You know, you can't always trust conventional wisdom.

The following is a blog post discussing how the Six Degrees of separation is “an urban myth”. The author claims that over time, information gets lost or distorted and that the Six Degrees of Separations has fallen victim to this. According to the article, people neglect to acknowledge that in Milgram's experiment, only 29% of people successfully sent their package to their target; the other 71% failed. This shows that not everyone is connected by six-degrees of separation and that only a minority of people can rely on their connections to extend far. He then ties this back to the business world where he recommends that one should connect oneself with people who are well-connected and are in the 29% minority.

http://networking.entrepreneur.com/2009/04/09/six-degrees-of-separation-why-you-cant-always-trust-conventional-wisdom/

This also goes back to some of the experiments/games we've done in class. For instance, the other day one student had to try to find the shortest path to another random student through her network of friends in the course. To make the task easier and more likely to work, we were told that we can assume we knew the people sitting next to us. However, this is not always true. It is very likely that someone does not have any direct connection to any other student in the class. This is true especially if they are in a completely different area of study and/or are just not very social (they could just be randomly taking the class...right?). Either way, if we didn't make the assumption that every student sits by someone they know in class, the experiment had a chance of failing and would not guarantee success every time.

I liked this article, but only to a point. Some of the topics that we come across the like Milgram experiment I tend to think “no way” when I learn about the theoretical results at first. This article gets at that, but I don’t think it validly disproves the theory. Just because only 21% of the people got their letters to the recipient doesn’t mean that the other 79% couldn’t have. If the first person, and consequently the people after, made better decisions (or perhaps more informed decisions) they could have possibly also succeeded. There is a big difference in saying a theory didn’t work in one instance and saying something won’t work.

I agree that the theory of six degrees of separation does not always hold true. For instance, what would happen if in the Milgram experiment, the original recipient was asked to send the letter to someone in a rural village in a third world country? Even with globalization meaning we now have more access to foreign countries, there is a big difference between sending someone a letter to someone who lives in the same country, and sending a letter to someone in a completely different country, culture, language, caste system, etc. I think one of the points of the Milgram experiment was to prove that social barriers are not necessarily as strong as we think, but I think there is more isolation than six degrees.

I would agree that six degrees of separation is not always possible especially when considering other countries and continents. But in terms of online connectivity I think its interesting to look at a facebook application called Six Degrees.

Here is the excerpt from Wikipedia.

A Facebook platform application named “Six Degrees” has been developed by Karl Bunyan (London network), which calculates the degrees of separation between different people. It has about 4.5 million users (as of April 7, 2008), as seen from the group's page. The average separation for all users of the application is 5.73 degrees, whereas the maximum degree of separation is 12. The application has a "Search for Connections" window to input any name of a Facebook user, to which it then shows the chain of connections.

As you can see, even if in Milgrams experiments, only 29% made it to the recipient, on Facebook the average path is 5.73. Of course this is the shortest path but in terms of Facebook members, it is interesting to see that we are so closely related. Conventional wisdom still might apply if certain restrictions are known.