(Image Source: Tecca)
BY MEGAN FAROKHMANESH
ANCHOR CHRISTINA HARTMAN
You're watching multisource tech news analysis from Newsy.
Tell me if this sounds familiar: you’re standing in line at the grocery store when you realize you know the guy in front of you. Well, you don’t know him -- but your friend from college dated a guy whose best friend’s band mate was his cousin. Something like that.
This tangled social web has coined its own term: Six Degrees of Separation. We’re all familiar with the phenomenon -- a kind of social game that tries to connect you with anyone in six people or less.
Now Yahoo and Facebook are teaming up to test those tricky connections. It’s called the Small World experiment. According to
SlashGear, participants...
“...will be asked to select one friend that they think is most likely to know whoever their target person is. That friend can then select one of their pals they think may know the target person and so on until the target person is found or not found as the case may be.”
Call it global creeping in the name of science. The theory dates back to the
1960s --
Gawker reports social psychologist Stanley
Milgram created the idea...
“...sending out 300 letters, each of which asked the recipient to forward the letter along to an acquaintance most likely connected to the person named as the ‘target.’”
But the experiment met with little success. According to
The Telegraph-- the Yahoo research scientist leading the Small World experiment says...
“‘You really couldn’t have done this until very recently.... It’s a milestone, in terms of it’s the kind of research question you can answer now that you could have imagined 50 years ago but that you couldn’t have answered 50 years ago -- or even 15 years ago.’”
So does everyone think it’s a small world after all? Doubters
gonna doubt. A blogger at the
Huffington Post isn’t totally sold on the idea, admitting,
“I find it hard to believe that since there are over 6 billion people on Earth, some in sparsely populated mountainous areas of the Himalayans for example, that they are all somehow connected to me by an ‘imaginary net system.’”
And on to the bigger question at large: even if you are connected to this -- what’s it, “Bacon?” -- guy, now what?
New Scientist asks,
“Are we more connected now as a planet than we were in the 1960’s? And if so, do those connections matter?...Either way, the results should be interesting.”
The study currently has no stop date -- it will continue as long as it needs to. You can join in by going to
smallworld.sandbox.yahoo.com. Or visit the link in the transcript section of this story.
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