Just about everyone knows the game "Six degrees of Kevin Bacon", where one has to get from a specific film star to Bacon within six steps, using other stars who have acted together, but did you know there are only six degrees of separation between Internet users too?
A recent experiment has proven that it takes, on average, five to seven steps to contact a total stranger purely using online contacts.
A team at Columbia University enlisted 61 000 people in 166 countries and asked them to find one of 18 people - an arbitrary stranger to them - using their friends and contacts on the Internet.
Incredibly, it took so few steps for the participants, who forwarded the requests to people they knew whom they anticipated would be closer to the target, to reach people as diverse as an archival inspector in Estonia, a technology consultant in India, a policeman in Australia and a veterinarian in the Norwegian Army.
A recent experiment has proven that it takes, on average, five to seven steps to contact a total stranger purely using online contacts.
Rodney Weidemann, Journalist, ITWeb
The researchers say the experiment proves what a small world it truly is, and how connected people actually are, even when they are unaware of the connections.
Well, now we know how easily strangers can be found using the online medium, but just how quickly does the global communications network operate?
An experiment conducted on Highveld Stereo recently saw Jeremy Mansfield and his team attempt to send an e-mail all the way around the world during the three-hour timespan of the morning show.
While this particular experiment eventually ran aground, thanks to vastly differing time zones, the message managed to traverse Africa, much of Asia, Australia, New Zealand and part of North America, before eventually coming to a halt, and all of this well inside the three-hour mark.
The point of this experiment was purely fun on the part of the Rude Awakening team, but it certainly illustrates the speed of today`s technology.
Once upon a time it would have taken many weeks for such a message to traverse the globe, these days it is more like a case of "Around the World in 80 Minutes", to paraphrase Jules Verne.
As for what the "Six Degrees" experiment illustrates, the sociologists who conducted it say it illustrates how social networks operate and how global they have become, proving that the Internet really is the tool of the future in terms of networking.
As far as I`m concerned, all it does is illustrate that you`re actually a whole lot closer to a bunch of potentially crazy total strangers than you may have thought before you read this column.
Now I know how Kevin Bacon feels.
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