Customer Reviews

Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives

5 star:		(18)
4 star:		(17)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I loved this book. Sensitive, aware people perceive on a daily basis that actions, behaviors and emotions impact the lives of those around us, but the science that proves conclusively that your behaviors are impacting mine, my spouse's and friend's in Idaho offers such hope for improvement in the cosmic social network of which we all have our "connectedness". I loved the anecdotal stories - Nicholas and Erika meeting, the Starbucks employee, crazy unstoppable laughter - to which each reader will add additional network stories. We are connected, like it or not, so perhaps we can all start behaving in ways that benefit the entire network. Everyone who reads this will think twice about the impact of cutting someone off in traffic. Dr Christakis and Dr. Fowler have written for the scientific world, NY Times and lay reader - all who are part of the network.

While the statistics in the original journal articles might be fine, the authors do not present the interpretations in a particularly convincing way. Many interpretations given are just stated and the reader is apparently supposed to accept that explanation without evidence why it is the correct explanation. Even I can think of alternate explanations for some of their observed data.
Also, in many chapters the point is made and then elaborated upon for pages when they could've stopped much earlier--or else instead of just restating the same conclusions over-and-over, they could've told why other explanations don't work.

"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.

Nicholas A. Christakis (MD, PhD) and James H. Fowler (PhD) hold a high opinion about the potential value of their own field of expertise: "If we do not understand social networks, we cannot hope to fully understand either ourselves or the world we inhabit." Having read their book Connected I am generally inclined to agree with them, although I remain skeptical of much they have to say, including the validity of some of their most attention-grabbing conclusions. The book exhibits many of the merits that accrue when scientific authors are skilled at writing for a popular audience, but it also illustrates some of the perils that arise when complex and technical research details are truncated to make the product palatable for non-specialists. Nevertheless, anyone with a serious interest in the social sciences, public health, or public policy generally, but not previously fully-versed in social network analysis, should find Connected very instructive.

That is my summary judgment and you can stop here if you just want to understand why I assigned four stars. Connected is rich in content and I apologize that to summarize the book fairly and further justify my evaluation requires considerably more words, quite likely more than you may want to read at this point.

Social networks consist of humans and the connections between them. Most of us are members of "multiplex" networks involving different kinds of connections such as family, close friends, coworkers, neighbors, acquaintances, and so on. We can be either directly connected to others (first degree of separation), or indirectly so, through the second degree (a friend of a friend, for instance) up to about six degrees of separation to cover the globe. Networks have structure and shape: people have specific locations within networks, sometimes forming clusters that are themselves distinct network components. Christakis and Fowler do a commendable job of explaining all of this, plus they include several very clever color "maps" of different kinds of networks to provide visual reinforcement (credit the software).

Networks have the capacity for contagion, for influences to flow through the connections. We all understand how this works in a health epidemic when germs are spread, but Christakis and Fowler contend that it also applies to certain behaviors as well. There are several plausible explanations for why we might often behave or feel like others in our network, or vice-versa, including genetics (for directly related family members), our tendency to associate with others like ourselves (homophily), "emotional contagion" (the authors present several striking accounts of epidemic hysteria), shared environmental exposures, our propensity for imitation, and our desire to conform to social norms.

We can see readily enough how such influences might often operate at the first degree of separation, through ties with people to whom we are directly connected. But the authors are especially interested in "hyperdyadic spread," the tendency of behavioral influences to extend beyond the first level to generate effects at higher degrees of separation (just like germ contagion). It is not immediately intuitive that people we don't even know (aside from media personalities and the like) can significantly influence how we behave or feel. Yet Christakis and Fowler report on research where they claim to have found just that, including studies of network effects on happiness, obesity, and smoking, for example.

They propose a "Three Degrees of Influence Rule." For instance, they found in one of their studies that a person is about 15 percent more likely to be happy if someone to whom he or she is directly connected is happy; ten percent more likely if a connection two degrees removed is happy; and six percent more likely for happy persons three degrees removed. Beyond three degrees "intrinsic decay" (like in the telephone tree game) and network instability (social ties change over time) diminish the influence to negligible levels. Christakis and Fowler report similar findings from their obesity study, where they conclude (somewhat sensationally) that, "You may not know him personally, but your friend's husband's coworker can make you fat." Such network effects were observed supposedly after controlling for genetic influence, the tendency of people to befriend similar people, and the possibility of shared exposures that contributed to weight gain or loss.

The authors summarize many social network studies in addition to their own, addressing such subjects as employment search, romantic matches, sexually transmitted disease, currency circulation, financial market activity, voting behavior, and suicide. Much of the discussion is provocative and enlightening. For instance, readers will learn that there are circumstances where weak ties to others may be more helpful than strong ties, that higher status (college educated) persons influenced the spread of smoking in the 1930s and now influence the cessation of it, that networks might help explain why the rich are getting richer (the rich attract more friends, and having more friends is an aid in getting rich), and that political polarization (a bad thing in the eyes of many) increases political participation (a good thing to most).

