Since the dawn of humanity, people have needed to band together in order to survive. From the family groups of prehistory to today’s megacities with millions of people living in them, our history and development as a species has been due to the collective effort to survive and thrive. And in this effort, each and every one of us is weaving our own network of contacts, which in turn have their own. And today, when we live in a globalized and interconnected society through networks, it is not impossible to think that we could actually contact anyone.
This thinking has led some researchers to generate different theories that try to reflect the possibility that in reality we are all interconnected. One of the theories that have been used in this regard is the theory of six degrees of separation which we are going to talk about next.
The theory of six degrees of separation: origin and basic idea
The so-called theory of six degrees of separation is a theory that states that any person can be interconnected with any other person anywhere in the world. through a chain of contacts which does not exceed six people, there being only five points of union between the two.
Although it seems like an idea typical of a globalized world like that of today’s society, the truth is that it is a theory that has its origins in the proposal for the first time in 1929, its author being the writer Frigyes Karinthy and appearing in his publication Chains (strings, in English).
The original idea makes sense and is viable: we meet a large number of people throughout our daily lives (subsequent authors such as Watts suggest around a hundred), and they in turn meet many others, who in turn also They will have as many others. In the long run, the number of interconnected people would grow exponentially making it increasingly easier for us to find contacts in common with the target subject over time, and over time if we wanted to send him a message it would be enough to follow said chain.
Social connection points
Now, the fact that only six stops are necessary is more difficult to demonstrate. The specific number of “jumps” was the subject of arduous debate until 1967, when the well-known psychologist Stanley Milgram (the same as Milgram’s experiment on obedience to authority), carried out a series of experiments trying to solve the mystery, in what was called “the small world problem”
In one of them, Milgram gave random people a series of letters to send to an unknown person in Massachusetts, only through their acquaintances. Although many of the letters never arrived, among other things because many participants did not pass them or their contacts did not continue trying, in the cases where they did, an average of six passes was counted.
Milgram’s experiments in this sense could be unrepresentative, but Other investigations were subsequently carried out (and some relatively recent ones, such as one in 2001) that seem to show that the number of jumps required, although not absolute, on average is still around six jumps.
Theory in the information society: six steps (or clicks) away
Time has passed since the theory was first proposed, and there are multiple social and technological advances that have appeared since then. Among them we can find the emergence of the Internet and social networks, which facilitate interaction between people from all over the world. Thus, nowadays it can be even easier to establish contact between people who are very far away and different from each other.
Furthermore, the use of these networks allows not only contact, but also the calculation of the separation between people: LinkedIn or Facebook are examples of this. However, the data obtained demonstrate that the theory of six degrees of separation may have evolved over time, and the distance may be much smaller today. For example, a study by the Universitá degli Studi di Milano and various researchers from Cornell in 2011 reflect that the distance between two people on Facebook is 3.74 people
Other difficulties
We cannot fail to indicate that although this theory may be relatively supported, we must take into account that there are a large number of variables that can interfere with the specific number of jumps: it is not the same to come into contact with someone of the same city that is from another continent, or that has another language.
The difficulty will also vary depending on whether the person is more or less popularly known, or whether or not they share a hobby or a job. Another problem is found in the media: today we can generate more diverse contacts thanks to new technologies but those who do not have them do not enjoy this option.
Finally, it is different to contact someone in a city than in a town with few inhabitants, and if we go to the extreme we can find much more difficulty in contact a subject in situations such as war, extreme poverty or famine. Or if one of the two extremes (the one who initiates the search for contact or the objective of this) is a member of an indigenous tribe or a culture isolated from the rest of the world
The usefulness of this theory
It is possible that reading this theory may seem interesting on an informative level, but the truth is that it is not just a curiosity: it has its usefulness in multiple sectors.
One of them is that of work networks in the business world, in such a way that it allows studying how to form client portfolios and contacts that can facilitate them. It could also be applied in marketing and advertising, when taking into account the formation of chains of contacts when promoting the sale of a service or product. The well-known word of mouth can also be linked to this factor
Finally, we can also find usefulness in the theory of the six degrees of separation at the educational level: it can be used and taken into account in the transmission of prosocial values, prevention programs (for example sexual education, drug prevention or gender violence) or information.
