The Six Degrees of Separation Sensation Cannot Be Proven Using Raw Data From Social Media
Anyone who has ever considered the philosophical theory of 6-degrees of separation has contemplated whether that is true in their own life.
In other words do you know someone, who knows someone, who knows someone, who knows another person, that knows a certain aborigine in Australian outback? Well, maybe you do, and maybe there are only 6-degrees of separation between you and everyone else on this planet.
It would be interesting to test out that theory wouldn't it, to know for sure? In the Mercury News on August 15, 2011 there was an interesting article titled "Yahoo uses Facebook to test six degrees of separation," by Mike Swift.
The article stated; "Yahoo and Facebook are joining forces to test an iconic 1960s-era social experiment that showed there are just six degrees of separation between most people on the planet.
" Now then, I would submit to you that using raw data from Facebook or any other social network will not prove anything, and the data will be skewed.
There are two reasons why I say this, and the first reason is I don't believe that six-degrees of separation truly separate the human race anymore considering that there are 7 billion people on the planet, and nearly 3,000,000,000 people are now online.
Meaning that maybe there is only three, four, or five-degrees of separation thanks to the Internet and current technologies.
Secondly, I would submit to you that just because someone has "friended you" on their Facebook page, doesn't mean they actually know you, or that you know anything about them.
That doesn't mean that you couldn't somehow give them a message, if you knew who they were to jump the gap from 6 to 3-degrees of separation.
But, since you don't know whom all those people are who are, who your friends on Facebook, the chances are that even if the data in this research project proves positive, it still won't prove or dismiss the six-degrees of separation theory.
As you know, there are folks on Twitter, and Facebook, perhaps celebrities who have hundreds of thousands of followers, but that doesn't mean they know more than even 1 or 2% of those people in the real world.
Therefore the only way to prove this theory is to limit those in the test case who have less than 1000 friends, or use the average number of friends, and cut that in half.
And then work on that separation relationship question using more accurate data.
This fits within the realm of possibility.
Anyway, indeed I hope you will please consider all this and think on it.
In other words do you know someone, who knows someone, who knows someone, who knows another person, that knows a certain aborigine in Australian outback? Well, maybe you do, and maybe there are only 6-degrees of separation between you and everyone else on this planet.
It would be interesting to test out that theory wouldn't it, to know for sure? In the Mercury News on August 15, 2011 there was an interesting article titled "Yahoo uses Facebook to test six degrees of separation," by Mike Swift.
The article stated; "Yahoo and Facebook are joining forces to test an iconic 1960s-era social experiment that showed there are just six degrees of separation between most people on the planet.
" Now then, I would submit to you that using raw data from Facebook or any other social network will not prove anything, and the data will be skewed.
There are two reasons why I say this, and the first reason is I don't believe that six-degrees of separation truly separate the human race anymore considering that there are 7 billion people on the planet, and nearly 3,000,000,000 people are now online.
Meaning that maybe there is only three, four, or five-degrees of separation thanks to the Internet and current technologies.
Secondly, I would submit to you that just because someone has "friended you" on their Facebook page, doesn't mean they actually know you, or that you know anything about them.
That doesn't mean that you couldn't somehow give them a message, if you knew who they were to jump the gap from 6 to 3-degrees of separation.
But, since you don't know whom all those people are who are, who your friends on Facebook, the chances are that even if the data in this research project proves positive, it still won't prove or dismiss the six-degrees of separation theory.
As you know, there are folks on Twitter, and Facebook, perhaps celebrities who have hundreds of thousands of followers, but that doesn't mean they know more than even 1 or 2% of those people in the real world.
Therefore the only way to prove this theory is to limit those in the test case who have less than 1000 friends, or use the average number of friends, and cut that in half.
And then work on that separation relationship question using more accurate data.
This fits within the realm of possibility.
Anyway, indeed I hope you will please consider all this and think on it.