How Six Degrees Became a Forever Meme

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/19/theater/six-degrees-of-separation-meme.html

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“Six Degrees of Separation” — John Guare’s play about a wealthy Manhattan couple whose lives are upended by a con artist claiming to be Sidney Poitier’s son — was the toast of the town when it had its premiere in 1990. A mere six months later, Frank Rich wrote in The New York Times that “its title has passed into the language.”

Mr. Guare did not invent the idea that everyone in the world is separated by only six other people, which emerged out of nearly a century of mathematical and psychological research. But it was the stickiness of his title — and the 1993 film version, starring Will Smith as the impostor — that blasted it “into the pop-culture stratosphere,” as the sociologist Duncan J. Watts put it in his book “Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age” (2003).

While the idea that we’re all connected may seem old hat in the age of the internet, fascination with it has yielded its own rich web of associations over the years. On the eve of the play’s first Broadway revival, which opens on Tuesday, April 25, here’s an unscientific look at a concept that links, among other things, the first issue of Psychology Today, the star of “Footloose” and a shirtless J. J. Abrams.

The idea of a totally connected world goes back at least to the early 20th century. As part of his broader inspiration, Mr. Guare has often cited the 1909 Nobel Prize lecture by the Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi, a pioneer of wireless telegraphy, who envisioned a network of towers that could send messages to any part of the globe.

Mr. Guare, in a recent interview, said he first encountered the six-degrees concept in 1967, in the inaugural issue of Psychology Today, which featured a cover story about the psychologist Stanley Milgram’s “small world” experiment. The experiment involved giving a letter to random people in Omaha and Wichita, Kan., with instructions to give it to someone who could give it to someone who would help it reach a designated individual in Boston.

Evidently, Ouisa Kittredge, one half of the couple in Mr. Guare’s play, saw the same article.

“I read somewhere that everybody on this planet is separated by only six other people,” she says during the increasingly desperate search to find “Paul” Poitier (who was based on a real con artist) after he disappears.

“The president of the United States. A gondolier in Venice,” she says. “It’s not just the big names,” she continues. “It’s anyone.”

The phrase is often seen as an inspiring, even mystical symbol. But the speech, Mr. Guare notes, was meant ironically, as a comment on racial exclusion and social stratification in America.

“The nightmare of the play becomes finding the right six people,” he said. “You can find everyone in the world, but you can’t find one black man whose name you don’t know.”

Mr. Guare said he was “tickled” when he started seeing the phrase “six degrees of separation” in different contexts: an ad for Air France, a newspaper article about the 1992 presidential election. And then came Kevin Bacon.

The now-famous Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon game was invented in 1994 by Craig Fass, Brian Turtle and Mike Ginelli, three students at Albright College in Reading, Pa., who were sitting around watching “Footloose.” They started naming other movies Mr. Bacon had appeared in, and came up with the idea that he was the unacknowledged center of the Hollywood universe, who connected everyone.

The three friends performed their parlor trick on “The Jon Stewart Show” on MTV a few months later. Next came a book (with an introduction by Mr. Bacon) and a board game.

Mr. Bacon (who declined to be interviewed for this article) would go on to found SixDegrees.org, which matches celebrities with charities, and star in a Visa commercial that parodied the six-degrees concept. But at a 20th-anniversary panel with Mr. Turtle and others at SXSW in Austin, Tex., in 2014, he recalled his initial mystification.

“People would come up to me and touch me and say, ‘I’m one degree!’” he said. “I didn’t really know what was going on.”

The Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon board game, which appeared in 1997, featured 20-sided dice. But the true great leap forward came a year earlier, when Brett Tjaden, a graduate student in computer science at the University of Virginia who sometimes played the parlor game, created The Oracle of Bacon, a website that generated authoritative “Bacon numbers” based on data from the Internet Movie Database.

“I did it mainly for myself and my friends,” Mr. Tjaden, now a professor at James Madison University, said in a phone interview. “They sent the link to their friends, who sent it to a couple of their friends, and before too long it was famous.”

