Contacts and Influences:
It's a smaller world today and with all the online social networks along with an ever-growing populous, the alleged six degrees of separation may be shrinking to three degrees..
For example my friend Steve plays saxophone, his niece Debra Cox is an amazing singer, she moved to LA to make it big, Debra signed with Whitney Houston's manager and became an award-winning R&B artist.
Above: me with Nicole Holness singer / co-host of MTV Live
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MTV Live co-host Nicole Holness (featured pic) is related to Debra Cox who is then related to my friend Steve which concludes a 'three' degrees of separation theory.
To clearly understand this theory we must look at the history:
The phrase 'six degrees of separation' refers to the notion that everyone is approximately six steps away from any person on Earth by way of introduction. If true then we are inexplicably intertwined in a web of friends whereby one can connect us to any two people in the world in six steps or less. This friend of a friend acquaintance chain was originally set out by 1929 short story author Frigyes Karinthy and later popularized by playwright John Guare and Will Smith's 1993 movie.
Six degrees of separation is basically the relationship links that occur in quantitative social structures which develop from a direct result of the evolution of these relationships that intercept our social groups and organizations. Michael Gurevich conducted seminal work in his empirical study of social structure and the fractal signature these networks design, this trail or rather these sets of trails was later referred to as 'Sociometry'.
Mathematician Manfred Kochen, an urban design Austrian Statist, extrapolated these sociometry empirical results in a mathematical manuscript: 'Contacts and Influences' where he concluded that in a North American population two individuals can almost certainly contact one another by means of at least two intermediaries.
Perhaps today, in an internet based social structure, one individual can infinitely bridge over to the whole world's population thus foreshadowing a more realistic 'three degrees of separation' scenario as predicted in the findings by American psychologist Stanley Milgram.
