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.

In short, a fascinating book. I do have a nit to pick with it though. At the end of it all, I have a great set of information about what a strong network would look like. I get a good sense of why I would want to have a strong network. Nothing about how to really get a strong network other than making sure my friends are connected with my friends and that my friends, and as much as possible their friends and their friends, are all on a positive path. Right. I'm sure that's easy to work out. Guidance around this network thing would have been nice.

I found this book quite interesting. It was not easy to read but interesting enough to keep me engaged. The numerous illustrations very helpful in understanding the points being made in the book about the impact of relationships being interconnected and the impact that this has on our lives and decisions.

Also, the point made by the authors about the impact others have on us and the impact we have on others was intriguing, especially that "You do not have to be a superstar to have this power. All you need to do is connect" (p. 305). Our connections can thus either help promote or degrade the common good. How important it is to know that we can make the world better through our connections with others promoting things of value such as truth, beauty, and justice (those traits upheld by the Greeks). There is value in building community.

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.

These are among the dozens of business subjects and issues of special interest and value to me, also listed to indicate the scope of Christakis and Fowler's coverage.

o Rules of Life in the Network (Pages 16-26)
o Emotional Contagion (37-40)
o The Spread of Happiness (49-54)
o Big Fish, Little Pond (71-75)
o Dying of a Broken Heart? (81-86)
o Changing What We Do, or Changing What We Think? (112-115)
o Moody Markets (148-153)
o Three Degrees of Information Flow (153-156)
o Networking Creativity (162-164)
o Real Politics in a Social World (184-187)
o The Network Architecture of Political Influence (202-204)
o The Ancient Ties That Bind (213-217)
o Networks Are in Our Genes Too (232-235)
o A Brain for Social Networks (240-243)
o The Human Superorganism (289-292)

As some of these subjects suggest, there are striking similarities between the nature and extent of connections within the human brain and those that occur within social organizations such as Google+, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. I eagerly await breakthrough insights in months and years to come that increase our understanding of metacognition even more.

During a conversation near the conclusion of the book in the Reading group Guide, Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler are asked this question: "What particular aspects of social networks are you currently researching? Is there anything exciting coming to light?" Their response:

"We are especially intrigued by the idea the idea that evolution may have shaped the networks humans form with one another, and we think this might give us a clue about some important questions: Why do we help each other so much compared to other species? What is the reason for the spark in love at first sight?"

Stay tuned....

This is a very considerable piece of work and it's has deep implications for understanding human behaviors. This book is pretty dense and well organized. The authors build up the definition of what a network is and our role in a network. The importance of networks. The implication of technology. Finally they walk us through several examples. There's a lot to learn here.

Its not one of those lighy easy going business books. As long as you're prepared for that you'll get a lot out of this.

I was looking for more on the impact of Facebook and the implications of SnapChat. What this book did cover about pre-Facebook era and the rise of Facebook was insightful.