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But it turns out that people — and marketers — don’t really understand influence very well, despite being embedded in social networks their entire lives: we really don’t understand the way that we are influenced by other people. For example, if someone touches you when you first meet, you are ten times more likely to remember that person. But we are unaware, later, that the touch was the reason for our recollection. We underestimate the impact of a kind word, or the chilling effects of workplace fear. There are dozens of examples of this sort coming out of cognitive science that demonstrate that we are being strongly influenced below the conscious level, physiologically, all the time. The actions of others can make us fearful, or confident, or curious, or suspicious — and it can happen invisibly. People just don’t have a great insight into the social interactions of people, despite being involved in them.

Most contemporary thinking about our social interactions is derived from an economic view that considers groups as collections of individuals, where each individual makes more-or-less rational decisions intended to maximize benefits to themselves and their loved ones.

I think there is a analogy with the historical physics view of how fluids work, like water, or water specifically.

Like people, water is everywhere. and we come into contact with it everyday, when we wash, cook, drink, or bathe. But, just like people, close contact with water does not let us understand water’s workings. And, strangely, we don’t come into regular contact with other liquids to any extent like our experience of water, so it is both familiar and yet badly understood.

For example, liquid water is not a amorphous blob of H20 atoms, as I was taught in high school. It is a complex, quasi-crystalline substance, with giant aggregations of water molecules forming and breaking apart all the time. These supermolecules are responsible to a great extent for the extremely unusual qualities of water, like its high heat coefficient: water changes temperature very slowly because these supermolecules are slow to change their rates of vibration. If water was really just a bunch of uninvolved H2O molecules, it wouldn’t be anything like water. Water is also inclined to move from networks of supermolecules into a crystalline solid as it gets colder, which leads to one of the strangest qualities of water: solid water floats on liquid water. We take this for granted, and don’t consider it unusual: but it is very very unusual, and life on Earth depends on that property of water.

Just like water, we are around people all the time, but we don’t understand how connected together we are. It’s easy to consider people as individuals, bumping into each other like billiard balls, making independent decisions, individuals coincidentally living and working in close proximity. But we aren’t like that, at all, any more than water is made up of totally independent molecules.

The new physics has opened our understanding of the most common liquid on earth, one absolutely central to life, one that we touch everyday. Just so, social physics will allow us to understand our connection to each other, and how our thinking, beliefs, values and behavior are almost totally shaped by social ties to others. But it may require that we reconsider almost everything we think we know about ourselves and others.

Below is a network map(via social network analysis) of a very interesting new book — Too Big to Know [2B2K] by internet scholar David Weinberger. David’s book is shown by the magenta node in the center of the network.  Directly connected to his book are the books that Amazon mentions that customers also bought [green nodes], in addition to 2B2K. These books are probably more similar than different to 2B2K. The blue nodes are books that are 2 steps away from 2B2K, they are probably more different than 2B2K, but retain similarities. The arrows show the direction of the majority of also-bought activity. If you find 2B2K interesting, you will probably find a pleasant read in one of green books or possibly a blue book — depending upon your desire for difference.

Today, Amazon introduces you to similar books. Tomorrow, they will introduce you to similar readers.

Of course, Amazon doesn’t have to build such a network from scratch, they could begin by acquiring Goodreads or Readmill.

Readmill would be particularly relevant, since it is based on highlights and notes that readers make within the Kindle experience, which are shared with friends, as shown here:

I think Valdis is onto something, since reading is perhaps one of the deepest ways of characterizing our identities. The works that have informed and shaped us could be a bridgework to bring us closer together, certainly.

There are cognitive universals in how people chose to wander, and what paths we would rather use in cities, and what emerges is a spectrum of quite complex societal outcomes.

Walk this way via The Economist

According to Ruth Conroy Dalton of the University of Northumbria, people perceive routes with changes in directions to be longer than straighter ones, even if they are actually the same distance. Odder still, equivalent routes that have landmarks on them are also reckoned to be longer than routes that do not. That may be because memorising changes in direction and landmarks both require the brain to do more work than a route that simply heads in as straight a line as possible.

These preferences may help explain why it is that some city streets are more crowded than others. Why is it that Oxford Street, for instance, is London’s busiest shopping street and not, say, Regent Street or Piccadilly? Tim Stonor of Space Syntax, an architectural consultancy, says that the answer lies in graph theory, a branch of mathematics that studies nodes and the connections between them. Counterintuitively, though, Space Syntax’s model represents street segments as the graph’s nodes and road intersections as connections between the nodes. The resulting topsy-turvy simulation is then used to chart the most linear conceivable route to join every street in a city with every other street. It soon becomes clear that not all roads are equal. Some are more accessible and integrated than others—which is why Oxford Street is more likely to be walked along than any other street in London.

