Six Degrees of Separation It’s a Small World

It's a small world. We are more connected than we think. Six degrees of separation is the idea that all living things and everything else in the world are six or fewer steps away from each other so that a chain of "a friend of a friend" statements can be made to connect any two people in a maximum of six steps. It was originally set out by Frigyes Karinthy in 1929 and popularized in an eponymous 1990 play written by John Guare. With the rise of social networking sites like Facebook, we are getting closer than we think. In fact, recent studies show that 99.6% of people are connected within 5 degrees instead of 6, 92% within 4 degrees and that number is only getting smaller.