Six Degrees of Separation in Popular Culture

The “Six Degrees of Separation” (SDS) is a small-world phenomenon which illustrates that the world we live in has an incredibly well connected social network with many short paths from one person to another.  As we have learned in class, the SDS is the idea that everyone is connected by six people or fewer. The concept of SDS is incredibly prominent in pop-culture; there have various movies, television shows, songs, and, even, a video game centered around this theme.  In my blog post today, I would like to examine two different cases of SDS utilized in popular culture.

Earlier this year, Netflix released an advertisement stating that we are only six shows away from any Netflix user anywhere in the world.  This sounds spookily similar to SDS, so how did Netflix actually discover this phenomenon in its service? Netflix used the vast data and streaming patterns of its 139 million person user base, including residents of 190 countries.  A user had to either watch 70% of a movie or at least an episode of a television series to count as having watched it. After accumulating this data, Netflix discovered that “The average number of shows shared between two randomly paired Netflix active accounts is 6.2.”  Many of the common films between users were big box office titles such as Stranger Things, Bird Box, La Casa De Papel, Black Mirror, and The Christmas Chronicles; these were in the upper quartile of most commonly watched films. I believe that this finding can be perceived in two different ways.  Primarily, Netflix has provided a service that caters to many people and allows the opportunity to connect with others through shared movie choice. Secondarily, Netflix has become so dominant in the industry of online entertainment that it has herded people into watching big box office films and has hurt the popularity of smaller films and independent media.  Although I am not particularly swayed to one side, it is comforting to know that someone across the world from me is simultaneously cuddling up and enjoying a nice episode of The Office.

 

In 2018 Jacob Wenger, a developer who has worked at Microsoft, Firebase, and Google, created Six Degrees of Wikipedia.  It is a game on the internet that allows a user to type in any two Wikipedia article topics and it will produce the shortest path from one to another.  It uses the data from the 6 million different Wikipedia pages to sort out the path and proceeds to map out the path visually as well. According to its first blog post, it had over 500,000 searches within the first two weeks.  Wenger found that there were many, surprisingly, popular searches. The most commonly searched links were Anime to Obesity, Age of Enlightenment to Consumption of Tide Pods, and Anime to Alt-Right. The most common pages were Adolf Hitler, Donald Trump, Barack Obama, and Jesus.  Finally, there was only 1.07% of searches that could not be connected via any path. Play it here (https://www.sixdegreesofwikipedia.com/). Additionally, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter have also been proven to exhibit similar signs of SDS.  

 

After reading these articles, I cannot help but sing in my head “It’s a small world after all.”

 

Learn more about Netflix SDS:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/danafeldman/2019/02/13/according-to-netflix-we-all-have-6-shows-in-common/#44691ce463d0 https://www.ibtimes.com/6-degrees-netflix-how-users-are-all-connected-2766847

Learn more about SDS Wikipedia:

https://www.sixdegreesofwikipedia.com/

https://www.sixdegreesofwikipedia.com/blog/search-results-analysis