Feeling a lil’ claustrophobic in this modern world? No shit – you should be.
In a world before the current social media landscape, we chucked the term ‘six degrees of separation’ around like it was nothin’. We were like, ‘omg, I’m totally only six degrees of separation from Kevin Bacon!!!!!! Crazzyyyyy!’ – remember that?
But now, it feels smaller, shorter, a little like everything’s a bit too close from comfort.
There’s a reason. Facebook‘s released a report that shows that the separating degrees between any two people (or at least, the 1.59 billion people on the social media site) is now looking more like 3.5~.
They explain it like this:
“Imagine a person with 100 friends. If each of his friends also has 100 friends, then the number of friends-of-friends will be 10,000. If each of those friends-of-friends also has 100 friends then the number of friends-of-friends-of-friends will be 1,000,000. Some of those friends may overlap, so we need to filter down to the unique connections.We’re only two hops away and the number is already big. In reality this number grows even faster since most people on Facebook have more than 100 friends.We also need to do this computation 1.6 billion times; that is, for every person on Facebook.Rather than calculate it exactly, we relied on statistical algorithms developed by Kang and others to estimate distances with great accuracy, basically finding the approximate number of people within 1, 2, 3 (and so on) hops away from a source.”
With this algorithm, they’ve worked out that the average is about 3.57, and ranges from 2.9 and 4.2.
If you take a look at the report, it will actually calculate your won personal degree of separation for you, whih is slightly terrifying:
And Mark Zuckerberg, who you’d assumed knows pretty much everyone, is being kinda outshined by Sheryl Sandberg on the social scale:
If you’d like to take a look at the report, you can here: research.facebook.com/blog/three-and-a-half-degrees-of-separation/
And now, let’s back to a state of happy obliviousness where we don’t think about how the small the world is (while secretly being stoked we’re only three people away from Channing Tatum, Natalie Portman & Amy Schumer 
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Source: Facebook.
Photo: Handout / Getty.