That has implications for how street layouts can be consciously designed to create areas that are more or less vibrant—more suited to shopping, say, or family living. It can also be used to identify places that are unhealthily segregated. Mr Stonor points out that 85% and 96% of riots last August in north and south London respectively took place within a five-minute walk of a post-war housing estate. Most observers would put that down to the fact that the estates’ cheap accommodation draws poorer folk, resulting in pockets of poverty and deprivation whose denizens are more likely to commit crime and engage in acts of vandalism. But Mr Stonor believes that the complex, insular design of many housing estates exacerbates the problem by limiting interactions between people and thus encouraging anti-social behaviour—the exact opposite of what their creators envisaged.

So, network science seems to get at some fundamentals in our thinking about space, and our movement through it. Stonor’s observations show that alienation will arise when groups are  dead-ended in pockets of our cities’ networks of streets, and the result is a corresponding isolation from the non-physical, societal social networks and the social capital that they create, and distribute.

I wonder how we will be able to work through complex social issues like the riots in London, the underlying motivations of the Occupy movement, or the growing inequities of or globalize economy, when our leaders have no understanding of the social physics that underlies human association? We are in a world dominated by business leaders, lawyers, and economists, alas, and far too few anthropologists, physicists, and scientists.

Nexalogy is pleased to announce that we have developed a JSON API for our clients. Based on popular demand, we are releasing the API which will allow you to input data into our system. We have developed a generic system that uses JSON formatted data with a few simple API calls. That will allow you to create projects and populate them with your data. In the weeks and months ahead, the API will be expanded and will be made more robust.

You can follow the API Specs here and try it for yourself. Does it allow you to do what you want? What features would you like to see? How can we improve it ? We look forward to your feedback.

Social Networks And Happiness, Nicholas A. Christakis & James H. Fowler

Happiness is a fundamental object of human existence. To the extent that it is synonymous with pleasure, it could even be said to be one of the “two sovereign masters” that, Jeremy Bentham argued, govern our lives. The other master, lest we forget, is pain.

Our happiness is determined by a complex set of voluntary and involuntary factors, ranging from our genes to our health to our wealth. Alas, one determinant of our own happiness that has not received the attention it deserves is the happiness of others. Yet we know that emotions can spread over short periods of time from person to person, in a process known as “emotional contagion.” If someone smiles at you, it is instinctive to smile back. If your partner or roommate is depressed, it is common for you to become depressed.

But might emotions spread more widely than this in social networks—from person to person to person, and beyond? Might an individual’s location within a social network influence their future happiness? And might social network processes—by a diverse set of mechanisms—influence happiness not just fleetingly, but also over longer periods of time?

We recently published a paper in the British Medical Journal that addressed these questions. We studied 4,739 people followed from 1983 to 2003 as part of the famous Framingham Heart Study. These individuals were embedded in a larger network of 12,067 people; they had an average of 11 connections to others in the social network (including to friends, family, co-workers, and neighbors); and their happiness was assessed every few years using a standard measure.

We found that social networks have clusters of happy and unhappy people within them that reach out to three degrees of separation. A person’s happiness is related to the happiness of their friends, their friends’ friends, and their friends’ friends’ friends—that is, to people well beyond their social horizon. We found that happy people tend to be located in the center of their social networks and to be located in large clusters of other happy people. And we found that each additional happy friend increases a person’s probability of being happy by about 9%. For comparison, having an extra $5,000 in income (in 1984 dollars) increased the probability of being happy by about 2%.

Happiness, in short, is not merely a function of personal experience, but also is a property of groups. Emotions are a collective phenomenon.

Yet another example of one of my maxims: most of what we think we know about people is wrong.

The conventional wisdom is that our emotional state — while influenced by other people — is principally an output of our individual personality and the way that we process events in our lives. But this orthodoxy is turned upside down by actual science.

The graphic above is the result of an analysis of 353 students with Facebook accounts, tracking people that appear in photos together. As you can see, smiling people are generally arm-in-arm with other smiling people, and likewise with frowners. But more interesting: those that are smiling have more friends, about one extra friend on the average. As the authors say,

If you smile, you are less likely to be on the periphery of the online world. It thus seems to be the case, online as well as offline, that when you smile, the world smiles with you.

