Carl Bialik’s Wall Street Journal blog The Numbers Guy takes a look at the whole six degrees of separation phenomenon that I discussed at length a couple of weeks ago. In my posts, I discussed ways to eliminate degrees of separation between individuals, mainly through the Internet or Web.

Carl looks specifically at the Microsoft Messenger experiment of June 2006 which tried to calculate an average degrees of separation between Messenger users. The Messenger study arrived at a value close to 7.

If you believed news reports this week, you’d think that the six-degrees theory — first advanced in a test using the mail in 1967 — had been proven. Microsoft researchers announced that a study of the company’s instant-message traffic in June 2006 showed that the average number of people needed to bridge any pair of users was 6.6. The median number was 7, and the longest was 29.

The authors readily agreed with me that this is far from proof of the average distance between any two people on Earth. Some limitations of the study cause it to overstate our connectedness, while others serve to understate it. Still, the Microsoft numbers represent a major advance in our knowledge about the fragmentary nature of the online population, and certainly are more rigorous than the original six-degrees experiment from more than four decades ago.

Carl brings up the very reasonable point that these are imperfect experiments. The tools to accurately measure degrees of separation would be tough to find and implement.

Does that mean that the whole theory is hogwash?

No.

It means that we don’t know for sure and we can’t prove it for certain. And that’s OK.

Maybe it’s better to start off on the premise that we are all connected in some way and then try to figure out how. Whether it’s 1 degree or 1 million degrees, the vast majority of us are connected in some way.

Not to mention the fact that we are all connected by the facts that we share the same planet and have the same basic biological needs. Unless, of course, you’re reading this from some other planet or construct in some point in the future, in which case you can stop laughing at your primitive ancestor.

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