BOOK OF THE DAY: ConnectedBy Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler, Harper Press; 338pp, £12.99
TO JUDGE from all the attention lavished on Twitter and Facebook, you could be forgiven for thinking that all of human interaction was now being carried out on social networking sites. But, in reality, online networking tools are mere digital manifestations of the social networks we have always inhabited. It is those “real” social networks, and their complex properties, that are the subject of this fascinating book from Nicholas Christakis, a physician and multidisciplinary professor at Harvard, and James Fowler, a political scientist.
Christakis first became interested in the field of network effects by studying the “widowhood effect”, the increased mortality of the recently widowed. Fowler, on the other hand, had been studying the spread of political beliefs in groups. Together, they began to ponder not just health and political network effects, but the vastly more complicated chain of influence that can occur in the social networks we all inhabit. The scope of their topic, they soon realised, was limitless: “In a kind of social chain reaction, we can be deeply affected by events we do not witness that happen to people we do not know”, they write. “As part of a social network, we transcend ourselves, for good or ill, and become a part of something much larger. We are connected.”
We are all familiar with the six degrees of separation theory, the notion that everyone on the planet is only six people removed from everyone else. Christakis and Fowler, however, put forward an addendum to that theory – the three degrees of influence rule. This goes much further than the six degrees theory, which essentially illustrates nothing more than the fact the world is a surprisingly small place. Instead, the three degrees rule suggests our lives are influenced by a circle including our friends, our friends’ friends and our friends’ friends’ friends. And the rule is reciprocal, so we also influence all those people too, thousands of people, many of whom we have never met. Everyone’s behaviour ripples through their network, affecting people up to three degrees away.
The writers contend that both happiness and wealth are spread by social-network effects. This intuitively makes sense – happy people make other people happy, and we are more likely to be in the position to make money if the people we know are also making money. So far, so obvious. But the authors contend the three degree rule also holds true for other characteristics and behaviours, such as obesity and smoking. The notion that, if someone we have never met puts on weight we are more likely to put on weight too, radically challenges our perception of social interactions, as well as our sense of free will. If our lives are subject to the properties of a network we barely perceive, how much responsibility do we have for our behaviour?
Christakis and Fowler go on to explore how networks influence joy, romance, the maintenance of health, financial markets and democratic principles.
The socioeconomic model of stratified groups seems hopelessly rudimentary in comparison with nuanced and web-like social networks. And the notion of emotional contagion is particularly interesting given the malaise afflicting this country, and the sense of melancholy felt even by those few people unaffected by recession.
Connected succeeds because it articulates a truth about our collective self that has previously been little understood.
Davin O’Dwyer is a freelance journalist
