How many friends do you have on Facebook? 100? 500? 1,000? Does it really matter if you amass so many of them?
In their book
Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives, Harvard Medical School professor Nicholas A. Christakis and University of California political science professor James H. Fowler contend that the sheer number of such “friends” doesn’t really matter that much. “We might have 1,000 Facebook ‘friends,’ but we were not built to affect—or be affected by—all of these people,” they say. “The spread of influence online works in much the same way that it has worked offline for hundreds of thousands of years. In the past, present, and future, our closest connections are the ones that matter most.”
Their book is the result of a study they conducted four years ago among 1,700 Facebook-interconnected college students to find out if social contagion can indeed happen online. What they found was that Facebook connections tended to become important, real-world connections only if Facebook members actually uploaded photos of one another, making them “picture friends”—a relationship that can approximate that of “close friends” in real life—between whom particular tastes or likes and dislikes can spread strongly as in the real world.
When this happens, they observed that the social networks so created take on lives of their own, transmitting information, germs, and habits between people. “Friends of friends of friends can start chain reactions that eventually reach us, like waves from distant lands that wash up on our shores,” the authors say.
Read Christakis and Fowler’s online introduction to their book ConnectedRead Laura Vanderkam’s review of Connected in the City Journal
