Frigyes Karinthyan, a Hungarian playwright, proposed the theory of six degrees of separation for the first time in early twentieth century. According to this theory, everyone in the world is connected with each other by way of 6 people. Since then the proposition is a fairly popular and widely accepted one.
However, now Facebook has chosen to differ from it. The networking platform has brought down the number to 3.5 from 6 people. After conducting a study of 1.59 billion active Facebook users, it was concluded that every person is connected to another by 3.57 people.
According to the report, the collective degree of separation between people all over the world has shrunk over the last 5 years. And now Mark Zuckerberg is separated from every Facebook user by only a 3.17 degrees of separation.
“Calculating this number across billions of people and hundreds of billions of friendship connections is challenging; we use statistical techniques described below to precisely estimate distance based on de-identified, aggregate data,” says the team.
It was further commented that, “Within the US, people are connected to each other by an average of 3.46 degrees.” In a country like India, where there are so many of us, we can probably half this number.
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