Social Networks – Mutual Responsibility

September 15, 2012

Now You Can Understand Why Connecting To Other People Is Great, Thanks To This Shouting Sociologist

The benefits of a connected life outweigh the costs!”

Nicholas Christakis, MD PhD, in his powerful TED Talk “The Hidden Influence of Social Networks,” lays down the omnipotent role of social networks and the benefits of connecting with other people…

Social Networks Naturally ‘Sustain & Nourish The Good’ & ‘Reject The Bad’

We form social networks because the benefits of a connected life outweigh the costs. If I was always violent towards you or gave you misinformation or made you sad or infected you with deadly germs, you would cut the ties to me, and the network would disintegrate.

So the spread of good and valuable things is required to sustain and nourish social networks. Similarly, social networks are required for the spread of good and valuable things, like love, kindness, happiness, altruism and ideas.

If we realized how valuable social networks are, we’d spend a lot more time nourishing them and sustaining them, because I think social networks are fundamentally related to goodness. And what I think the world needs now is more connections.”

An Example Showing How Certain Properties Reside Not In Individual Parts, But In The Interconnections Between Them

Think about these two common objects. They’re both made of carbon, and yet one of them has carbon atoms in it that are arranged in one particular way – on the left – and you get graphite, which is soft and dark.

But if you take the same carbon atoms and interconnect them a different way, you get diamond, which is clear and hard. And those properties of softness and hardness and darkness and clearness do not reside in the carbon atoms; they reside in the interconnections between the carbon atoms, or at least arise because of the interconnections between the carbon atoms.

So, similarly, the pattern of connections among people confers upon the groups of people different properties. It is the ties between people that makes the whole greater than the sum of its parts. And so it is not just what’s happening to these people – whether they’re losing weight or gaining weight, or becoming rich or becoming poor, or becoming happy or not becoming happy – that affects us; it’s also the actual architecture of the ties around us.”

Human Beings Are Not Reducible To The Study Of Individuals, But Must Be Understood In Reference To The Collective

Our experience of the world depends on the actual structure of the networks in which we’re residing and on all the kinds of things that ripple and flow through the network. Now, the reason, I think, that this is the case is that human beings assemble themselves and form a kind of superorganism.

Now, a superorganism is a collection of individuals which show or evince behaviors or phenomena that are not reducible to the study of individuals and that must be understood by reference to, and by studying, the collective. Like, for example, a hive of bees that’s finding a new nesting site, or a flock of birds that’s evading a predator, or a flock of birds that’s able to pool its wisdom and navigate and find a tiny speck of an island in the middle of the Pacific, or a pack of wolves that’s able to bring down larger prey.

Superorganisms have properties that cannot be understood just by studying the individuals. I think understanding social networks and how they form and operate can help us understand not just health and emotions but all kinds of other phenomena – like crime, and warfare, and economic phenomena like bank runs and market crashes and the adoption of innovation and the spread of product adoption.”

Watch Nicholas Christakis’ TED Talk ‘The Hidden Influence Of Social Networks’

September 15, 2012September 16, 2012

Your Social Network Has The Power To Influence What You Think, Want, Feel, Choose And Eventually Do

“How we feel, what we know, whom we marry, whether we fall ill, how much money we make, and whether we vote all depend on the ties that bind us. Social networks spread happiness, generosity, and love. They are always there, exerting both subtle and dramatic influence over our choices, actions, thoughts, feelings, even our desires. And our connections do not end with the people we know. Beyond our own social horizons, friends of friends of friends can start chain reactions that eventually reach us, like waves from distant lands that wash up on our shores.”

Nicholas A. Christakis, a social scientist at Harvard University and James H. Fowler, a political scientist at University of California present in their book Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives how people are interconnected, interdependent, and products of their societies.

Watch Nicholas Christakis & James Fowler Discuss The Book

Their book shows many examples of how the social networks people are in profoundly impact all areas of life: health, marriage, economy, politics and more. This post contains a few examples:

Examples Of Social Networks In Health

Have you ever wondered how your social environment can affect your health?

