How many degrees of separation?

It was in the late 1960s that the psychologist, Stanley Milgram, ran his small experiment to determine how many steps it would take for 160 people living in Omaha, Nebraska to use their social acquaintances to direct a mail package to a stockbroker located in Boston, Massachusetts. On average, he found the exercise took five to six stages of social contacts to eventually result in the mail packages arriving to the stockbroker. This result led to the concept of six degrees of separation.

In an interconnnected world, now dominated by convergent technology in telecommunications and the internet, the six degrees of separation paradigm would appear to be shifting to a series of cross connections which may mean in many respects that six degrees may often be much less.

In a simple example of this new interconnected reality, I placed a simple quiz on one of the latest social networking sites, Facebook and uploaded it to the main directory of the site. The number of quizzes on Facebook runs into the hundreds and so this item could be easily lost. Without any marketing or promotion, just interconnected communities of people, over 42,000 persons undertook the quiz online spread throughout a dozen different countries over two weeks. All of this was effectively electronic word of mouth and social networking.