Zero Degrees of Separation

Watching Kevin Bacon play his own creepiest fan in this advertisement (for the Revue, Logitech’s Google-TV implementation), we’re reminded that the famously well-connected star has long been an avatar of social networking. It’s funny to realize that the “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” gambit appeared way back in 1994, well before the rise of the social media. Mosaic, the graphical web browser credited with popularizing the Web, had been released just the year before, and Mark Zuckerberg was only ten years old. But the notion of people organized by technology into nodes and networks was already in the air. (The “Six Degrees of Separation” meme can be traced back even further, to Hungarian author Frigyes Karinthy’s 1929 story, “Chain Links.”) A few short years later, personality itself is in the cloud; we’re not only “friends”�we’re unwitting doppelg�ngers as well.

[via BoingBoing]