Back Pain – A Culture-Bound Syndrome

“The rate of lower back pain among working-age people is 10 percent in the United States, 36 percent in the United Kingdom, 62 percent in Germany, 45 percent in Denmark, and 22 percent in Hong Kong. In some ways, this varying prevalence, and the culturally specific ways in which back pain is experienced, suggest that back pain can be seen as a culture-bound syndrome – a disease recognized in one society but not others, such that people can experience the disease only if they inhabit a particular social milieu.”

Eating Disorders – Also A Culture-Bound Syndrome

“Eating disorders resemble other culture-bound syndromes in that they can ripple through a social network in waves, reflecting the possibility of person-to-person transmission of (admittedly severe) weight-loss behavior. High-school girls may compete with one another to lose weight and college dormmates can copy one another’s binge eating. In fact, these behaviors may affect a person’s network location, and in one study of sororities, women who were binge eaters actually became more popular and moved to the center of the social network, just as nonsmokers did in our study.”

Example Of Social Networks In The Economy

Economists Morgan Kelly and Cormac O’Grada studied two panics that were in the 1850s at a New York Bank (Emigrant Industrial Savings Bank), in which they observed how people’s interdependence affects their actions.

“Kelly and O’Grada found that social networks were the single most important factor in explaining the closure of accounts during both panics, even more so than the size of the accounts or the length of time they had been opened. Thus, financial panics may result from the spread of emotions or information from person to person.”

Example Of Social Networks In Politics

How did Obama succeed in his election campaign? He made people feel connected.

“Obama’s campaign was described as a perfectly run operation that made few, if any, mistakes. But how did he get people on board before the public perception that things were going well? How did he persuade so many previously uninvolved people to donate money to him and to vote for him, especially those who in the past believed their vote did not count? In no small measure, Obama succeeded because these ‘working men and women’ felt connected. Obama’s campaign was a historical milestone in all kinds of ways, but the most revolutionary may not have been its fund-raising. Many have commented on Obama’s remarkable ability to connect with voters, but even more impressive was his ability to connect voters to each other.”

The book Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives is full of many more examples on how people are interconnected and thus are strongly influenced by the social network they are in.

Image: Connected: Amazing Power of Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives by zone41.

September 15, 2012September 27, 2012

President Of The World Offers Solution To The World’s Problems: Create A Unified Public Opinion

In an effort to raise the voice of the silent majority, GlobalDemocracy.com has introduced a President of the World (POW) who will serve as spokesperson for the People of the World on issues ranging from economics, health, government, environment and more; in this introductory video [3 min.]:

An overview of the world’s problems & solution, according to the POW in the video:

The Problem – A Global Crisis

As a whole, we’re contributing to a system that’s broken.

Countries are competing for limited resources and economic domination,

We’re sucking up resources on our planet like there’s no tomorrow,

We’re breeding like rabbits,

We’re strangulating other species out of existence,

Plastic waste in the ocean is growing larger than most countries with nothing in place to stop it,

Industries that are harming our planet are so powerful they can prevent or slow down cleaner technology for the sake of short term profit,

Governments, justice systems, the media – are all influenced by self-interest groups whose actions often conflict with the wellbeing of humankind.”

The Solution – Create A Unified Public Opinion

The more people united in one place, the more powerful their voice becomes.

Together, through social media, we can influence world leaders and industries to start improving the world as opposed to ruining it,

We know this will work because history has repeatedly shown us that leaders and industries must follow public opinion, or they fail.”

How It Works At GlobalDemocracy.com:

User registers and creates a profile
Registered user proposes an idea
Ideas must meet the principles mentioned on the site: Equality, Freedom and Security
Members vote on ideas already proposed
Additional comments and discussions of ideas are encouraged
The most popular ideas will be presented by the President of the World through future video news conferences.

