The old saying that everyone in the world is only 6 people away
from knowing everyone else is a well known saying. The argument
is, everyone is linked to each other whether it be via friends,
family, co-workers, acquaintances, one way or another, you are 6
people away from knowing someone. But new research has said that
it may now be nearly half that at only 3.74 degrees (how you get
.74 of a human being I’m not quite sure…). But why the sudden
increase in social awareness and contacts world wide? You
guessed it, social media! Primarily Facebook. In May of this
year, Facebook conducted a study on active members in an effort
to see if the rumour of separation was true at 6 or if modern
life had indeed made it easier to communicate with people world
wide. The experiment, carried out by Facebooks data curator,
Lars Backstrom on all active Facebook members (ie, had logged in
once in 28 days). Using social network data of 721 million
members, he had roughly 10% of the world wide population to test
the theory upon.