2. The Eternal Contest

The original manuscript dates back to the 1950s, but it remained unpublished until 1978.

Barabási et al.’s work builds on the paradigm that all complex networks are completely random. The simple and elegant approach was developed by Paul Erdös and Alfréd Rényi in the 1950s, two Hungarian mathematicians who described networks in communications and life sciences as systems that could be modeled by connecting their nodes with random links. What Erdös and Rényi predicted was that most nodes would have a similar number of links, despite the randomness of linking. Barabási et al. disproved this assumption empirically and found, instead, a few highly connected nodes (hubs), something that the random-network-theory failed to explain.

A few studies have been concerned with language from a formal-conceptual point of view. The small-worlds that have been found the cooccurrence of words in sentences (Ferrer i Cancho & Solé, 2001; Motter et al., 2002), the semantic associations in various languages as networks (e.g., De Deyne & Storms, 2008; Y. N. Kenett et al., 2011; Steyvers & Tenenbaum, 2005), structural word-network properties and their potential impact on the quality of texts (Antiqueira et al., 2007) as well as the implications for writing code for meaning-generating algorithms (cf. Y. N. Kenett et al., 2011: 2). Ferrer i Cancho, R. & Solé, R. V. (2001). The small world of human language. Proceedings: Biological Sciences, 268(1482), 2261–2265; Motter, A. E., de Moura, A.P.S., Lai, Y-C., & Dasgupta, P. (2002). Topology of the conceptual network of language. Physical Review, E65(6), 065102; De Deyne, S. & Storms, G. (2008). Word associations: Network and semantic properties. Behavior Research Methods, 40, 213–231; Steyvers, M. & Tenenbaum, J. B. (2005). The large-scale structure of semantic networks: Statistical analyses and a model of semantic growth. Cognitive Science, 29(1), 41–78; Antiqueira, L., Nunes, M. G. V, Oliveira Jr., O. N. & Costa L da, F. (2007). Strong correlations between text quality and complex networks features. Physica A: Statistical and Theoretical Physics, 373, 811–820; Kenett, Y. N., Kenett, D. Y., Ben-Jacob, E., & Faust, M. (2011). Global and local features of semantic networks: Evidence from the Hebrew mental lexicon. PLoS ONE, 6(8), e23912.

Microsoft Messenger Instant Messaging was available in up to 50 different languages.

The Oracle of Bacon allows anyone to inquire into the shortest path between the individual user and Hollywood actor Kevin Bacon. See www.​oracleofbacon.​org.

Daraghmi and Yuan (2014: 285) argue similarly: ‘We are so close; the world is even smaller than you thought…we observe the average degrees of separation or the average numbers of acquaintances separating any two people no matter who they are even with rare-special features were only 3.868. It does not matter who we are, less than four degrees separating [sic] you and me.’ Also, a study conducted by a research group at Facebook concludes:

Each person in the world (at least among the 1.59 billion people active on Facebook) is connected to every other person by an average of three and a half other people…Our collective “degrees of separation” have shrunk over the past five years. In 2011, researchers at Cornell, the Università degli Studi di Milano, and Facebook computed the average across the 721 million people using the site then, and found that it was 3.74. Now, with twice as many people using the site, we’ve grown more interconnected, thus shortening the distance between any two people in the world (Edunov et al., 2016).

Another common dimension includes studies about the psychology of the small-world phenomenon—that is, the surprise effect that people experience once they realise the small-world phenomenon and how it affects their future behaviour in social networks (cf. Schnettler, 2009).

Revisiting the state of small-world research in 2016, and pointing out the lack of studies about isolation and social networks, Duncan Watts emphasises: ‘Given the importance of social networks in determining life outcomes, it would be extremely interesting and useful to understand better who these people are and why they are isolated. Is it something to do with their underlying networks or is it that their search strategies are somehow less effective?…But the answers would not only be of academic interest — they could also potentially help many people access currently inaccessible reserves of “social capital” thereby improving their lives. Far from being settled, the small-world problem still has much to teach us about the world, and ourselves.’ This book is also a contribution to this largely neglected aspect of small-world research, which requires much more attention now and in the future. Watts, D. (2016). How small is the world, really? Retrieved from https://​medium.​com/​@duncanjwatts/​how-small-is-the-world-really-736fa21808ba#.​msalncdb1, 6 July 2016.