The Third Link: Six degrees of Separation

A Brief Summary
In 1967, Stan Milgram, a professor at Harvard did a research to discover the distance between any two people in the United States. According to his research, he found that the median number of intermediate persons was 5.5. However, when John Guare made this into a Broadway musical (and eventually it was made into a movie), he applied this "six degrees of separation to the whole world, changing it from the research of Milgram, which was limited within the United States. This created a myth among the people.
However, while the six degrees theory maybe a myth considering the whole world, Milgram's theory made one thing clear; that our world is connected in which no one is more than a few handshakes away. Barbasi claims our world is small "because society is a very dense web".

To see if the web society works in a similar way, Barbasi cooperated with Reka Albert and Hawoong Jeong to research how many clicks of the mouse it would take from one web page to another. They found that it took "19 degrees of Separation" for this task.


Personal Reaction
This theory of "six degrees of separation" was extremely interesting, and although it is still hard to believe the medium is 6 people, (personally I think 42 letters out of 160 is too small to make the assumption a theory) it certainly proved that our society is much denser than I'd have thought it to be.