5 to 7 intermediaries to deliver the package, inspiring the phrase "Six Degrees of Seperation". This experiment was repeated recently using email as a medium (and extending the scope to 150 odd contries) by a professor at Columbia, who found that it did indeed take on average 6 intermediaries to deliver a message to an unknown receipiant. The full Wikipedia article can be found here. I rememer that as a small child, I sat a ride at Disneyland called "It's A Small World After All" which I enjoyed immensely. There was quite a sense of nostalgia when I sat the same ride recently at Eurodisney in Paris, and finding out about phenomenon like the "Six Degrees of Seperation" gives me an even greater sense of how small the world we live in actually is. Indeed, Milgram called the whole thing the "small world phenomenon" - perhaps as the song goes, it really is a "small small world"