Does Six Degrees of Separation Always Work?

The Centola and Macy paper helped me better understand the meaning of the "strength of weak ties." In the paper, the authors describe strong ties as ties that "connect close friends or kin whose interactions are frequent, affectively charged, and highly salient to each other." Centola and Macy imply that strong ties only occur between the closest of friends and relatives, and that these ties form tight clusters that infrequently form relationships outside of the cluster. On the contrary, Centola and Macy describe weak ties as ties that "facilitate diffusion when they provide 'shortcuts' between remote clusters" and that "it takes only a small fraction of these long ties to give even highly clustered networks the “degrees of separation” characteristic of a random network." Centola and Macy argue that weak ties connect clusters and extend the reach of social networks.

I have always had my doubts regarding the Six Degrees of Separation theory, and this article helped reinforce my doubts. Although there are many ways to classify a "degree," such as a Facebook friend, an ex-coworker, and a godparent, not everyone is able to make the weak ties that extend networks. Two examples of groups of people that may not be able to extend social networks are small towns in Rural America and individual tribes in Africa. Groups in these areas seem to be very community based, having strong ties to each other, but not communicating nearly as much with other groups. For example, the Amish, due to their lack of technology, rarely communicate with the outside world. Hypothetically, if only the Amish's parish leader communicates with other priests outside of the village, I find it doubtful that any given Amish citizen could be connected in less than six degrees to any given African tribesman, whose only connection outside his tribe is his tribe leader, who knows a few other tribe leaders. For example, an Amish villager could know the priest, who could know a non-Amish priest, who could know a government official, who could know an African official, who could know a tribe leader, who could know a tribesman. This hypothetical path separates the Amish villager and the African tribesman by six degrees at a bare minimum number of connections. However, many African tribes may not be directly connected to the government, so in many cases, the separation might be over six degrees. Because of this, I feel that the Six Degrees of Separation theory doesn't always apply in every network.