Six degrees is a claim that between any two people on earth, no matter how far apart, you can find a path. This path runs from one person to another, from you to any target person. You might not be aware of this path, but it is there. Sometimes the path takes two steps to reach any unknown target person, sometimes it takes eight steps, but on average it takes 6 steps.
Think of society as a bunch of people who have acquaintances. Everybody has friends, from work, from school, from sports, your relatives and so on. Say you know 200 people on a first name basis and all of those 200 people each know another 200 people. In two handshakes you’d be able to meet anybody in a range of 200 times 200 people. In six handshakes this range would widen up to a staggering 64 trillion people. Of course the situation is a bit more complicated, because some of our friend’s friends are our friends as well. So the number doesn’t increase as fast, but what is clear, there is a huge number of friends of friends
The problem always was that you had no idea who was connected to who. You’d have to ask every person and ask them to tell you who their acquaintances are. Nowadays, technology has made mapping of these networks possible. Think of all the social networking sites availible. These sites all show who is connected to who. The information is not complete, as only relatively few people subscribed to these services, subscriptions are scattered over different services, and only a small part of acquaintances are connected, but a lot of connections are there. Most social networking-software shows you the shortest route from one person to another. This could be very valuable information. So my question to you is: to what use are you putting this information?
Image
I found an example in O’REILLY’s Release 2.0 Magazine of April 2007. The Article “Channeling Crowds” tells about the opportunities of the merge of online prediction markets and social networks. In social networks, people are having conversations about certain music, movie actors, fashion trends, sports, politics and numerous other topic. The conversations about these topic can reveal information about popularity, likes and dislikes. If you are able to aggregate, assess, and distill the group knowledge and opinion you can come up with fascinating collective hunches. By listening to the community you can get useful information about a product or marketingcampaign’s chance for success.
“The marriage of prediction markets and social networks remind us that conversations are markets, too”
Often times called: the Wisdom of the Crowds. However, I’m not sure if it will tell anything about a product or campaign. It will tell you something about the community. So the success should only be related to the success in that community.
Other question: social networking sites that are based on the six degrees of separation, will make you find the people that are somehow related to you. I wonder if that relation crosses culture and values. Meaning: in the mathematics sense the argument of the six degrees of separation ofcourse holds true, but does it really in reality? It would mean that in six handshakes I will get to Osama Bin Laden? Is that really true? Will I get in touch with other opinions, perspectives, customs, cultures, etc that easily? I doubt it. Isn’t it because of this system of people knowing people that more extreme opinions are being developed just because people don’t get in touch with other minded people?
And that poses a question I raised before: shouldn’t the wisdom of the crowd be about diversity instead of ’sameness’?