I have various reservations about Connected, however. Some are methodological. For instance, the authors obtained the data for their principal research from the Framingham Heart Study, which has collected health information about a large inter-generational group of people since 1948, but was not designed as a social network study. Christakis and Fowler turned it into one by using the researchers' contact notes to reconstruct social connections among the participants in the more recent cohorts. But because the available information was limited the average number of assigned direct "friends" (not counting family, coworkers, neighbors or other kinds of connections) for the study subjects was only 0.7 (I know the number only because I consulted one of the authors' journal articles, not because they provided such detail in the book). Thus to me it seems their network data were at best incomplete, or worse, possibly selection biased, leaving out a large majority of the real-life friends of the study subjects. Surely many persons who were actually closely connected at the first degree were not recognized by the study as connected at all, and possibly many actual first-degree connections were linked inaccurately only at higher degrees of separation.

That is just one example. Peer scientists, persons much more qualified than myself, have raised other methodological concerns. For instance, Christakis and Fowler have been criticized for the specification of one of their mathematical models, with one adjusted replication finding no significant social network effects on obesity.

While it seems clear enough that network analysis has been and can be applied in socially beneficial ways, the authors at times appear overly optimistic about the prospects. One of their themes is that "positional inequality" (persons placed in less advantageous positions in networks) can be mitigated if policy makers better take into account the role of social networks. For example, they suggest that a friends-of-friends strategy may sometimes be preferable to one that involves just the direct subjects and their one-degree friends -- if you join your friends to lose weight you might succeed, they say, but if their friends are overweight and not working on it, your friends might relapse, affecting you too. But, at least in this example, their strategy does not seem to offer much practical promise, since with each additional tier of friends engaged the cumulative cost goes up exponentially and there are diminishing marginal returns in the effectiveness pay-off for the first-tier direct subjects.

One big factor that makes Christakis and Fowler upbeat about the future of network analysis is the advance of communications technology. In part they are excited because they see treasure mines of data. They observe, for instance, that cell phone information allows researchers to study where connected people are minute by minute. The authors do not pause to consider the potential privacy intrusions and risks that expanded access to such data might enable.

Christakis and Fowler believe that technology now makes physical distance less of a constraint for certain networks (such as scientific collaborations, for instance) and they think the Internet has facilitated match-making networks of various kinds. Yet interestingly, they suggest that modern technologies do not take us away from our prehistoric past, but rather move us closer toward it, in the sense that "our desire to form connections depends partly on our genes." They say that, "Overall, the evidence from real-world networks suggests that online networks can be used to enhance what flows between real-world friends and family, but we do not know yet whether the Internet will increase the speed or scope of social contagions in general."

The bottom line is that there is still much about social networks that social scientists and others do not understand. For instance, I do not think that we can yet say much with great confidence about the magnitude and diffusion of behavioral influences (as distinct from pathogenic agents) beyond the first degree of separation, in spite of the assertions of Christakis and Fowler here. However, what they have done should help enrich future research.

As an author, psychotherapist, and teacher, I read a lot of books. Most are read, enjoyed, and soon forgotten. However, occasionally I come across a book that is hard-hitting, informative, and changes the way we understand ourselves, each other, and the world.

Connected is such a book. To give you an idea I usually put little flags on pages with information I think is significant and want to remember. I usually have 10 or 12 little flags in a good book. In this book I have 120 flags and many of the flags have little notes I've written.

For instance, I've flagged this important point: "So while the observation that there are six degrees of separation between any two people applies to how connected we are, the observation that there are three degrees of influence applies to how contagious we are. These properties, connection and contagion, are the structure and function of social networks. They are the anatomy and physiology of the human superorganism."

Why is that important to everyday people? Well, how about because happiness as well as depression can spread along our social networks and make us joyful or sad, or because your future spouse is likely to be your friend's friend, or because your friends' friends' friends can make you fat, or thin.

If you really want to be happy, healthy, wealthy, and wise, I recommend you read Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives.