Time Magazine named it one of its top 10 websites of 1996. Today, it has the same Web 1.0 look, though its Center of the Hollywood Universe list is updated regularly. (Mr. Bacon is No. 457, while the current center is … Eric Roberts?)

The website drew the attention of Duncan Watts and Steven Strogatz, two leading researchers in the emerging field of network theory, who drew on it for a seminal paper. It also inspired other riffs, like the Oracle of Baseball; Degrees of Wikipedia, which calculates links between Wikipedia pages; and Erdos-Bacon numbers, which combine a person’s proximity to both the Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdos, which has long been a benchmark for mathematicians, and Mr. Bacon. (Natalie Portman’s Erdos-Bacon number, in case you are wondering, has been calculated as seven.)

The Oracle of Bacon still has about 10,000 visitors on an average day, according to Patrick Reynolds, a software engineer in Florida who runs it.

“To me, it says that a meme never really goes away,” he said. “Everything lives forever until you pull the plug.”

The concept got another boost in 1999, when The New Yorker published an article by Malcolm Gladwell called “Six Degrees of Lois Weisberg,” which used Ms. Weisberg — at the time the cultural affairs commissioner of Chicago (and the mother of one of Mr. Gladwell’s friends) — as a case study in the surprising science of social connection.

The article, which was later adapted for Mr. Gladwell’s monster best seller “The Tipping Point,” dug into research by Milgram, Mark Granovetter (who developed the concept of strong versus weak social ties) and others. But the big ideas, Mr. Gladwell said in a phone interview, came second.

“She was kind of a hilarious person, and I wanted an excuse to hang out with her,” he said. “The article was really a delivery vehicle for Lois Weisberg.”

The article popularized the idea of “connectors”: people who know unusually large numbers of people and are unusually given to making introductions, the rough equivalent of hubs in a computer network.

“Not all degrees are created equal,” Mr. Gladwell wrote. The article’s teaser summary put it even more dramatically: “She’s a grandmother, she lives in a big house in Chicago, and you’ve never heard of her. Does she run the world?”

Ms. Weisberg, who died last year at 90, may have run the world, but she didn’t necessarily appreciate Mr. Gladwell’s telling everyone about it.

“I think I made her life a little difficult,” he said. “She wasn’t interested in celebrity of any kind.”

The play, Mr. Guare said, is “an antique piece.” Nowadays, a quick Google search — or text message to the Kittredges’ children, whom Paul supposedly knows from Harvard — would have blown Paul’s cover immediately.

On the other hand, social media has made it possible to be “friends” with people you don’t actually know, while also providing vast data sets for calculating the number of links separating people scattered around the world.

The degree of separation, it turns out, is less than six. Last year, researchers at Facebook reported that the 1.59 billion people on its network were separated from one another by only about 3.5 people. And that number had been shrinking: Five years earlier, when there were fewer than half as many people on the site, the figure was 3.74.

The six-degrees idea has a cosmic undertow that writers and directors have been happy to ride. The movies “Babel” and “Cloud Atlas,” as well as “Lost,” the head-scratching television series cocreated by J. J. Abrams, featured characters unknowingly linked across huge swaths of space and time. The movies “Crash” and “Magnolia” (both set in Los Angeles) and the short-lived ABC series “Six Degrees” (another Abrams project, set in New York) offered more localized versions.

Virginia Heffernan, reviewing “Six Degrees” in The New York Times, said it reflected “the shared citywide creed” that “might be called Manhattan paganism: a private, almost secretive belief in coincidence, chance, accident and serendipity.”

But here’s a real coincidence for you: Back in 1993, Mr. Abrams was an aspiring actor whose film credits included … a small part in the film adaptation of “Six Degrees of Separation.”

He played Doug, a college student whose father has also been taken in by Paul. “You’re an idiot! You’re an idiot!” a (shirtless) Mr. Abrams screams into the phone at the climax of his minute-long scene.

By the way, Mr. Abrams was in that movie with Donald Sutherland, who was in “Animal House” (1978) with Kevin Bacon, giving him a Bacon number of 2.