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Product Details
Hardcover: 352 pages
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company; First Edition first Printing edition (September 28, 2009)
The premise of the book is pretty simple. You have close friends and acquaintances. Your close friends and acquaintances also have friends and acquaintances, that may or may not over lap with yours. Those people also have another set of friends and acquaintances. And here's the kicker, that third layer, not your friend, or your friend's friend, but your friends friends friend can affect your daily mood, the amount of exercise you do, whether or not you smoke, your involvement in crime, all sorts of things. The book sets out to prove it. Along the way you also learn about things like why you probably only have somewhere between 3-8 close friends. Why you probably don't have more than about 100 people that you communicate with regularly (uh, but what about my 7,000+ Twitter followers?). How these are to a degree biological factors hardwired into you. Most interesting of all is how the ripples just fade away at the third layer, over and over again throughout their studies and their testing.
The book was just filled with highly interesting facts about how your network influences you. Also, how you can influence your network. It also matters the type of network that you have. Are you connected to lots of people that aren't connected to each other, weak ties, or are you connected to lots of people that are all connected to one another, strong ties. Each of these types of networks influences you differently. Your behavior within a network is probably following one of three paths; cooperator, you're willing to help others, free rider, you're letting others do the heavy lifting, enforcer, you're making sure everyone follows the rules. Your behavior is also likely to shift between those roles depending on who you're interacting with and when.
I read this book when it was first published in 2009 but am only now getting around to re-reading and then reviewing it. Since then, the nature and extent of social media have expanded and extended far beyond anything that Tim Berners-Lee could have imagined twenty years ago when he developed his concept of the worldwide "web" of electronic connection and interaction while working as an independent contractor the for European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). Currently he is the director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Presumably Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler, co-authors of Connected, are amazed by the growth of networks of various kinds since they published their book.
As they observe in the Preface, "Scientists, philosophers, and others who study society have generally divided into two camps: those who think they are in control of their destinies, and those who believe that social forces (ranging from a lack of good public education to the presence of a corrupt government) are responsible for what happens to us." They think a third factor is missing from this debate: "our connections to others matter most, and by linking the study of individuals to the study of groups, the science of social networks can explain a lot about human experience." I agree.
This book is the result of what Christakis and Fowler have learned thus far from their research and I think they make a substantial contribution to a discussion of a question that has continued for several thousand years: "What makes us uniquely human?" They remain convinced that to know who we are, we must first understand how we are connected.Read more ›
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Lovely book for understanding more about the indeed surprising power of our social networks! Understanding better what leads to overall happiness. Highly recommend this. Mariette's Back to Basics
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34 of 39 people found the following review helpful
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.Read more ›
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This item: Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives
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