A Brief Summary of the Third Link: "Six Degrees of Separation" of "Linked" by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi

Barabasi asserts that people "live in a small world because society is a very dense web" (30) by using many examples of the very small number of links that can connect two randomly selected nodes in a network. There are his examples. First example is so-called “six degrees of separation”. It originates from "Karinthy's 1929 insight that people are linked by at most five links" (27) and this concept was rediscovered by Staley Milgram's experoment in 1967. The result of his experiment showed people that the distance between two randomly selected persons are only 5.5 on average in the United States. Originally, Milgram's study was confined to the United States, however, John Guare spreaded his vision that "six degrees applied to the whole world" (29) by his play. Next example is in a network of Webpages within Notre Dame University. This experiment was conducted by Barabasi and two other people and the result of this is eleven clicks away from each other, so "there are eleven degrees of separation at Notre Dame". In addition, final example is also Barabasi's experiment. As a result, he estimated that the number of links that people need to connect two documents in World Wide Web is 18.59 on average by utilizing the statistical mechanics. Thus, there are "ninteen degrees of separation" (34) in the full Web. In short, Barabasi emphasizes that the world is very small because of "the highly interconnected nature of these networks" (34).