Electronic Anthropology: Six Degrees of Cell Phone Separation

The concept of Six Degrees of Separation (Google search results) is often misunderstood. It’s a hypothesis that says that any two random people in the world are separated by no more than six degrees of social interaction. That is, if I wanted a way to connect with someone in particular, all I have to do is find no more than five people between us that form a chain of relationships. I know Person A, who knows Person B, and so on down to Person E (maximum) who knows the person I want to find. [Some texts and sites say that it six people between two - something I have also mistakenly said in the past.]

This hypothesis was proven by Duncan Watts and others in an emaili experiment involving 60,000 people. Researchers found that it actually took between five and seven emails for a person to “connect” with a randomly selected person. I wrote an unpublished short story about this in 2002, called “Power of Two”, which explores the idea from a different angle - a reality tv show where contestants have to find someone in the United States before the others, starting at a random location.

I had just come up with what I thought might be a mathematical proof of the concept, but I’m damned if I can find the notepad I scrawled the formula on - it had something to do with the cube root of the population of the Earth, I think. I was thus exploring the concept, mostly in the fiction I was writing.

At the time, I was unaware of the Hungarian writer Frigyes Karinthy, who introduced the concept of Six Degrees of Separation in a 1929 short story called Chains. I was also unaware of American sociologist Stanely Milgram’s experiment, “the small-world problem”, where randomly selected people in the American mid-West try to get a package to a stranger in Massachusett’s. This is essentially the same basis of my fictional reality tv show in “Power of Two”.

Because the concept fascinates me - an armchair electronic anthropologist - to no end, I also explored the idea from another angle, over space-time, in my story “The Postcard”, where two WW II young Italian lovers get separated and end up in France, but somehow, the postcards the young man sends somehow end up in a post office 50+ years later in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. (It’s an unfinished novelette, so I haven’t decided how the present day factors in.)

I’m continuously experimenting with the Six Degrees concept because as luck would have it, I am connected to some very influential people, as well as many celebrities, by no more than two to three interactions, and sometimes just a single interaction. I experiment with the concept in fiction constantly, and having browsed a half hour ago through a number of Imran Ali’s posts about Neokeys, Fastap.ulo.us, and Hellphone/ Wellphone - all about mobile handset experiences - something gelled in my mind: a new experient that uses the mobile domain and Bluetooth.

Bluetooth, if you’re not familiar with it, is a wireless protocol used on mobile devices, computer mice, keyboards, speakerphones, wireless headsets and earpieces, hats, prototype autos, and other devices to allow two objects to communicate. Many mobile phones have Bluetooth capability. That means that one phone could potentially transfer its address book wirelessly to another Bluetooth-enabled phone.

So consider this experiment. Assume that every person in the world has a Bluetooth enabled phone. Assume that these hypothetical phones have sufficient memory. Now, what if everytime two people came close to each other, their phones would automatically transfer the contents of each address book to each other. How many transfers would it take one person to get, say, Paris Hilton’s address book? How many interactions before at least one person in the world had collected everyone’s phone numbers - a sort of Book of Mankind?

These are not the same as Six Degrees but they are peripherally related. Bluetooth-enabled phones allow sociologists and willing participants to conduct some very interesting electronic anthropology/ global village studies that the creators of Bluetooth (working at Ericsson) probably never dreamed of. Then again, Bluetooth is named for the 10th century Danish king Harald Bluetooth Gormson, who engaged in diplomacy and communication between warring parties.