5 people to tour the small world

This is another very useful theory of communication. To illustrate the importance of social networks, Stanley Milgram demonstrated the existence of chains of interpersonal relationships. The length of a chain is defined by the number of intermediaries necessary to link a starting individual to a target individual. The average of these lengths was evaluated at 5,2 intermediate. This figure tends to be reduced to 4,6 when studies focus on the professions of individuals. By establishing that the average distance between two individuals is approximately equal to 5 within a mass society, Milgram's experiment made it possible to discover the theory of the “small world”. By deepening his results, Stanley Milgram had noticed that the chain linking the people in question was made up more of microgroups than of isolated individuals. He used the metaphor of a bunch of grapes to illustrate his point. Information is transmitted from...