This piece in Nature Magazine is actually more interesting than it appears at first.
More than six degrees separate us - Perception and motivation influence social networks.
"An e-mail experiment has confirmed the famous 'six degrees of separation' of human social networks, but revealed that individuals don't necessarily benefit from their connectedness." In fact, the article quite strongly indicates to me that people do benefit from their connectedness, what they don't always do is exploit it, which is another thing entirely. And what's more, I think it reveals a power law at work in the real world.
Just for the hell of it, throw in some evidence for a damped driven system that has already taken into account the six degrees of separation.
The Six Degrees experiment is here. I signed up for it and was assigned a lecturer at the University of Irkustk (I think), sent it to a friend in Moscow, never heard another thing.
The ease with which two people can hook up depends also on their perceptions of social structures and their motivation to get connected, say Duncan Watts of Columbia University, New York and his colleagues. [...] In the new study, Watts' team invited 61,168 volunteers from 166 countries to recreate Milgram's experiment by e- mail. Targets ranged from an Ivy League academic to an archive inspector in Estonia.Of more than 24,000 chains started, only 384 found their target. Successful chains were, on average, about four steps long, although this number was biased by the greater likelihood of shorter chains being completed. A typical chain length was indeed between five and seven, consistent with Milgram's earlier findings.
But most e-mails did not reach their targets. This, it seems, is mainly because of lack of interest from participants, rather than because of their inability to think of an appropriate person to pass the message to.
While I'm sure a lack of interest played a part, you have to ask why people who are as interested in being connected as those of us with email tend to be, might still be disinterested. Part of it, I'm sure, is social. A description of a state imply very little about the functions of the system within which that state occurs. To say that you and I know each other describes a state, but it does not in any way describe the relationship. We may be friends who will lay down our lives for each other, or enemies who will not pee on the other to put out a fire.
The success of chains reaching one target - a professor at a well-known US university - was by far the biggest. The researchers think that this was because more than half of the volunteers were professional, college-educated Americans, who probably perceived this target as more easily reachable than others. In fact, his degree of connectedness was probably akin to that of the other targets.
Almost by definition, his degree of connectedness was equivalent, but I think what is going on here is a power law. (I love Clay Shirky's exposition, even if I hate the implications for wealth and fame for YT) There is an extravagant difference in the likelihood of connections being completed between the top beneficoiary and even the second or third ranking person, and those of us below tenth are on slim pickings indeed. The failure rate shows me a picture of just that kind of law at work; there was a high correlation between short chains and completed links, even though the averages for completed links came out as expected around 6.
The exercise seems to shows that even if global social networks can be searched quite easily, a searcher may not exploit this asset unless he realizes the strength of his connectedness and has sufficient motive to make the effort.
What this indicates to me is that we already "know" that the 6 degrees apply, and we have both psychological and social prohibitions built in to frustrate and dissipate the process. We cannot afford the resources to deal with a reality that everyone on the planet is a neighbour who can make a claim on us, even if it is only for our time. I'd bet that we have an inherent disinclination to pass on such messages, even though they cost us almost nothing and the oucome doesn't affect us, simply because that will also ensure that others are equally disinclined to pass those messages to us. And that looks to me like a damped, driven system at work.
The reality is that we mostly live our lives at the centre of a society, a community and an economy with quite a short horizon and the vast majority of our transactions are within that horizon. The possibility that many tens of thousands of interlopers might come charging across that boundary is deeply aversive because, although some of them may bring something of value, the rest of them are just your lazy brother in law after a free beer.
If you are right now thinking, yes, email, you get the point.
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