Coffee breaks seem to be very fruitful these months. After discovering there are bilingual chickens in the campaign for the elections, last week the balance was more personal: I came across a friend I had not seen for seven years, after we both finished our Erasmus year in Leuven.
Thinking about this coincidence I remembered that a few months ago I also had an unexpected meeting: a girl with whom I used to play basketball in Madrid when I was 12, or maybe 13, at the swimming pool of my gym in Brussels. I have more and more the feeling that this is a small world.
A friend knows a friend…
It's a small world... (photo from Flickr by kosmonautica)
It is true that Brussels is a kind of a melting pot that reunites many different people from many different profiles; but even taking that into account I still think that if I could know where all the people I have met in my life are, I would have some surprises. Maybe one of them got married with someone I met in a totally different circle, or another one is working in the most original place in the world… who knows!
That brings me to the title of this post, which fortunately does not refer to the temperature now in Brussels, but to a theory, the six degrees of separation. I am sure most of you know what I am talking about: that every single person in the world is separated from, and connected to, everyone else by just six others.
This idea constitutes the core principle of one of our initiatives for the elections campaign: the YaBs, Yellow and Blue want-to-be secret agents that have already infliltrated the 27 member States searching for one particular celebrity each of them. This blog has already talked about them: departing from Brussels, with 27 different missions, they have to be given from one person to another until they reach their objective. I am sure many of them will succeed in their mission with the power ful weapon of “a friend knows a friend that knows a friend…”
- French YaB Paul Ethique is already in Paris
Audrey Tatou? The actress of Amelie seems very far away from me and my colleagues. But our French YaB Paul Éthique will find the way and that little agent we gave away to visitors during the open days will hopefuly get to her. The same applies to the Spanish YaB Paloma Estrella, now in Madrid after leaving Brussels last week. She wants to get a photo with the capitain of the Spanish national football team, Iker Casillas. Will she make it?
Making the theory a bit more complicated, that would also somehow connect Audrey Tatoo and Iker Casillas, as both of them will receive an agent that departed from Brussels on the 9th of May. And that would also connect me, and all my colleagues, to them, as we saw how the agents were born; in a way they are our little creatures.
Many of them will (I hope) reach their destination after meeting some other European citizens on the way, to whom we would also be connected, as well as Casillas and Tatoo and all the other celebrities YaBs are looking for… this is starting to be a bit complicated!
In any case, the success of the YaBs’ missions would be a nice way of proving that the degree of proximity between so many different people is really amazing. So I propose a change in the name of the theory… six degrees of separation?? Better say six degrees of proximity!
Hi Julien,
Evita and Anete wrote a post about the conclusions of the YaBs’ project:
http://www.ep-webeditors.eu/2009/06/how-did-our-experiment-work/
All the best,
T.
Barbara,
do you have any news regarding this story?
Since one of my scientific interests are social networks and the flow of goods and information within (social) networks, let me make the following remarks:
The real-life problem with the six degrees of separation phenomenon (I think five is even more realistic in the European context) is that it’s quite hard to prove with a concrete flow of a single object.
First problem: Activation of the right relations.
In order to show the shortest distance between two individuals in a network, the object needed to be handed over only to persons that are actually closer to the destination than the person before. This means that the every person on the path would need to know who is closer to the destination (which is rarely the case). If not, the object might take much longer paths.
And the second problem is timing:
It is possible that there is a quite short distance between two person (i.e. only two intermediates between them), but in the real life not all relations are activated with equal probability. So it might be quicker for an object to be given seven times from hand to hand of people who meet very frequently (and to reach the destination on a longer path) than to wait until the relations along the shortest path are actually activated (this might be only once in half a year).
But I’d be more than interested to hear about outcome of this story!
RT @Tayebot: New post by Barbara: "Six degrees" http://bit.ly/lXht6
#-eu09
New post by Barbara: “Six degrees” http://bit.ly/lXht6
#eu09