Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives -- How Your Friends' Friends' Friends Affect Everything You Feel, Think, and Do Paperback – Illustrated, January 12, 2011

"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.

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.

There are plenty of good books out there. Books that are fun to read and that actually provide useful information. However, it is not very often that one comes across a true reference-book, a book that will change the way you think about various issues; a book that you will refer to in hundreds of conversations. Connected is one such book. Using not only a different perspective (a network perspective), but also robust, quantitative data from the real world, Christakis and Fowler will change the way you think about smoking, obesity, flirting, epidemics, suicide, happiness, politics, and, well, everything else that has to do with human behaviour.Have you ever thought that your wife's sister's husband has an effect on how happy you are? Or that your friend's boyfriend's nephew, whom you have never met, can make you gain weight? If you haven't, then you should read this book and find out why social networks have a profound influence on everything we do. Psychologists, philosophers, anthropologists, and social scientists have long debated over the priority of nature or nurture. Many stress the role of the individual, while others argue for the importance of culture. Christakis and Fowler very convincingly argue that both these perspectives can be complemented by a third, overarching perspective, a network perspective. We are social animals, and social networks are part of who we are, part of our genetic heritage.Christakis and Fowler have written THE book on the subject. Connected is a true masterpiece, not only for social scientists, but for everyone.