Only Six Clicks Away From Reaching Whoever You Want





Most of you are familiar with the six degrees of separation theory where everyone on the planet is reacheable through six people. You call your friend in Boston, who is a friend of someone in Paris, who is related to someone in Lyon, who knows the mayor, who once studied with the Pope.



Now the theory has been applied to the internet. I would have thought if anything that the ability to connect would have been greatly reduced to three or four degrees of separation.



From theage.com.au - The Age:



"Email users are only six mouse-clicks away from anyone else in cyberspace, a team including two Australian researchers at New York's Columbia University has found.

Drawing on the six degrees of separation theory, the experiment involved more than 60,000 participants in 166 countries who registered online.



Volunteers were asked to begin an email chain to reach 18 'target' people in 13 countries, including Australia.



Each person in the chain was to forward the email to someone they thought would get it closer to the target. Although some message chains died out, researchers found that emails could reach their targets in an average of five to seven steps.



'This study was based on a much older study conducted by Stanley Milgram in the 1950s and out of which the phrase 'six degrees of separation' is likely to have arisen,' said researcher Duncan Watts, who studied physics at the Australian Defence Force Academy before further study in the US.



Associate Professor Watts said the internet allowed researchers to gather detailed information from a large number of participants. "