Six degrees of separation examples
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The biggest problem is Leskovec and Horvitz’s assumption that instant messaging between two people can be considered a marker of a relationship.People behave differently online than they do offline:
#Six degrees of separation examples Offline#
The problem, though, is that it is hard to generalise from an online to an offline environment. Leskovec and Horvitz claim their work supports Milgram’s theory that each of us is only separated from anyone else by six jumps. They analysed data collected by Microsoft from 30 billion instant messages sent around the world in one month in 2006.Įxamining this data – the largest social network ever analysed – they found that the average number of hops between any two instant messenger users was 6.6 – slightly higher than Milgram’s finding. Where are the factory operatives or convenience store workers in this sample? New study: 6.6 degrees of separationīut a new study carried out by Leskovec and Horvitz for Microsoft Research addresses some of these points since they used data that cuts across geographical and class boundaries. Also, like Milgram’s study, the targets were relatively visible in society, one was a vet, another a policeman, another a technology consultant.
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Unfortunately this email replication had the same problem as Milgram’s original study – many chains simply broke down. They found that successful chains were completed in between 5 and 7 steps, similar to Milgram’s results. All together more than 60,000 people took part. Emailers were asked to try and forward a message to one of 18 target people in 13 different countries, going via their friends and acquaintances. In 2003, though, some support for Milgram’s idea was found by Duncan Watts and colleagues at Columbia University, in a paper published in Science.
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Real life is probably not as incestuous as the worlds of actors or mathematicians. Kleinfeld points out that Milgram’s claim for the six-degrees of separation could be an academic myth. Mathematicians also have a version in which they trace each other back to the eccentric Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdos through shared publications. The theory inspired the trivia game ‘ Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon‘ in which participants try to link any given actor back to an appearance with Kevin Bacon in as few moves as possible. Milgram’s work eased itself into the popular imagination with it’s optimistic message that each of us is only a few social steps away from everyone else in the world. Milgram took this study, along with other research, to demonstrate that we really do live in a small world. Six degrees of Kevin Bacon and Paul Erdos Milgram found that on average it would take 5.2 intermediaries for his letter to go from the first person to its destination, via each person’s social network. Then on and on it would go until it reached the target. So, for example, if the first recipient, who lived in Nebraska, knew anyone at all in Massachusetts, they would send it to them. The letter asked the first random receiver to forward it to someone who might be more likely to know the target person, but it had to be someone they were on first-name terms with.