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Six Degrees of Separation

The distance between us

Posted in Arts and culture on Monday, January 24, 2005

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How often do you hear: “Oh, man… it’s such a small world!...” Or how about situations when suddenly your jaw drops when the person you’re conversing with happens to know someone you know, but the coincidence of that actually being true is mind boggling? And think about how many times you started to think how you can reach someone you don’t know through people you know.

Well, however strangely small the world might have seemed to you, and however hard you might think it is to reach a random person on the globe, know that you need no more than six people to contact anyone else in this world.

This is a concept that was proven and defined more than 40 years ago, a concept which, through time, has acquired an official name: “Six Degrees of Separation”. Stanley Milgram , a famous sociologist, was the initiator of a simple action, that of sending of letters and packages from person to person, having access to only general details of the recipient (such as name, location, and approximate profession). What’s important to specify is that the sender did not have the EXACT address of the recipient and did not know that person; he recipient could receive it through the minimum number of intermediaries. Every experimental chain has returned a common fact: the package reached its destination going through no more than six people.

Since 1967 when the experiment was finalized, different variations of the theory have been developed, different urban myths were built with this concept at its core, and the theme is not only found in movies (Six Degrees of Separation, 1993), but in books (“The Tipping Point” by Malcolm Gladwell ), as well as treaties on social connectivity. There are also anti-theories, but it all tallies up in favor of Milgram.

I personally find it interesting to know that the distance between us all is scientifically verified to be smaller than we might imagine. Following that logic, I think it’s encouraging to proceed towards contacting someone you admire; there are big chances that you are closer to their sphere of influence than you know. By the same token, you can also conclude that your positive attitude can influence a stranger, the same way as someone’s negativity that you see displayed in a different country can reach you in a matter of at most… six people. We can then better understand how ideas are born and travel as currents, sometimes according to principles which escape our immediate intuition and logic. We like to assign colossal significations to coincidences, and I hope not to completely take away from their beauty once we stop and evaluate how “Six Degrees of Separation” comes into play, if it does at all.

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