Further Information:

Source for video and quotes: Youtube/President of the World

September 11, 2012September 14, 2012

New Twitter Study Shows Global Happiness On The Decline

In case you didn’t know, or have yet to receive a tweet about it, twitter is now being used for research. For instance at Cornell University a study was conducted which looked through over 500 million tweets to gauge users moods throughout the day: It turns out that we start our days positively (positive tweets), then our moods begin to decline throughout the day (at around midnight they pick back up again).

A more recent study at the University of Vermont has also been conducted in which, “… more then 46 billion words written in Twitter tweets by 63 million Twitters users around the globe…” were analyzed.

From this the researchers immersed themselves in a new perspective,

In these billions of words is not a view of any individual’s state of mind. Instead, like billions of moving atoms add up to the overall temperature of a room, billions of words used to express what people are feeling resolve into a view of the relative mood of large groups.”

Like in the Cornell study,

The Vermont team then took these scores and applied them to the huge pool of words they collected from Twitter. Because these tweets each have a date and time, and, sometimes, other demographic information—like location—they show changing patterns of word use that provides insights in the way groups of people are feeling.”

The implications of such research?

The new approach lets the researchers measure happiness at different scales of time and geography… and stretched out over the last three years, these patterns of word use show a drop in average happiness.”

So, the Cornell study measured mood shifts of Twitter users throughout the day and now the Vermont study shows that happiness has been declining amongst Twitter users over the past 3 years.

The researchers stress that it isn’t only “… younger people… with smartphones,” either because, “Twitter is nearly universal now… Every demographic is represented.”

One added benefit:

“… measuring happiness has been exceedingly difficult by traditional means, like self reporting in social science surveys. Some of the problems with this approach are that people often don’t tell the truth in surveys and the sample sizes are small.”

The Vermont study does not show a specific reason for why happiness is globally declining but does pose the question,

Why does happiness seem to be declining?”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PN2HAroA12w

Quotes and graph image taken from the University of Vermont. For more information about the study: http://www.uvm.edu/~uvmpr/?Page=news&storyID=12986&category=uvmhome

For more information on the Cornell Study:
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/333/6051/1878.abstract

Sad Twitter Bird image courtesy of Full Stop.

September 11, 2012September 14, 2012

Can Your Actions And Thoughts Influence People You Don’t Know? Prof. Fowler Explains [PopTech Video]

If you tell someone they don’t influence anybody, they’re not going to do anything. But if you tell them they influence a thousand people they’ll change their lives. And that’s why I think it’s so critical for us to understand first and foremost how and why we are connected.”

James Fowler, Professor of Medical Genetics and Political Science at University of California, is the co-author of Connected: How Your Friends’ Friends’ Friends’ Affect Everything You Feel, Think, And Do.

The book describes conclusions from statistical analysis of data that was collected as part of a heart study in Framingham, Massachusetts, tracking over 12,000 individuals for 32 years.

For the first time,” says Fowler, “we are able to get a birds’ eye view of networks like the networks that you live in.”

Here is a 9 min. clip with highlights from Fowler’s talk on social networks at Pop Tech:

Fowler describes a:

Three Degrees of Influence” concept: “Your friends’ friends’ friends’ have an impact on you. They’re going to impact whether or not you’re obese, whether or not you smoke… whether or not you’re happy, whether or not you’re lonely, whether or not you’re depressed…”

Fowler explains that this interconnection works two ways,

We shape our networks but our networks also shape us.” Therefore, “If you do a kind act to a person they’ll do a kind act to another person and that will also spread…” And that this serves an “evolutionary purpose… Human social networks are in our nature… we have grown up over hundreds of thousands of years in these social networks.”

Here is a link to Fowler’s full talk at Pop Tech [19 min.]:
James Fowler: Power of Networks

The official site of the book Connected: www.connectedthebook.com

4 Facts & Stats on How Happiness Is Contagious

More on the Happiness Contagion Study…

The Spread of Obesity: An Example of Social Contagion

Mindless Eating – Explaining Obesity in Terms of Social Contagion