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Facebook Knocks "Six Degrees of Separation" Down a Few Notches (i-programmer.info)
mikejuk writes: Six degrees of separation is the, already well established, idea that any individual is connected to any other via six network nodes. New research has discovered that the average between Facebook users is just three and a half: "We know that people are more connected today than ever before. Over the past five years, the global Facebook community has more than doubled in size. Today we're announcing that during that same time period, the degrees of separation between a typical pair of Facebook users has continued to decrease to 3.57 degrees, down from 3.74 degrees in 2011. This is a significant reflection of how closely connected the world has become." This may all be true and Facebook makes us better connected, but it leaves the question of the quality of the connections open. Are Facebook friends anything like real friends?
I you have my back! ZERO-DEGREES of!
I know of very few people in my social circle who have a Facebook account. I'm sure people who use Facebook will know few people who don't.
Philosopher (n) - a wise person who is calm and rational; someone who lives a life of reason with equanimity
Everybody on Facebook knows this. And because of this we've got way too many friends on Facebook, at least compared to the real work. That in turn means we seem more connected, making the degree of separation in the graph go down. But none of that is real; if you'd only count your actual friends on Facebook, the degree of separation would be much higher, because we'd have a lot less friends per person.
what are these "friends" they keep talking about?
"...Are Facebook friends anything like real friends?"
When people literally have thousands of "friends" on Facebook, I'd say the answer is rather obvious.
Doubly so when you consider celebrity status is partly derived from how big certain numbers are online, which tends to question the reality of the whole damn thing.
Somebody claims that an AVERAGE of 3.5 compared to an UPPER LIMIT of 6.0 is "new research" ?
How do I math ?
I should get a Facebook account. Anything else?
I know of very few people in my social circle who have a Facebook account. I'm sure people who use Facebook will know few people who don't.
And "six degrees of Kevin Bacon" applied only to actors and actresses, so that's fair enough. On the other hand, the six was not (as I understood it) supposed to be an average, but a maximum without exceptions, so Facebook is probably falling short in that regard.
You're hurting the World.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
n/t
We can keep track of about Dunbar's number people on our own. If a computer's keeping notes for you about how you've interacted with other people, which you can easily review at any time, then maybe that's enough to extend the limit a bit.
"the friend of mankind is no friend of mine ... to honor all men is to honor none" - from molière's 'the misanthrope'.
do whatever links facebook accounts have with one another, count as 'connections' between human beings?
has societies that give importance to facebook links, lost all ability to distinguish and differentiate?
to value such links on same level as real human connections, may not matter in a superficial empty life. but if life is worth living, and and there is value in emotional depth and intelligence, those two types are not even in the same world.
On social media I see that a lot of people just send connection requests everywhere, but rarely follow up with actual conversation. (this particularly goes for job agents on linkedin - who will spam you with "would like to connect" queries without ever having heard of you, having anything like a job opportunity that might be right for you, or even asking for more information about you. Seems the only thing they're really after is having "more connections".
So, is having more facebook "friends" really an indication of more connectedness?
If so, if we're all more connected, why is there a rising partisanship among people?
If we're more connected, why do we have so much trouble helping refugees from warzones? And - not just in the US, but in Europe, too -- Germany has taken on a huge number of refugees in the last year - but at the same time, we've also experienced a strong rise in anti-immigration sentiment. I'm feeling ashamed seeing the rise of "anti-islam" (or more generally just plain xenophobic) Pegida movement in Germany - rising from one of the states with the lowest percentage of foreigners...
Yes, connectedness truly seems on the rise.
I had given facebook a try a few years back, but dropped back out of it and asked for my account to be deleted a few months later -- good riddance.
I just don't know why they think that by counting how many people you have as "friends" on facebook is a good indicator for how connected we are...
The threshold for being associated with a terrorist and thus a target for enhanced data collection and investigation was revealed by Snowden to be 3. So now the average Facebook user is 3.5 degrees away from ISIS.
I follow Snowden on Twitter, which makes me one degree away from an active investigation.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
>"Today we're announcing that during that same time period, the degrees of separation between a typical pair of Facebook users has continued to decrease to 3.57 degrees, down from 3.74 degrees in 2011"
What is scary is how they are able to determine that and with such precision. There are many reasons I have never used Facebook.... this just continues to reinforce that.
>"Are Facebook friends anything like real friends?"
Um, no.
>This may all be true and Facebook makes us better connected, but it leaves the question of the quality of the connections open. Are Facebook friends anything like real friends?
