Reality TV And Six Degrees

http://abcnews.go.com/Primetime/Story?id=2717038&page=1

This article discusses a new reality tv show that pits two people against each other in a race to connect to a third person. The It’s a Small World After All experiments once again found six degrees of separation to be the norm as several thousand people participated in an experiment across over 100 countries. The two people the pitted against each other were intended to come from completely different backgrounds in all meanings of the word. It was a fun spin on the basic idea of the connectedness of all people’s social networks.

Although the TV show idea mimicked Milgram's experiment, it was also flawed in some ways. First of all, it worked via e-mail, and it is clear that not everyone in the world uses e-mail or even has access to the Internet or even a computer. Also, people cannot be 100% sure to find the shortest path between themselves and the person they are looking for. In class, we learned that although we can most of the time find a short path between ourselves, sometimes it is not the shortest path.

In many blog posts, social networking sites such as facebook have been mentioned, but it seems people have forgotten about friendster. The now debunk social-networking site used to tell people exactly how they are connected to another person via the "friends" they had on the site. I think this sort of "graphing" of nodes and edges is the only way to ensure finding the shortest path between people. Although Milgram's experiment and the one done on TV in this example show 6 degrees of separation, it may be even less. We might even be able to find 5 degrees of separation between us all if only we knew how to look...