So, apparently, the six degrees that used to separate you and me has shrunk. As reported in The New York Times, the number of people separating anyone from anyone else in the world is now 4.74, and the number between people in the United States is 4.37.

The implications for how this affects party games involving Kevin Bacon have yet to be determined.

I suspect the conventional wisdom would assert that the cause of the narrowing gap between you and me are summed up in the words "social media": 800 million Facebook friends are bound to bring us closer together.

But just because I follow Jerry Seinfeld's Twitter feed doesn't mean I've closed the gap between me and George Costanza.

And when we take into account the fact that Facebook itself conducted the study that led to the 4.74 degree conclusion, it begins to sound more like a marketing hashtag than double-blind social science.

Not like the original finding of six degrees was hard science either. The idea for the original 1967 study by psychologist Stanley Milgram originated in the creative conjecture of a 1929 Hungarian short story and was made famous by the 1990 play by John Guare, "Six Degrees of Separation."

In both studies, the participants were self-selecting, and its hard not to see the number as anything other than the statistical mean of a vastly wide-ranging spectrum. I mean, really, does anyone believe 4.74 degrees separates the person in Appalachia who has no electricity (let alone Wi-Fi) from the subsistence farmer in east Africa? And if by chance they did, Facebook would have had nothing to do with it.

Personally speaking, the people I've friended on Facebook are either friends I already knew beforehand, or people who are already aware of me (or vice versa) through other professional or personal circles. In which case the "weak tie" of social media depends on a "strong tie" elsewhere.

You know, like the circle of people we call "neighborhood" or "office" or "church."

Thus, it strikes me that the conventional wisdom may have it backwards. Social media is actually the effect of the 4.74 degrees separating you and me, rather than its cause.

The fact of the matter is, we have now surpassed 7 billion human beings on the planet Earth. If you're keeping count, that means we're breaking our old record nearly every single second. And more and more of us are living in urban and suburban settings. So, there is less and less square footage between you and me. Literally. So, it only stands to reason that there would be less separation between us when there's less physical space to keep us apart.

There we have it. Perhaps it is as simple as a lesson in high-school geography.

Nevertheless, it does beg the question of what we mean by "friend" and what actually constitutes a "degree" of separation. No doubt the "weak ties" of social media count for something significant. They have become an incredibly efficient and innovative way to share information and extend our reach in real time. And it is changing the way we conceive of and act upon our relationships with other human beings. For both better (see: Arab spring) and worse (see: cyber bullying).

Of course, the irony isn't lost on me that I'm sharing these thoughts on a blog, a link to which will soon appear on my Facebook page and Twitter feed. This is the wonderful world we live in.

But I still wonder whether social media can create or multiply the kind of "strong ties" that result in what Robert Putnam so famously called "social capital." I remain unconvinced it can do it on its own. These ties are the ones that create and sustain trust, reciprocity, and value among people. They require deep encounters, mutual interests, and multiple avenues for interaction and communication.

And these ties have zero degrees of separation.

They are the kind of ties that would motivate farmers in a community to each invest in a different piece of heavy machinery and then each share their machinery with the others through the planting and harvest seasons. (If you're curious, my great grandfather Schmidt was the one who owned the threshing machine in Altenburg, Missouri.)

And they are the reason we might actually show up for the Christmas potluck in the neighborhood church basement. And bring our favorite casserole. Which might be why Robert Putnam himself calls these ties our "church friends."

You don't create these kinds of ties on Facebook, Twitter, or Google+. For that matter, they don't happen during momentary encounters on the MetroLink either.

They take time and intentionality and cooperation and, yes, faith.