The language of connection

Abstract

Researchers at Facebook and the University of Milan have dismissed the idea of 6 degrees of separation between two people and maintain that it has shrunk considerably in the past few years to 4.7 degrees. This may not seem surprising until we realise that the original experiment published in 1967 by the psychologist Stanley Milgram was drawn from 296 volunteers who sent a postcard through friends and then friends of friends to a specific person in a Boston suburb. Facebook together with researchers at the University of Milan performed a study earlier this year using all 721 million active Facebook users. Of course, the quality and level of 'friendship' is of a different order but people are still people and we are clearly getting closer and closer on a global scale.