4.74 Degrees

There's a common adage called "six degrees of separation" that refers to the idea that everyone in the world is no more than six steps away, by way of introduction, from any other human on Earth. Basically, any two people in the world can be connected to one another in six steps or less.

Believe it or not, this concept did not originate with Kevin Bacon, although it is most famous now for being associated with the actor. No, the six degrees of separation notion was first conceived in 1929 by a Hungarian author named Frigyes Karinthy in one of his short stories. The idea wasn't officially tested scientifically until the 1960s by Stanley Milgram during his "small world" experiment.

Six degrees wasn't brought into popular culture until the early 1990's when a playwright name John Guare wrote a stage play on the concept, and then had a film based on the play released three years later. Kevin Bacon didn't come into the fold until four bored Albright College students created a game in 1994 called "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon" after watching a few of his films, a game they labeled as nothing more than a stupid party trick. The ultimate popularization of the concept took off from there and became what it is today.

As technology continues to advance our world every day and bring people together more closely than ever, that six degrees of separation has shrunk. The omnipresent social networking site known as Facebook, partnered up with the Laboratory for Web Algorithmics of the Universita degli Studi de Milano to conduct an updated version of the six degrees experiment among its users.

After all was said and done, the study revealed that the average distance between any two Facebook users globally (of which there are currently 720+ million) is 4.74 degrees. The last time Facebook did this experiment was in 2008, and the number of steps then was 5.28.

Of course, this study only pertains to the world of Facebook and its users, not to the actual entire world population. But since so many of us spend more time online on Facebook than we do rooted in reality with real physical contact, it might as well mean the "world" to most of us.

And since the number of degrees keeps shrinking at a decent rate, I figure that in another decade or so, I can finally stop stalking Kevin Bacon in order just to be close to him, because by that time, we will actually be connected and most likely best friends.

Source: Facebook