Nicholas Christakis: The hidden influence of social networks

My friend Julianne recommended this great video talk:

I have recently been reading about the creation of the U.S. Constitution, and been struck by the fact that individually the creators of the Constitution had a lot of crackpot ideas, but together they constructed a system that was capable of improvement over time and that has served the nation very well. This would seem to be an example of the good that can come out of social networking -- the theme of Christakis' talk.

I was also struck some years ago by Orhan Pamuk's thesis that Istanbul's population share a certain sadness and that in fact many cities are characterized by their own characteristic emotion -- an emotion that differs from city to city. Christakis' talk would seem to suggest ways that such a situation could develop, based on the genetics of the population and the social network of the city, as well as contingent on the history of that population.

It will be interesting to see how the changing global information infrastructure affects society. In the 20th century, mass media resulted in a very few people being connected by one-way channels of communications to very large numbers of people; those mass media networks were primarily constrained within national boundaries. The Internet now connects many people to relatively large numbers of others, often via two way channels. Think of email, social networks, blogging, etc.