The concept of a tightly knit, interconnected world — one where an individual’s connection with another is within six degrees of separation — has been around for nearly half a century. Social psychologist Stanley Milgram published his findings in 1967, and has been a standby of sociology and pop culture alike ever since. It comes as little surprise, then, that the rise of social networks over the past decade has brought us even closer together. Facebook released two studies of its social graph on Tuesday, which conclude that we Facebookers are closer to one another than we thought. In collaboration with academic researchers at the Università degli Studi di Milano, Facebook’s study found that instead of the average of six degrees of separation between each of us, Facebook users are separated by an average of four degrees.
