According to Internet World Stats, of the 6 billion people alive today (worldwide), 2 million have access to the internet. Half of these people are members or have accounts for at least one social networking site, and of this million, 80% are active users on Facebook.com. As a comprehensive networking site, Facebook has changed how people all over the world interact with others, reducing the “six degrees of separation,” to just four.
“Six degrees of separation” is a finding during pre-internet times by psychologist Stanley Milgram that everyone in this world is connected to one another through the relation of five other people. But now, with the growth of Facebook and its feature of comparing mutual friends, such connections can be made with just the average separation of acquaintances of about 4.74 people. This finding was announced by scientists at the University of Milan on Facebook.com after a month-long experiment in November. By using a set of algorithms to compute sample paths among Facebook users, they found that any two arbitrary people shared a sort of mutual relationship online. In the United States, this separation was even smaller: 4.37 “degrees” separating two unique Americans from each other.
This new finding has elicited various responses from social media users. While many were intrigued by this geometry of connection, some expressed that “the connections [were] very thin.”
“’Friend’ has many meanings,” said a commenter. “Just because [I accept a] friend request doesn’t necessarily [mean that that person] is my friend.”
What is defined as a friend on Facebook may be different from how most people interpret the relationship. However, the mission of Facebook is to give “people the power to share and make the world more open and connected,” which is an impossible feat if the meaning of Facebook friends were to mean close relationships and not just acquaintances. In this aspect, Facebook has been successful as a social networking site, linking people to others around the world. As the web of relationships grows through technological advancements and the formation of new social networking sites, paradoxically, the world gets smaller.
