A205 – World Wide Web

Ever imagine how are the people in this world connected together? We have many friends, who in turn have many other friends too, and this may even extend beyond national boundaries. With the rise of globalization and the Internet, our social networks are gradually expanding as we become part of the giant social web.

Compared to the past, we cannot deny that we have more social contacts today. Take a look at Friendster or Facebook and you might realize how close-knitted our modern society is. The Internet serves as a useful tool for us to stay connected with our friends and acquaintances without meeting them face to face. Rather than just interacting with those present in our own surrounding environment like relatives, classmates or colleagues, we can also get to know more people through special events or organized gatherings, which helps us to extend our familiarity beyond our main social circle.

So how dense are we connected now? An experiment was conducted in America in 1969, where 300 randomly selected people were asked to mail a letter to a complete stranger in another city. (taken from source) However they could not mail it to the stranger directly and had to mail to another party whom they know by first-name. So on and so forth. Many thought it would take many passings, even up to hundreds, before each letter reaches the designed person. Surprisingly, the average number of passings is only about six. The passing from one person to another is defined as ‘degree of separation’.

After this experiment, it was claimed that there are no more than six degree of separation between any two people in United States. Would the degree in Singapore be smaller? Like four? Well it is not impossible. Take for example I have a relative who works in a Town Council Board. He knows a Member of Parliament, who in turn knows the Prime Minister. So the degree of separation between the Prime Minister and I is three. Take another example I have a friend who knows an actress, who in turn knows Fann Wong. Thus the degree of separation between Fann Wong and I is only three!

If you know me personally, you may add one degree to the above examples to make it four, or you may even discover a smaller number on your own. Try it yourself, how many degrees of separation are there between you and, say, Stefanie Sun? Note that there might be unknown connections present, where your friends or relatives may unexpectedly know a significant someone that will decrease the expected degree.

Whether the experiment was reliable or flawed, it was still an interesting one nevertheless. This indeed shows how small the country, or even world, really is. The definition of ‘degree of separation’ is questionable though. To what extent is the familiarity between two persons considered as a ‘degree’? Would a friend whom I have only spoken once to, counted as a valid separation? Even without a clear line drawn, we can know that we are actually not that far related from those strangers we see on the streets everyday.

Who knows, the person you bumped into yesterday might be your friend’s friend. Or the victim who appeared in the headlines might be your relative’s friend. Touch wood...