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Has the internet shrunk our world?įifty percent of the world’s population actively and regularly uses the internet, and it is often said that social media use brings connectedness. On top of that, Derek has no idea how many email chains were started but never successfully reached him. But let’s be clear: people who watch science videos aren’t a random selection to begin with. At the time Derek reported back, about 750,000 people had watched his video and he received 350 emails, with an average of only 2.75 steps in each email chain. Science YouTuber Derek Muller pondered the science of six degrees and ended his video with a challenge: he asked his viewers to try and get an email to him by only contacting people they knew and had met in person. They found that the average path length among Messenger users was 6.6. They analysed 30 billion Instant Messaging conversations among 240 million people from the month of June 2006. Microsoft had a go at testing the theory too. But right on target: the typical chain length was between five and seven. More than 224,000 email chains started, and only 384 arrived in the prescribed inbox.
#Kevin bacon degrees of separation archive
These included an Australian police officer, a Norwegian army vet and an Estonian archive inspector. They asked more than 61,000 volunteers from 166 countries to use their email networks to reach one of 18 different target people. In 2003, researchers at Columbia University set out to test the six degrees theory using email. Enter email, Instant Messaging and YouTube And although Bacon apparently didn’t like the game initially, he later launched a website to bring together people who want to support good causes. So does it hold up? According to the Oracle of Bacon, Kevin Bacon has appeared in films with 3,031 actors and more than 99% of 1.91 million other actors have a Bacon number of five or less. There are also Six Degrees apps that allow you to explore the number of degrees of separation between any two actors. The game led to the Oracle of Bacon, where you can find out the Bacon number for any actor, director or producer you care to name. The aim of the game is to link Kevin Bacon to anyone in the Hollywood film industry via their film roles in six or fewer steps.Īs a result, the Bacon number of an actor is the number of degrees of separation he or she has from Kevin Bacon. They came up with the idea after Kevin Bacon suggested he had worked with everyone in Hollywood. In 1994, three college students created the game Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. And we have no idea how many links there were in the chains that never successfully reached their target: the stockbroker only received 64 packages. For example, two hundred of the original people weren’t randomly selected at all: 100 were stockbrokers and 100 lived in Boston. In fact, Milgram’s research has been heavily criticised. The result? On average it took 6.2 links to reach the Boston target.īam! Is that all the proof we need for our six degrees theory? Not so fast. Stanley Milgram asked 300 randomly-selected people to attempt to send a package to a particular stockbroker living in Boston via their acquaintances. The first research to test this ‘ Small World Problem’ was published in the 60s. Do you know 45 people? Do each of those 45 people know another 45 people that you don’t know etc? If this were true for everyone on Earth, in just six steps any one person could theoretically be connected to 8.3 billion people – more than the 7.4 billion alive today. The game is a familiar one: can you link any two people on earth by no more than five individuals?īasic maths tells us this idea is certainly plausible. In it, one of the characters suggests a game to test whether the population of Earth is closer than ever before. In 1929, Hungarian writer Frigyes Karinthy published his short story Chains. Six degrees of Kevin Bacon It’s a small world