In an interview on Virtual Living

Your fifth book?

Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age by Duncan Watts, who until recently was at Columbia University – he’s now at Yahoo Research. Watts has been looking at the small world phenomenon to identify whether the web itself has shrunk our world, and in fact it hasn’t. That’s the lovely thing about it: we still have the same number of friends as was outlined in Stanley Milgram’s experiment in the 1950s, where he coined the term ‘small world’ and identified the six degrees of separation phenomenon. Watts has been running an experiment for the past few years: if you sign up you are given the name of somebody randomly – clear across the world or next door – and tasked with becoming connected with that person via e-mail or instant message (it all has to be online), like a treasure hunt. These online environments certainly hyperinflate the number of acquaintances you might be exposed to. Now, you would think that that would make Watts’s experiment a lot easier, that it would be easier using all of your potential weak ties to go from points a to b faster, but it’s not. We still do have those six degrees of separation, even by e-mail, with somebody who’s in, say, Brazil. When it comes down to it, ultimately we do still have the same number of friends and the same number of connections between two points in the world.