Six Degrees Of Kevin Bacon

The other reading for this week, ‘Six Degrees’ by Duncan J. Watts, describes networks and their historical origins, as well as contrasting physical and online networks.

Watts opens with the statement of we “have become increasingly reliant on a truly staggering and ever growing array of devices, facilities, and services that have turned a once hostile environment into the lifestyle equivalent of a cool breeze”, as well as saying “without power, pretty much everything we do, everything we use, and everything we consume would be nonexistent, inaccessible, or vastly more expensive and inconvenient.

This article was written in 2002, but is only more relevant today, with the prevalence of internet, smart phones, and social networks. Nearly everything we do is somehow connected to these ‘networks’ of the internet, and without them, many aspects of society would cease to function.

The reading serves to ask a series of thought-provoking questions and identify a number of interesting potentials to do with these networks, without necessarily answering them.

Watts says that “a network is nothing more than a collection of objects connected to each other in some fashion”, and has distinct historical origins. In the past, a network was viewed as “objects of pure structure whose properties are fixed in time”, but as Watts states, this “couldn’t be further from the truth”.

Watts claims that “real networks represent populations of individual components that are actually doing something”, and this is a brilliant way to summarise these networks that we are studying in this course.

Watts uses the example of the ‘small world’ saying to explain these notions, as well as Milgram’s experimentation with ‘Six Degrees Of Separation’. We have our own network of relationships between individuals, and these are expansive, because each person has their own circle of relationships, and these relationships have their own relationships and so, creating a wide and diverse network of individuals. Six Degrees Of Separation is the idea that anyone, anywhere, can be connected to another person through six other people.

This idea enjoyed a resurgence with the internet, becoming an item of popular culture, and spawning wonderful things such as ‘Six Degrees Of Kevin Bacon’, a game where people try to find the shortest path between any actor and Hollywood star Kevin Bacon.

These things are based on the ‘small world’ concept, which is brought into being whenever someone exclaims “it’s a small world” when they discover the person they are talking to is a friend of a friend or such. If the world was already small before the internet and its accompanying network, it is now miniscule. Online networks are overlapping and interacting constantly, and serve to bring us closer to anyone, anywhere, seen in the likes of social medias such as Facebook and Instagram.

Through these online networks, it is now infinitely easy for us to connect with anyone, be it a long-time friend living on the other side of the world, or a celebrity that chooses to respond to a Tweet or a Facebook post. This also applies to our blogs, with their possible reach to anyone in the world, and has exciting potentials that are only just now starting to emerge.