Day 15- May 15 - Social Networks and the Oracle of Bacon
- Elizabeth Rasnick
- May 19, 2023
- 2 min read
Facebook pops in most people's minds when they read the term: social network. It is probably the most well-known social network these days. However, it is just one of many. Social networks have existed since humans started communicating with each other. They are just a collection of people who connect with each other on a social basis. Experiments on social networks in the late 1960s lead to the concept of six degrees of separation.
The small world construct that many of the early social network experiments were based on suggested that there was some small number of connections between any two people. The small number, as it turns out, is six. Imagine that! It only takes 6 people to get from you to any other person on the planet. It’s kind of mindblowing! Six?
Social networking applications on the web take advantage of contemporary technology to make the speed of communication faster. But, that’s all they do, speed up the process. They did not invent it. (No matter what Zuckerberg says.) That brings us to the Oracle of Bacon. In an effort to give his students a better understanding of social networks, Brett Tjaden (who has a mancrush on Kevin Bacon) envisioned a site where someone could connect from Kevin Bacon to anyone else in TMDB (the movie database) in six connections or fewer. Patrick Reynolds runs the Oracle of Bacon website. It will now link any two people in IMDB. It’s loads of fun. I suggest giving it a try. (I like trying to connect classic Hollywood stars like Shirley Temple and Alfred Hitchcock with current actors.)
Many concepts of social networks are illustrated in the Oracle of Bacon. Each person links directly to people they know. Each person knows some people better than others. That presents the idea of strength in relationships. There is a temporal element to relationships. Some relationships stay strong over time and some have varying strength over time. This is true in relationships online as well. Some people have loads of connections. We all know at least one person who seems to know everyone; they run into someone they know everywhere they go. These people serve as hubs. It is through these people that distant connections are shortened. Another fun concept the Oracle of Bacon shows us is that there are usually more than one path between two people. How many times have you been introduced by one common friend only to discover that you have others in common as well?
Ever wonder how websites like Facebook and LinkedIn make suggestions for people you may know and might want to connect with? They take advantage of these concepts to identify people who know the people that you know (one degree of separation). LinkedIn even identifies who many degrees anyway from someone you are with the number next to someone’s name (1st, a direct contact; 2nd, one person links you to someone else)
留言