BigShinyThing

Everyone likes a good soundbite, and none more than the team here at BigShinyThing. Imagine our excitement at the claim, in The Economist’s (rather excellent) feature on The New Organisation, published last week, that Milgram’s famous ‘6-degrees of separation‘ is now shrinking under the impact of enabling technologies and modern organisational practices:

According to more modern work along similar lines, that number has now fallen to 4.6, despite the growth in America’s population since Milgram’s time. Being able to keep in touch with a much wider range of people through technologies such as e-mail has brought everyone closer.

Lovely. We expect that meme to be showing up in every second PowerPoint slide in the next 6 months. Lo! Not only has the Internet shrunk the world, but we have a number saying how much! You heard it first here!

But: having actually studied statistics at one sad point in our lives, we were curious both about the methodology and the precision of the number — 4.6, not 4.7 or 4.5? So over the weekend, we asked some people who should know — members of INSNA, the International Network for Social Network Analysis: the professionals in this field. The (informal) consensus was that:

1. Without knowing the methodology, the number is meaningless.
2. Milgram’s original number — 6 — isn’t magic, and was never claimed as such: Milgram’s discovery wasn’t really the number 6, it was the rather astonishing qualitative result that the minimal distance between members of huge social networks is incredibly small compared to the size of the network.

So we’re under-impressed, and if you see this claim popping up over the next few months, we strongly recommend suspicion and restraint in spreading the meme. We’re willing to believe that networked communications can bring people together, but we think that the claim that we’re lost 1.4 degrees of separation as a result — while very PowerPoint friendly — is probably not worth repeating without some serious caveats.