Duncan Watts, Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age

Tip Ghosh

Duncan Watts is a skillful storyteller. He uses narrative to explain intricate and complicated con-
cepts and examples, making the science of networks accessible to the public. He weaves a tale
of personal biography and social history, in a rich description of the study of networks across
disciplines. His story is one of the intersections between structure and agency and the evolution
of a new way of studying networks that arose from the realities of our networked society. The
tradeoff between order and randomness and structure and agency represents the counterpoints for
networked systems. Variety is the spice of life because only with variety the emergent order can
generate something rich and interesting.

Watts advocates a multi-disciplinary approach to the study of networks. Any deep understanding
of real networks can come through a marriage of ideas and data that have dispersed across the
spectrum, each a piece of the puzzle with its own fascinating history and insights, but none the
key to the puzzle itself. Such an interdisciplinary approach seems very productive, though Watts
is rather unique because of his background in physics, mathematics, and engineering combined
with his interest in social phenomena.

Duncan Watts presents an introduction into the “small world” phenomenon that is being re-
searched in current social network analysis literature. He describes how he came to study the
topic and how he has been able to extend previous research with the introduction of two new
mathematical models that represent small world networks.

Watts describes his background and how he became interested in the concept of networks. He
describes networks as a collection of objects connected to each other in some sort of fashion. He
discusses how networks have been viewed as objects of pure structure whose properties are fixed
in time. He claims that neither of these assumptions is true, but that real networks represent
populations of individual components that are actually doing something. Therefore network
structure of relationships, while important, are dynamic and cannot be looked at as static and un-
changing.

Watts describes how random graph theory has been used as a basis for understanding the small
world problem. He depicts a random graph as a collection of buttons tied by strings. Pairs of
nodes (buttons) are connected at random by links or ties. This is important because of a property
of this depiction is that all of the links have been connected at random and so when the average
number of links per node exceeds one, a phase transition occurs. In other words, the network
transitions from a disconnected to a connected one. Before this phase transition it would be im-
possible to have access to everyone in the network, but when the transition occurs it is very pos-
sible.

Watts brings in the idea of synchronization and how networks that are dynamic display proper-
ties similar in nature. An example of this is a crowd that begins clapping. There does not neces-
sarily have to be any one person who is central or who leads the audience in applause. However,
most often we hear audiences clap in unison. He explains that what they have found is that a
group or cluster of people randomly claps at the same time and because their clapping can be
heard louder than the others, everyone tends to synchronize around them. But he points out, just
because they were the cluster that led the group one time does not mean that they will lead the
group the next time. Therefore he states that a historical perspective of networks doesn’t always
depict things as they are presently.

Random-biased net theory states that there exists a bias toward creating cycles of length of three
(triadic closure bias) and therefore creates longer cycles. This means that people that have
friends will have more potential to make friends with their friends’ friends than with some ran-
dom person.

Duncan Watts uses path length and clustering variables to describe how small world net-
works are different from fragmented networks and random networks. Two mathematical
models are used in order to better understand and describe small world networks. An im-
portant finding is that highly structured networks, with many redundant ties, would take
five thousand jumps to get a message to someone else on the other side of the network.
But when a small amount of randomness is allowed in the structured network, the path
length decreases significantly. So a few random links can generate a large effect. Fur-
ther regardless of network size, five random links decrease the path length by half, but in
order to halve it again, 50 such random links are required.

Small world networks arise from the tension of very basic forces, order and disorder (or
rather structure and agency). Watts tested this concept on individuals, power grids, and
neural networks and found similar results for all of them suggesting that these network
properties can have universal generalizability.

Social network analysts have developed two types of techniques for studying networks.
¾ the relationship between network structure and the corresponding social structure, ac-
cording to which individuals can be differentiated by their membership in socially dis-
tinct groups or roles
¾ viewing a network as a conduit for spreading information or exerting influence (here the
notion of the “weak tie” is particularly relevant).

Yet, Watts notes a major problem of social network analysis – its inability to deal with network
dynamics. Because purely structural and static measures of network structure can’t account for
actions taking place in the network, the methods of social network analysts offer no systematic
way to translate their findings into the meaningful statements about outcomes.

Social network analysts have also done considerable work on the notion of centrality. Watts
points out that what if there was not a center that is not coordinated in a formal way. He also
finds that important innovations have occurred at the periphery and not at the center. He says
“What if small events percolate through obscure places by happenstance and random encounters,
triggering a multitude of individual decisions, each made in the absence of any grand plan, yet
aggregating somehow into a momentous event unanticipated by anyone, including the actors
themselves?”. This has huge implications for our understanding of networks in the sense that the
center emerges as a consequence of the event itself.
Networks are dynamic objects because the networks themselves are evolving and changing in
time, driven by the activities or decisions of their components. In the connected age, therefore,
what happens and how it happens depend on the network. Dynamics has two meanings: dynam-
ics of the network (the evolving structure of the network itself), and dynamics on the network
(when outcomes of individuals’ actions are influenced by what other network members are do-
ing). In the real world, both kinds of dynamics are present simultaneously.

Watts’ models are based on four elements. First, social networks consist of many small overlap-
ping groups that are densely internally connected and that overlap by virtue of individuals having
multiple affiliations. Second, social networks are not static objects. Third, not all potential rela-
tionships are equally likely. Fourth, occasionally actors do things that are derived entirely from
actors’ preferences and characteristics, and these preferences may lead actors to meet new people
who have no connection to their previous friends at all. Each of these general principles was ex-
pressed more precisely in terms of the so-called “interaction rules”, when the model let networks
evolve in time as individuals were making new friends according to a specific interaction rule.

Mathematically, this entire family of rules was expressed as an equation that contains a single
tunable parameter. The model was called the alpha model, and hence the parameter was called
alpha. The alpha model showed that the origin of the small-world phenomenon seemed to de-
pend on the presence of two apparently contradictory properties of social networks. On the one
hand, the network should display a large clustering coefficient. On the other hand, it should be
possible to connect two people chosen at random via a chain of only a few intermediaries. The
alpha model indicated that either the world will be fragmented into many tiny clusters, or it will
be connected in a single giant component within which virtually anyone can be connected to
anyone else.

Yet, the meaning of the coefficient alpha could be clarified only after the second model–– beta
model––was developed. The beta model revealed a wide interval in the space of networks be-
tween complete order and complete disorder, in which local clustering is high and global path
lengths are small. The alpha parameter was understood to determine the probability that the fin-
ished network will exhibit long-range, random short cuts, and it is the short cuts that are impor-
tant to the process. The models developed by Watts could generate the short cuts either by simu-
lating social processes (alpha model) or by creating them with some probability (beta model).

In empirical application of his models, using a network of movie actors, Watts showed that in a
world consisting of hundreds of thousands of individuals, every actor could be connected to
every other actor in an average of less than four steps. The same results were obtained for non-
social networks as well, thus indicating that various networks of different nature and origin are
all small-world networks. Watts concludes that any network can be a small-world network as
long as it has some way of embodying order and yet retains some small amount of disorder.

A small-world phenomenon may suggest that any person can get a message to anyone, but Watts
states that it is not so because the society is deeply divided along the lines of race, class, and re-
ligion. One of Watts’ key insights is the emphasis on the universality among networks of differ-
ent types from social to neural.