March Challenge - Day 2: Feeling Connected

So I've started on a book called Connected - How your friends' friends' friends affect everything you feel, think and do. I'm about 2 chapters in and really enjoy it. As a Facebook addict, the first couple of chapters talk about the formulation of social networks (now, to note, when I'm talking about social networks, I mean how you relate to other people, not social networking platforms like Facebook). According to the authors, Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler, there are rules to a network:

1) We shape our network - we choose the structure by deciding how many people we connect with, how interconnected each of our contacts are with one another and how central we are to our networks (do we like to be the centre of attention or live at the peripheries?)

2) Our network shapes up - where you're position in that network (ie: first borns have on average a higher IQ than second borns who have higher IQs than third borns), how interconnected your contacts are with one another, and again, the number of people will mould us into what we are.

3) Our friends affect us - studious people make others more studious, people who drink a lot influence others to drink more.

4) Our friends' friends' friends affect us - there's a rule called the Three Degrees of Influence (similar to the Six Degrees of Separation) where it states that between one to three degrees of connections, attitudes and behaviours (like political views, smoking) are passed along from originator to friend to friend. But beyond three levels, that influence diminishes rapidly. Think of it as a big broken telephone game - while the message stays consistent with the first two or three people, after that, "I eat at the restaurant" quickly turns into "Purple monkey dishwasher." There's also the possibility that your connections have severed along the way - people stop being friends. Or another theory is that our evolutionary path hasn't taken us to the point where we trust anything beyond three levels of connectivity - that it's only been in the last 200 - 300 years where we've in large urban centres, and that humanity is used to living in smaller groups where influence doesn't go beyond three levels.

5) Networks have a life of its own - you cannot isolate it to one person. This point is totally valid when one looks at the unrest in the Middle East. While Tunisia's fight to remove it's dictator started with the actions of a street vendor setting himself on fire, the wave of unrest in the Middle East has started to morph into different opposition networks from Egypt to Libya to Bahrain to Yemen. All different networks, moving, growing and changing everyday without one person to attribute it to.

Points four and five were provoking points to read - and I reflected on how my interactions with Facebook (which surprisingly has not been talked about once in this book) live up to these points. While we cannot ever tell if our influence reaches our friends' friends' friends, we can certainly see if our posts are reposted or shared by our friends to their networks (a term us advertisers love to call social amplification). And point five has been validated time and time again that networks are organic - any brand with a facebook fanpage can tell you now that they are no longer in control of the conversations of consumers about their brand - the network of fans control the conversation, the brand can only participate and contribute (as all other individuals in the network do) but the network steers the conversation (either good or bad).

I'm excited to read on. I'll report back with more soon.