Six degrees of 'flat' separation?

It is one of the tenants of internet beliefs, supported by that most dangerous of human enterprises Science (we gave it a capital S for fun and importance).

At most six degrees, give or take, separate you from any other person. The most widespread early social media, eMail, supports the finding, and later bittersweet applications do so too.

TheEditor looked at its (gender neutral) profile on a major social site and saw that one Barack H. Obama is a mere 3 degrees away among the folks that make up the cloud of acquaintances, connections, friends.

With all the bytes lined up like the ducks of pre-digital days, we forgot about the six degrees.

Then came, yes, you know what, and friends of friends of friends was buzzing around everywhere like flies around a fresh, steaming meadow muffin.

Hold on, a little voice said, there are a couple of glitches here.

1. The pathway may be different
It may be correct that TheEditor has only a few hops to Mr. Obama but the hops are probably not through this social media site. The Mr. Barack H. Obama on the site is almost certainly not the individual running around the White House doing the dishes but some intern or political action peeps in a basement outside the Beltway.

Thus, TheEditor has no clue how far the prez is away in terms of degrees, hopefully more than three because we don't want the email exchange with a friend spending time in Lebanon looking for the gal to marry get in the way of great politics. 'cause, if we understand the media reports about them bad terrorists right, an email out of Lebanon about marriage may just be the thingy of nightmares.

2. The six degrees is a flat measure
Someone must have pointed that out but despite our love of Science we avoid reading it raw, ingesting the byte-size chunks from news sites and aggregators.

What does "flat" mean?  We coined it to express the fact that, yes, someone may be only three degrees away but utterly inaccessible.

A simple example from days of corporate workdom illustrates this. There was the big boss, we all knew him because he'd do speeches ten yards in front of us, uplifting, joking, expounding on big hairy goals, explaining how the bottom five percent should leave the rest of us unencumbered and that these bottom feeders would henceforth be fired every six months.

Unless you ran into him on his motivational walk to the cafeteria, you'd never get any facetime. How we know? Because TheEditor, unbeknownst to it, came too close to the man one day when it wandered to the left instead of to the right in the big, glass-clad main lobby in its quest to see what the pretty plants to the left were.

Out of nowhere, a seven foot NBA-fit man appeared, curious as to where it was going, very gently body blocking the path. Which was fine because the plants of interest were right there, so it had no need or intention to go anywhere else.

Making small talk, the two wandered towards the main exit, and all was well.
So, the distance may be two or three degrees but the "social miles" may be the equivalent of a return trip to the moon.