This article discusses the forerunner to Myspace, which was called Six Degrees. It comes from an experiment by Stanley Milgram and Ithiel De Sola Pool. Milgram chose two random people from the states from random places off the top of his head (where he received a volunteer), and tried to send a package to that person through other acquaintences. The people who received the package had to send it to someone else who might know how to get it to the final destination. The only information they got was the address of the final destination.

Most of these flopped, but the ones that actually made it to the final destination had a mean of 6 people. Pool found out through another experiment that the chances that any particular person knows any other particular person in the US was 1 in 200,000. the chance that any two people could be linked by two other people was over 50%.

There is mention of a Dickens book (Bleak House) that tells how people interact through others (tell Jane that I said this kind of thing), so this idea wasn't new, but that someone went to the trouble of doing all the legwork was pretty new.

I agree with Milgram when he says "Though poor people always have acquaintances, it would probably turn out that they tend to be among other poor people, and that the rich speak mostly to the rich." I don't think that I could be linked to an actor or actress, much less Kevin Bacon. I can see possibly linking to Bill Bates, because I had a brother-in-law do some consulting for Microsoft once, and the likelyhood that the Microsoft employee knows someone who has met Bill Gates is pretty high. Same with government officials, because I have an uncle who works in the Census bureau. It seems highly unlikely that the hurdle of class can be jumped over, since people tend to know others within their same social status.

I admit that I signed up for this site when I heard about it in the early nineties, because one of my brothers invited me. I quickly became disinterested, because of many of the issues described in the Wood piece, but mainly because there was absolutely nothing to do. I didn't care if I knew people who led me to celebrities, because I really don't care all that much about the private lives of people I have never met. That is their business, in many instances.

I tried looking up the website (http://www.sixdegrees.org/), and found the website to be linked now to Kevin Bacon, who is soliciting funds with other celebrities to donate to charity. Instead of linking people, as the site originally did, it was now linking charities that celebrities are affiliated with. I found it kind of sad, because Kevin Bacon had raised about $50,000, but other many celebrities had not received any donations. I don't know if it was calculated by year, but the numbers did not look too great.