A neat story in today’s Times points to the paradoxically increasing smallness of our world, in the digital and, maybe, personal sense. We’re getting nearer, one to one another. Or at least some of us are through Facebook and other technologies.
Our average degree of separation is said to be only 4.74, according to a new study posted on-line yesterday, where else but on Facebook? According to the Times report on the Facebook work:
… The researchers used a set of algorithms developed at the University of Milan to calculate the average distance between any two people by computing a vast number of sample paths among Facebook users. They found that the average number of links from one arbitrarily selected person to another was 4.74. In the United States, where more than half of people over 13 are on Facebook, it was just 4.37.
The caveat, of course, is that the study examined connections among people who use Facebook. And that would be some 721 million users, not an insignificant fraction of the world’s population, but hardly a representative sampling.
The report refers to the 1960’s Small World Experiment, an early work of social connectedness by psychologist Stanley Milgram and his then-student, Jeffrey Travers. (And yes, I learned this morning, that would be the same Milgram who orchestrated shocking experiments at Yale). The Small World work harkens back to Hungarian author Karinthy Frigyes, who wrote a 1929 piece translated as Chains, and instigated or at least propagated the six degrees idea through literature.
One thing leads to another…
The medical take, in short: Patients, if they choose to connect, are no longer isolated from others facing the same or similar circumstances. This, potentially, could make a huge difference in outcomes, besides their mean level of happiness.
—
ADVERTISEMENTS: