Ever played Six Degrees from Kevin Bacon? Probably but in case you haven’t, basically it works on the theory that we are no more than six connections away from any other person on the planet. The point of the game is to find your personal line to Kevin Bacon (the prolific actor). Facebook has discovered in the modern world the steps needed to get to anyone else is actually closer to half that.
Thanks to our uber-connected world, the needed connection steps, once optimized at six, has dropped to a mean of three and half, which is to say four because you can’t connect to half a person. There are still outliers but for most people, it will only take four or less people to connect to anyone else.
This is all based on Facebook user statistics so it will only show us how connected Facebook users are but that being said, with it being one of the largest, most used, online communities it’s a fair estimate on how we’re communicating and connecting in today’s modern world, which, as it turns out, is a lot smaller than it used to be. Check out the website to see your personal degrees of separation (it’s under the opening paragraphs).