Nobody thinks Facebook friends are like real friends except when they are.
Slashdot can't seem to get enough of this corny article submission pattern. Often some obvious restatement of the article with an utterly inane leading question, probably intended to foster discussion. Maybe there's a style guide that I missed.
Imagine if the folks on Facebook bind together and decide to correct local injustices. For example, a restaurant owner is known to be rude and cruel to his employees. Imagine people on Facebook deciding that the restaurant would never be used by them, nor would any of their family members ever work there or even deliver supplies to that address. United social power can be a real scum squasher.
Those results are absolutely inaccurate. I'll admit, I'm on Facebook. I see people with 700, 1000+ friends sometimes. Does someone really have 700 friends? Probably not.
"... the degrees of separation between a typical pair of Facebook users has continued to decrease to 3.57 degrees, down from 3.74 degrees in 2011. This is a significant reflection of how closely connected the world has become."
But what is a Facebook connection? The average separation in a mathematical network/graph is a definable quality: nodes are either connected or not. Not so in Facebook. A connection can be "visited their page once w/o interaction" or "my connection with the woman I've been sleeping with for 40 years and have raised two kids together". I wonder if somehow measuring the degree of interaction would change the findings,
This 3.5 average is about Facebook users only, not non-users.
Still, it kind of puts a three-hop warrant in perspective.
Six degrees of separation is the, already well established, idea that any individual is connected to any other via six network nodes.
How is it "well established"? As far as I can see "six degrees" was never meant to be taken as much of a concrete fact; it's more of an allegory for our counter-intuitively connected world. There are still plenty of remote or even completely uncontacted tribes in the world, and those are just the extreme examples. At best, six is a very rough average.
PS My Bacon number is 3.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Marconi initially proposed the idea of 6 degrees of separation, not through social association but because his new invention of wireless radio would theoretically connect everyone on the planet through his new communication device. The number was more like 5.8, so they rounded up.
~JB
thank
...and I approve your demotion to 1 degree.
Sounds like bullshit to me, considering the fake accounts and dead connections out there. People fall for click bait all the time and, while they may be connected by FB connections, how many of those are really active rather than passive connections? I guess I need to RTFA, though I am heading into it with major skepticism.
Given that 3.74 rounds to 4:
1) I have never used Facebook, but I know plenty of idiots that do.
2-5) All of the idiots that use Facebook.
6) The other non-idiots on the planet that has never used Facebook.
Conclusion, still 6 degrees of separation!
First, off all the "study" is about facebook "distances". It does not change the distance of an Australian Aborigine versus an Kalahari Bushman or South American Indio in any way. Nor does it change mine to George W Bush or Bill Clinton.
Secondly, social sites like FB, Linkedin, Xing have people that serve as hubs. Artificial hubs. There are plenty of people who maxed out the "maximum friends limit" just because they want to be friend with "everyone who cares to accept".
E.g. on Xing there are "recruiters" that simply try to have everyone in their "contacts" that are somehow related to the business they are recruiting in.
They have contact lists as big as medium sized cities. It is fairly easy to be connected to random strangers via two "hubs" that have 10,000 "contacts" each.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Six degrees of separation is the, already well established, idea that any individual is connected to any other via six network nodes.
How is it "well established"? As far as I can see "six degrees" was never meant to be taken as much of a concrete fact; it's more of an allegory for our counter-intuitively connected world. There are still plenty of remote or even completely uncontacted tribes in the world, and those are just the extreme examples. At best, six is a very rough average.
PS My Bacon number is 3.
Suppose every person on the planet knows 50 people. This would include all your relatives, the people you meet at work, in your community, at the gym and so on.
If each of those people know 50 people with no overlap, then 2 degrees out is 2500.
Taking this to the 6th order, 50^6 is around 15 billion people.
So although the number "6" seems counter-intuitively small, it's realistic. Even though there are tribes that *might* be 7 or 8 degrees out from you, they are in the tiny minority and don't affect the average much.
Also, there have been experiments where one researcher tried to get a package hand-delivered to another researcher somewhere else on the globe, with instructions of "hand this to someone you know who's physically closer to $SaidPerson.
Surprisingly, it usually took fewer than 6 hops to get there.
Most of my FaceBook friends are people with whom I went to HS 30 years ago and haven't seen since. Some of my FB friends are people I ones that I never spoke with, unless I count my HS reunion after 5 beers.
