"Connected" by Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler is one of the most important books you will ever read. In this insightful and thought-provoking book, the authors explore our social networks and their powerful shaping role in our daily lives. The authors show that the powerful role of social networks obeys the Three Degrees of Influence Rule, meaning that our behaviors have impact on our friends, our friends' friends, and our friends' friends' friends. This amazing fact can be applied to human experience as diverse as happiness, loneliness and other emotions, political views, sex, and health. For example, happiness can spread through social networks from person to person to person, and our health behaviors can affect those of our friends, our friends' friends, and even our friends' friends' friends.
As I perused this book twice since its publication, I found reading "Connected" very delightful since it presents a constellation of thought-provoking, and sometimes counter-intuitive, ideas on social networks. We can enjoy the book solely for the purpose of enhancing our knowledge. But I think this book is much more than that and has meaningful implications in various ways. First and foremost, the book has very important implications for policymakers. For instance, as the authors articulated in Chapter 4, social-network perspectives can offer a whole new set of cost-effective public-health interventions. This innovative approach is particularly relevant at a time when soaring costs of health care are a major issue and health care reform is gaining momentum. Many policymakers now know that nudging is important, but they don't know how to implement it. This book provides a good answer.
Second, "Connected" has significant implications for academia as well. Efforts to understand human behavior have been confined to a long debate of individualism versus holism. This book offers an entirely different way. By studying social networks, the authors suggest, we can find the missing link between the two perspectives. In other words, through the investigation of how emergent properties arise and exert influence on our lives, we can truly understand human condition and behavior for the first time. This is almost a manifesto, calling for a change in the traditions of "either or approach" between individualism and holism towards "both and approach" by means of the solid bridge offered by social networks that could resolve the chasm. Such a manifesto is convincing and has a strong stance because it is soundly supported by the thoroughly researched evidence from the authors and others.
Finally, this book has meaningful implications for each and every individual because we are all embedded in our social network (both real-world and online network). The fact that we are all connected to others through social networks is significant to us partly because such networks influence us in every aspect. So after reading this book, some may behave differently so that social networks can have positive influence on them. For example, we may try to make friends with happy, slender and rich people. But I think that is not far from a kind of social determinism. Rather, what this book repeatedly stresses is the importance of our own role in social networks--the surprising power of us as humans and how we shape our social networks. The authors assert that social networks are important not only because of the effect others have on us but also because of the effect we have on them. In this sense, being embedded in social networks is a matter of our social responsibility with strong commitment to creating and enhancing public goods. This book thus teaches us one of the most important truths of our life that we are responsible for, and should take care of, others.
Whether you are a policymaker, scientist or everyman like me, if you want to understand who we are and what we must do to be truly human, "Connected" is a must-read. If you are to read just one book this year, this is the one.
