Six degrees of separation? Those days – the 1960s, when US social psychologist Stanley Milgram performed his "small-world experiment" and estimated that no one was more than six hops away from connection with anyone else – are over, my friend. Because you probably are a friend. Or at least a friend of a friend. In Facebook or Twitter terms, anyway. And that is how we arrive at the news of a new study claiming that, thanks to social-networking sites, the average degree of separation between people is now just 4.74.
Can it be true? Let us do a rigorous scientific test to find out:
• I'm Facebook, Twitter and real friends since law school with a woman who once danced with Robbie Williams when she was 16. Alas, she was shitfaced on Mad Dog 20/20 at the time and only remembers throwing up on a jacket – not even Robbie's jacket – afterwards. But still, she's absolutely sure it was him.
• A friend has a picture on her Facebook page of her at a rally in Washington shaking hands with Bill Clinton, who has met Barack Obama. So I am but three degrees of separation away from the leader of the free world. More importantly, Obama has been on The Daily Show, so I am only four from Jon Stewart, which makes us virtually married. Hurrah!
• I am Facebook friends – after she contacted me to thank me for something I wrote abut her late husband – with Gene Kelly's widow, which puts me two degrees away from one of my greatest heroes and within hailing distance of the rest of 50s Hollywood's finest too.
• Alas, I have no cyberconnection to him, but I did once meet Michael Portillo in real life, an unsettling experience I'll have to tell you about one day, which puts me two degrees away from Mrs Thatcher and therefore three from Satan himself, if the rumours about that Bilderberg group meeting in 1977 are true.