Many of my LinkedIn associates are people I met while in career transition. So I had lunch with so and so, hence we reached out since we had some "common interests" Nice as this sounds, we are really worlds apart. However, the kicker is that there are many coworkers out there who turned down my LinkedIn request, and vis versa.
Much of this is probabilistic analysis.
My favorite FB moment was a FB suggestion I had. FB found that I have lots of friends in common with this person. Ok, she is my wife, but maybe she does not want to admit this to too many people.
Six degrees of separation is the, already well established, idea that any individual is connected to any other via six network nodes. New research has discovered that the average between Facebook users is just three and a half ...
Facebook has set another bar even lower. </sarcasm>
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
I you have my back! ZERO-DEGREES of!
I like back bacon.
As far as facebook goes, the point of 6 degrees is a hypothetical favor network. A friend is someone you can aska fvor from. maybe a small favor like an introduction. that's why the concept of degrees of separation makes sense. Facebook freinds are not freinds. In some case facbook can be useful for tracing the spread of social disease however.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
While it is quite true that many people have friends lists in the hundreds, simply because they can, I have personally seen how Facebook can kind of act as a "network map" of social relationships. For instance, just starting with my friends from high school, I can see which friends of mine independently knew one another. I can also see who they know that I don't; and investigating them leads me to discover a whole new "circle" of mutual friends; people who's names and faces I knew, but who's social dealings I was unaware of.
The above observations came about by recognizing patterns in usernames posting on each other's feeds; in other words people whom actually interact with each other. Facebook is an incredibly powerful tool for studying social relationships (within the bounds of its demographic capture, of course,) if it's utilized in a proper manner. That certianly does not apply to some pap written by a Facebook PR staffer, (though it was nicely written, at least,) but don't let that obscure the real scientific value that can be gleaned from more intensive, focused observations. Facebook must be sociologist catnip; all those social interactions - many of them tied into "real life" via phone/geotagging integration - laid out on a table for easy perusal and analysis.
There are no "people" "on" Facebook. It's just a chat log. There is no place. There is no social interaction AT ALL. There is just a bunch of people quietly responding to a digital interface.
This is NOT a social activity. It's a passive voyer activity with the illusion of socializing with others.
There is no such thing as a "quality" Facebook friend. It's a goddamn platform, not the beach, not a house party, not a barbecue. It's a faceless, endless pit of sadness.
Leave the humanless void that is Facebook, Neo.
There was a study 2 decade ago claiming that humans are limited to 150 real friends: That is people whose lives one has regular contact with, and participates in their social activities.
It's Facebook; one already knows one is closer to idiots. Getting closer is not a good thing.
Probably massively distorted by stars who accept all friend requests and serve as hubs.
Basically, when you make such a rule, you should have some kind of minimum standard for what qualifies as a "connection". If you bring it down to FB standards, which basically is "I once saw you from afar on the street", the distance is minimal. In real-world terms, if you actually would use "once saw you on the street", I'm fairly sure even for large cities the average would be something like 1.8
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
I am a nobody in Canada and know someone who knows someone who regularly dines with the Queen. I am willing to bet though, that I could dig up a bushman who is 8 or more degrees from me. Also I suspect that Facebook is a bit distorted in that many of the people on Facebook are social vs most people not being terribly social. So being quickly connected to the queen is no huge surprise as she is the center of a vast social network. Her footman's kid is then 5 away from me. Her footman's kid's neighbour is probably the classic 6.
So where facebook statement is probably over generalized to the population is to forget that like the queen, many people on facebook are probably important nodes in the social fabric of western society. Thus many people know someone on facebook who is nearly 4 degrees from someone who that person knows who doesn't use facebook. Otherwise known as 6 degrees.
So a facebook made up of Clintons would be all two degrees, a facebook made up of Unibombers would all be 40 degrees.
This just proves that people on Facebook are 3.5 people apart. What about the rest of the world?
There are some problems with their data and their assumptions:
Problem 1:
Facebook has 1.5 billion users. Of those, 1/3 are considered fake or duplicate accounts or have died. So 1 billion real/valid users. The world has 7 billion people. So Facebook has shown that of people who join facebook, the degree of separation is lowering to 3.57. What does this mean for those not on Facebook.
Problem 2:
A friend isn't a friend on Facebook. Guess what. Just because two people agree to "friend" each other, doesn't make them "Friends". Most people have far fewer people they could contact directly than they have friends. For example, a lot of my friends are my friends. But really we are separated by my wife, even though Facebook has us marked as not separated.