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"Ignorance, Knowledge, and Outcomes in a Small World," by Mark Granovetter. Science, 8 August 2003,
pages 773-774.
"More than six degrees separate us," by Phillip Ball. Nature Science Update, 8 August 2003.
"With E-Mail, It's Not Easy to Navigate 6 Degrees of Separation," by Kenneth
Chang. The New York Times, 12 August
2003, page 3 Section F.
"Small World After All," by Erica Klarreich. Science News, 16 August 2003,
page 103.
Each article deals with an e-mail experiment conducted by Peter Dodds, Ruby Muhamad, and Duncan Watts asking 60,000 people to forward messages to an acquaintance who would then forward the message to his or her acquaintance and so on, so as eventually to reach one of 18 target people. This experiment was an electronic update of an experiment done via U.S. mail over 30 years ago. In the original experiment, Stanley Milgram of Harvard found that letters originating in Nebraska and sent to a friend---then sent on to a friend of a friend, etc.---that did reach a Boston stockbroker, did so in an average of six steps: Thus the phrase "six degrees of separation." In the current study, only 24,000 people started a chain of messages and of those messages only 384 reached their targets. The average length of the completed chains was four. Writes Klarreich: "Although six degrees seems like a small number of steps, in social terms it represents an enormous gulf, Strogatz says. 'With the people who are two steps away from you, the friends of your friends, the connection is already getting a little hazy...Once the number is three, you have very little psychological connection to these people---they're three whole universes away. Six or seven steps is unfathomable.'" Messages that were sent to acquaintances were more likely to reach their targets than those sent to close friends. The research article for this experiment is on pages 827 through 829 of the 8 August issue of Science, titled "An Experimental Study of Search in Global Social Networks." The researchers are launching a new experiment that allows senders to send email messages to more than one acquaintance. Volunteers for the experiment can sign up here.
--- Mike Breen
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