Article: The Five Degrees of Connected

The story about how Connected came into being is itself a story about the surprising power of social networks. Back in 2002, before we met each other, we were both obsessed with the idea that things spread from person to person to person. Nicholas was focused on health and James on politics, but both of us had the intuition that networks have a powerful effect on just about everything. All we lacked to prove it was each other.

Then James’s advisor, Gary King, heard Nicholas outline some of his ideas in a presentation at Harvard, and he instantly saw the connection. He told James “you guys should really get together” and soon enough we had our first meeting. We traded papers and ideas and we quickly realized we should collaborate. It’s hard to describe what happened – things just clicked into place, and we were both quite grateful that our mutual friend had turned friends of friends (two degrees of separation) into friends (one degree).

We worked hard to get funding and gather social network data in the long-standing Framingham Heart Study (which has followed over 15,000 people beginning in 1948), and, after five years, we put together our first paper on the spread of obesity, which was published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2007. That paper unexpectedly attracted an extraordinary amount of attention from the media and the public. When the dust settled, in addition to continuing our research and expanding our work into online networks and other topics (such as the genetics of social networks), we began to think about the possibility of writing a book. Nicholas’s friend Dan Gilbert had just written his own smash-hit book, the wonderful Stumbling on Happiness, and he introduced us to Katinka Matson and John Brockman, who later became our agents. John and Katinka really understand the place of science in contemporary society and how to communicate it clearly, and they encouraged us to broaden our focus and synthesize our ideas for a book proposal. They also introduced us to our editor, Tracy Behar, at Little Brown who was instrumental in shaping our manuscript into the book we hope you will enjoy and be stimulated by.

This chain of introductions itself illustrates one of the points we make in the book. We humans are embedded in social networks for a reason. A fundamental purpose of social networks is to transmit positive and desirable outcomes -- whether warnings about predators, introductions to valuable friends and partners, or diverse other things that run the gamut from happiness to kindness. While social networks also allow for the transmission of bad behaviors (like drug use or suicide) and other adverse phenomena (like germs and violence and fear), we gain more than we lose by living within social networks, and this drives us to embed ourselves in the lives of others. The natural advantages of a connected life explain why social networks have persisted for thousands of years and why humans have come to form them.

So, in some sense, this book is a product of our social network functioning -- for good ends -- in the background of our lives. Notice that prior to starting work on the book, James was socially quite distant from Tracy. They were separated by five connections that started with James’s advisor Gary (1) who knew Nicholas (2) who was friends with Dan (3) whose agent was Katinka (4) who introduced us to Tracy (5)! But our social networks allowed us search our friends of friends at each stage to make Connected a reality.