Some people travel through life keeping to themselves and trying desperately to live as independently as possible. What these people don't always realize is that their efforts to live independently are merely impossible attempts. Whether we choose this or not, our lives are entirely based on those around us, our social networks, and the choices that they make directly impact our daily lives. In Connected, Nicholas Christakis and James Folwer unveil the power of our social networks and how they influence virtually every aspect of our human experience.
It is very rare that we realize that what we do, spreads far beyond those we know directly. As a college student, my social network has nearly tripled in the past year, connecting me to hundreds more people than before. It is interesting to realize that my personal ideals are affecting hundreds of people, as well as hundreds of people are influencing me. According to Folwer and Christakis, the people who I choose to associate with in my college network, are directly affecting my success as a student through their attitudes and their study habits. By observing their ways and by associating with these college students, I unintentionally pick up their work ethic and make it my own. Furthermore, Fowler and Christakis do an excellent job describing how we are all interconnected in these ways.
The authors explore several aspects of the social network including the types of networks, and how they specifically apply to our lives. Intimate relationships were a common subject of discussion being that marriage is the most basic type of a social network. In these situations, our social networks serve as our matchmakers since we are homogamous creatures who search for people similar to us. They further argue that without the help our our social networks, we would never find our suitable mates since only one in every 6,000 people we would view as suitable for us (70). Some benefits of this social network are that people who are married prove to be happier, healthier, and tend to live longer than single people. Sexually transmitted diseases are also based off of our social network and in scientific studies, if the networks are split up, so are the diseases (Fowler and Christakis 97). This shows just how easily things can circulate within our social networks. According to the "Three Degrees of Influence Rule," any two people are related through six degrees of separation, and we can influence people up to three degrees of separation. Fowler and Christakis proved that this rule is commonly applied to obesity, smoking, drinking, political views, and several other things, which are the main focus of the book. If your friend's friend's friend decides to lose ten pounds, chances are that you will too (Fowler and Christakis 108). This is because we are influenced by others up to three degrees of separation and most of the time, we don't even know it. According to Fowler and Christakis, we all are involved in this superorganism and by reading Connected, we gain insight into our own networks and consequently, our own choices.
Both Fowler and Christakis started out in sociology and branched out to political sciences to examine how political opinions can be spread amongst groups of people (xi). The authors elaborate on our political tendencies by saying that we segregate ourselves into like-minded groups where we have high influences on those within the groups (185). It is no surprise that following their research, they expanded their beliefs from just politics, to include that every aspect of our lives are influenced by our social networks. Their writing style is strictly informative and successfully provides numerous examples of the various concepts. Although some facts can tend to be a bit contradictory of each other, the information still strongly argues just how prominent our social networks are in our lives. In chapter one it says "The powerful effect of social networks on individual behaviors and outcomes suggest that people do not have complete control over their own choices" (Fowler and Christakis 32). It is later stated that "a person is about 15 percent more likely to be happy if a directly connected person is happy" (51). These two statements are contradictory because it was initially stated that people have little control over their own choices, and then later stated that the people closest to you in the network, only have a 15 percent chance of influencing your choices. Overall, Fowler and Christakis do an excellent job communicating the profound impact that social networks have in our lives. This book will be a pleasure for sociology lovers or anyone interested in the basic principles of how we are affected by human interaction. I found this book to be an excellent read and strongly recommend it for older audiences. Connected by James Folwer and Nicholas Christakis, successfully gives us much needed insight into our own lives, by opening us up to our world of social networks.

Authors Christakis & Fowler have compiled a surprising and fascinating look at the impact our everyday social networks affect so many people; more than we ever imagined possible. I came away from this book truly amazed. You will be too.

Strangely enough, when I first came across this book, at first glance I thought it was another one of those Facebook/Twitter diatribes. That's where many of us go to get "connected", via the internet; social networking is what it's commonly referred to; and I wasn't enthralled with the idea of reading about those types of "connections" (again).

This book deals with the old-fashioned, personalized approach to social networks; no internet intervention; just real, live contact with real, live people. What amazed me was how seemingly insignificant contact with people we hardly know may have a widespread impact on a lot more people we probably don't know at all. Some of the observations were mind-boggling, and at times, seemed to defy logic. Although I'm not completely sure I agree with some of the premises, I'll give the authors the benefit of the doubt. You'll see what I'm talking about after you peruse this gem.

This is a book that will more than likely appeal to a very diverse bunch of people; in other words, I believe it's going to be a top-ranking best seller, right here on Amazon (or your local bookstore for that matter). It certainly opened my eyes to the significance of having a good social network; but beware; you need to be on your best behavior from now on. Your actions affect a lot more people than you ever dreamed possible.

This book did not live up to its hype unfortunately.

There are a number of cool graphs in the book that show network connections between individuals, the blogosphere of Iran, political blogs, etc that are an interesting way of visualizing networks. I had seen the TED talk that one of the authors gave, and found it fascinating, and went out and purchased the book.

I was hoping that the book might offer some way of creating a graph like this at an individual level, and discuss how a network position (or configuration) can lead to certain advantages / disadvantages and really breakdown how networks might affect us at an individual level. There is some of this, the author discusses the concept of one's friends being connected leading to transitivity, but the case studies in the book really don't go into much depth at all.

Really this book talks about networks at a much more general level, almost from a public health standpoint - which makes sense as one of the authors is involved in public health.

Most of the book cites various studies conducted that demonstrate some kind of network effect. While some of the studies are interesting, many are not, and there is a lot of filler material. It reads like Daniel Gilbert's Stumbling on Happiness, or Schwartz's Paradox of Choice.

Overall this book is ok, not amazing. There are probably better books to fill your time.

A nice try to explain the importance of social networks for our success, health, wealth, hapiness, relationships, behaviours, emotional states, etc. It confirms many things that we already knew or suspected. Contains a lot of research data and references, while trying to make those understandable by common people. This is stuff that should be teached in schools.

Most of the research in this book has already been widely reported in the popular press--a sign of its value--but like the phenomena the authors describe, the book is much greater than the sum of its parts. The carefully build a view of life from many areas of social science (while generally admitting that there are alternative ways to interpret the phenomena) and end up with one of those "big ideas" that publishers love. I'm quite willing to entertain this big idea: the ways we informally connect to each other defines us as people and influences our behavior profoundly. I did notice, however, that the authors moved more freely than I'd like between strong evidence supported by quantitative research and conclusions based on speculation about what caused the results.