Seven Steps
Uniting the world through…statistics?
Melissa Hiebert Staff
Everyone has probably heard the cliché phrase “we are all connected” so many times that the words have lost all meaning. According to a recent book, Struck by lightning: the curious world of probabilities, this statement has more truth value than we are willing to admit. Struck by lighning proposes that all that is separating you from the rest of the world is a mere seven steps.
A “step” is when you don’t know someone directly, but you know someone who knows them. Kind of like a friend of a friend of someone’s. A chain of steps is what people regularly do when trying to connect themselves with celebrities. Maybe your aunt’s hairdresser’s cousin knows someone who went to high school with the drummer from Aerosmith. It sounds impressive at first, but what most people don’t realize is that you can play the chain game to find that there are only seven steps between you and anyone in the world.
I was a little skeptical about this at first, but when you really think about it, it’s not entirely implausible. How many people have relatives scattered throughout the country? How many people have travelled and made friends along the way? How many people know international students, or have gone on exchange programs? When you add up all of the people you know, and all of the people they know, the world seems to become instantaneously smaller. And all this time we thought that the Americans were ignorant, asking us if we know Bob from Toronto upon finding out that we are from Canada. Maybe Americans are just really into their statistics classes.
The only hard part is figuring out the connections. Who knew that the best way to connect myself to Bob Dylan (so rumor has it) is through my high school librarian? And that my mom’s coworker’s son works for the UN, who most likely knows someone who knows George Bush? That’s only 6 steps, and that still might not even be the most effective way to play the connection game. People are always amazed when they discover a connection like this, perhaps because it’s always hard to know exactly who is going to know the right people, and how.
So just remember, everyone on campus is probably connected to you somehow within about one or two steps. Everyone in Winnipeg about two or three. And every random face, every stranger on the street in a foreign country on a foreign continent is probably around seven steps away from you (or maybe even less).
What is the moral of my story? I probably should relay some ostentatious message about treating people a certain way or how the world is all one or some other equally trite statement (and believe me, I am tempted), but I won’t. Instead I will simply pass on this tidbit of information, and leave you to ponder over it any way that makes sense to you. Or just leave you to contemplate how you can use this information to hook up with Johnny Depp.
