6 degrees of separation – the idea that anyone in the world can be reached in an average of six steps starting with you contacting someone you know, they contacting someone they know etc.
This was the subject of a fascinating program on the BBC (see here www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p02pc9qx/episodes/downloads, available for the next month) about social network mapping versus influence, the friendship paradox and trying to see if there are really on average six steps to get in contact with someone you don’t know through your friends’ network (in this case, someone on a Scottish island).
The idea is that in this social-media world the degrees of separation should be measurable by mapping contacts across a network. However, the interest is not in whether or not there are six degrees of separation between yourself and anyone else, but does it correlate with your influence on that person?
Other than the brilliant punchline, I can recommend the program for its research and discussion presented in under thirty minutes about how to influence via social networks of any kind. Though based on a limited example, these showed ambiguous results – while social network mapping has interesting effects once you learn about the limitations of your own network (like travel to a foreign country broadens the mind), the investigating algorithms fail at tightly-knit shared-interest communities (the “Bieber holes”), and they aren’t a good predictor of actual influence. What was more, the search for effective and efficient influence, measured by comparing three methods of influence (random 5% of people in a group, the top 5% measured by how many friends they have, and the best friend of the random 5%) showed that the last, utilising the “friendship paradox”, was the best.
A couple of examples:
1) the “Romeo and Juliet” network effect. Two groups (like the families of the famous lovers) don’t get on and don’t communicate. Any influence on one group from the other must go through Romeo/Juliet, which makes them key influencers.
2) Another variant is known as the “A-B-C” network, where A and C can be influenced at the same time only through B; and so if A has something from which C would benefit, it won’t spread until B gets involved.
3) the amount of influence you exert may be because you have more friends, or because your friends are all friends together, but not necessarily because your reach (number of friends plus their friends) is greater, given only one center point for your interest network relating to the subject.
Other use(lesse)s include the “Kevin Bacon number” and more to be found on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_degrees_of_separation.
