Six degrees to Kevin Bacon

In a White House Press Conference on June 28, 2000, Bill Clinton quoted at a certain moment: "In the words of that now-famous book that everybody is reading, it reaches a kind of tipping point and people kind of get it". Which was the "famous" book that he was referring to? What is a tipping point?

It appears that The Tipping Point is a bestseller non-fiction book that first published in 2000 by the legendary author Malcolm Gladwell (I referred to his work on another blog, Blink). Until quite recently, I had no knowledge whatsoever of either Gladwell or any of his books and articles. Eventually, I ended up linked to him and his work thru a phenomenon that he happens to be describing extensively in "The Tipping Point": Social networking, or the fact that everyone seems to be connected to everyone else, somehow.

Many know Linkedin nowadays. Linkedin is an organization that actually links people via their individual networks of acquaintances in ways Gladwell describes in his book. Within our daily worlds of social life, career, sports leisure, travel, etc, it appears that it is rather trivial to connect most of us to anyone else within just a few steps (a.k.a. degrees). As an example, I recently discovered that I was within two degrees of Kaspersky, one of the founders of the Kaspersky anti-virus software supplier (big deal...not?). That was made possible via my ex-boss at CA to whom I am linked directly and who has a rather large network of business partners, friends and acquaintances in the IT industry. The whole idea behind Linkedin is to use connections as referrals if you are trying to reach certain individuals. As an extra bonus, it appears that for referral purposes, as Gladwell puts it, the so called "weak ties" (that is links of second degree upwards) are stronger than "strong ties" (first degree links with people you know well and meet regularly). In other words, the friends of your friends are likely to know your target(s) better than your very own close friends and acquaintances...

As an example, let me refer to my own personal experience with Linkedin... despite the fact that I consider myself a dormant account holder... meaning, I am not doing much with it, I've got a total of 16 first degree connections, mostly ex-colleagues. However, it so happens that a handful of folks in my first degree circle are connected to hundreds of others... the highest score is Dan's, who worked in our UK ops at Sterling Software in the late nineties, with 312 first degree connections. Long story short, the total of my second degree connections covers more than 1,200 contacts. And three degrees away, my total number of connections span to more than 200,000 (!!!). This actually means, that in this target population of 200,000+ folks out there I could theoretically reach someone (say, my referral target) via some guy/gal closer to me (my first degree circle), who in turn knows somebody else relatively well (his/her own first degree circle), who then happens to be related to my target reasonably well (via, again, his/her own first degree circle)! Like "The friends of my friends are my friends too" sort of thing... 200,000 dudes out there, reacheable via a mere sixteen folks among my so many other acquaintances who, as it happens, went thru the trouble to participate in the Linkedin connectivity. Wow!

I have no idea how successful the Linkedin initiative has proven todate. I see them being still active, enhancing the functionality of their homepage and aggressive in marketing their services via a variety of strategies. They must be doing something right after all... as I said earlier, I don't quite use them too often but I am regularly invited to link to people via my connections, endorse people I know, etc...

Another "cute" example of human networking connectivity, that Gladwell superbly describes in The Tipping Point, is the trivia game "Six degrees to Kevin Bacon" (in this linked article, Wikipedia offers an extensive coverage of the game). The idea is simple: if I gave you the name of any actor or actress, either alive or dead, from a list of about 800 thousand (!), can you link him/her via movies they've been together to the actor Kevin Bacon in less than six degrees? For example, how many degrees do you think one needs to connect Gregory Peck (adored by Baby Boomers) to Kevin Bacon (a hero of Generation X fans)? Well, it appears that the answer is only two degrees:

Gregory Peck was in Mackenna's Gold (1969) with Eli Wallach
Eli Wallach was in Mystic River (2003) with Kevin Bacon

(same result obtained for Marilyn Monroe as well, who was actually found dead by the time Kevin Bacon was almost out of his diapers... connected via the same old sob Eli Wallach who still continues to act in his nineties...)

It gets even better. It appears that Brett Tjaden of the University of Virginia explored the game systematically and came to quite a few interesting conclusions. Of 800+ thousand actors maintained in the IMDb database it was calculated that the average number of degrees to Kevin Bacon is 2.946, or, in other words, almost any actor/actrice you know of in the US can be connected to Kevin Bacon in an average of just under three steps. Phenomenal!

If you are interested to try for yourselves, visit Tjaden's "Oracle of Bacon" and try any pair of actors you may select to link to each other. And if you concluded from the above stats that Kevin Bacon is "well" connected... I've got news for you... there are 1,048 others with a lower average than Bacon's. Finally, if you just wondered who's on top of the list, well... I am glad to say that it is one of my most favorite actors of all times with an average score of 2.678695: Rod Steiger!

It appears that actors who have acted in a variety of movie-styles (say Western, Romance, Gangster, Historic, Comedies) score better (higher in rank) than those who mainly acted in a few movie-styles alone, regardless how many films in total they did during their career. For this reason, John Wayne with dozens of movies (mostly Westerns) scores quite low (319) whereas Rod Steiger, who performed a myriad of different roles (from Napoleon to Capone), ranks on top... and Dan Hedaya (Dan who???) scores better than Woody Allen! Give us a break!

Finally, the first woman on that ranking list is Karen Black on rank 21. I had to search hard to find out who she is... I must admit, her face rings a bell, but I'll be damned if I remember which films I saw her act...