An Update to Milgram’s Six Degrees: The World is a More Connected Place.
In the opening lectures of the course, we discussed the “Small World Phenomenon,” and famous experiment of Stanley Milgram.
But what does the world look like now?
I recently came across this tweet from Ethan Mollic, an associate professor at Wharton, after it was retweeted by Jordan Ellenberg. It referenced Milgram’s experiment alongside modern equivalents from the digital age.
I was intrigued, and wanted to dig a little deeper. Prof. Mollick’s tweet contained snippets of a couple papers, one of which is Degrees of Separation in Social Networks (Bakhshandeh et. al 2013). The paper uses novel search techniques to find that the average degree of separation between two twitter users is 3.43. From the conclusion:
Social networking is a transformative Internet phenomenon…. Twitter’s 3.43 degree of separation is surprisingly small (or, rather, we were surprised) and perhaps is indicative of changing social norms… It reflects the truism that the world gets smaller every day.
The tweet also included a interesting results from a Facebook Research blog post titled “Three and a Half Degrees of Separation” (Edunov et al. 2016) (link). They found the average degree of separation to be 3.57 (3.46 in the US), down from 3.74 that Cornell researchers found in 2011.
These findings help put mathematical truth to the notion that the world is a more interconnected place. As the world grows more connected by the technologies of the 21st century, we are just beginning to understand how these changes will impact our lives. One can only hope the benefits of bringing us closer digitally will outweigh the costs.
Nathan Blumenfeld is a Junior in the College of Engineering at Cornell University.