Partnered with North of 41, Nexalogy CEO Claude Theoret will be presenting alongside SoKap on Friday, March 9 during a presentation on Crowdfunding 2.0. Claude will be highlighting the uses of social media intelligence in the burgeoning crowdfunding movement. Nexalogy will also be on hand in the North of 41 Digital Lounge to demonstrate its software.

On Monday, March 12 and Tuesday, March 13 Nexalogy will be taking at the Planet Quebec booth along with several other Quebec-based startups, including Miralupa, E-180, Greencopper and several others. Monday will also mark the first Startup Street Hockey event in a back alley in Austin. Join some of Montreal’s finest small businesses for hockey and some imported Quebec beer. When not playing hockey, you can catch up with Nexalogy at the Planet Quebec booths 1313-1315, 1412-1414 at 500 East Cesar Chavez Street.

You can follow us on Twitter @nexalogy and check out our official news release on CNW.

Hope to see you in Austin!

An equally revolutionary breakthrough is under way in social discovery, one that is totally analogous to spatial discovery. Over the past years, there have been a growing number of experiments in connecting people to other people, based on geolocation.

These tools can be thought of as having two sides: one side allows you to stay in touch with existing friends, while the other reveals people that are unknown to you, but who share your current, past, or future location.  Consider one of my favorite early geolocation apps: Brightkite. In its first version, Brightkite was something like a combination of Instagram, Foursquare, and Path. Users could take pictures and post them or post text updates, and these would stream out to followers. But it was also possible to see the updates of all Brightkite users within a certain distance from you, like within a mile.

In social network terms, there is a really important difference between these two sides of social location tools. Keeping track of existing friends spatially is a way of maintaining strong ties: your relationships with friends, and family. But hearing the observations and seeing photos of people unknown to you can be profoundly different, because your family and friends are well-known to you, and are probably much like you. So what we learn through weak ties — the chance encounter at a cafe with a tourist from France, or what you overhear from someone in the town softball league — is much more likely to be something from outside your circle of close contacts. It has a higher likelihood of being something novel, or taking a very different perspective on issues that might be important to you.

This is what Mark Granovetter referred to as the ‘power of weak ties‘. It turns out that most people meet their eventual mates, or get job referrals through weak ties, since their closest friends and family share to a large degree the same circle of contacts, and these are the first to be exhausted in job search or dating.

And this power inherent in weak ties is what makes the current crop of social discovery apps — strongly tied to smart phones — so potentially revolutionary. As we live in increasingly urban settings, with large, shifting populations, we are surrounded largely by people unknown to us, which is quite different from the norms of past societies.

Urbanization has led to great benefits: cities are significantly more efficient the larger they get, in fact. And people in large cities have more friends and contacts than people in smaller cities. However, we are still generally surrounded by people unknown to us, and many of those people might be intelligent, fun, or both.

Just as there is a spatial world to explore with geolocation tools like Google Maps, there is a rich social space around us, waiting to be opened up by the use of mobile technology.

I am writing this en route to SxSW, one of the most dense tech love-ins in the world, and already the buzz suggests that Highlight may be the breakthrough app of the show. Highlight is a geological social discovery app that allows users to learn who is nearby — perhaps even in the same coffee shop — and to see what they are up to, and perhaps exchange insights about what’s happening there.

One thing is certain: there is a place for an app that allows us to explore the looser and more transient benefits of weak ties, without necessarily converting every chance meeting at SxSW into a lifelong friendship.

The Russians were kicking our ass at hockey and, according to my back-of-the-envelope calculations, our farm was in the blast radii of Montreal and Ottawa! (I blame trying to expand my English vocabulary with Reader’s Digest for my alarmist outlook).

I remember reading a Bertrand Russell book, I think it may have been Has Man a Future?

in it he had a quotation that I can’t seem to find anywhere that went something like this: “Man’s Intelligence far exceeds his wisdom”.  Essentially, Russell is saying that we invent technology before we as a species have developed the wisdom, rules, ethics, or laws to effectively use said technology.

Now social media won’t threaten the existence of our species, like nuclear weapons or genetic modification, but the analogy still fits.

The technology of social media which, from what I can tell, grew out of the technology of internet dating sites in the early 2000s, has taken the world by storm.

Music, TV, books, photography, telephony, dating, either have been or will be disrupted.  This second phase of the digital revolution will change the way we consume information on a scale that will rival the invention of the Guttenberg press or the Renaissance.

Our lawmakers are stumbling around trying to make sense of the  technological paradigm shift or, better still, are trying to use it to political advantage without understanding it. Their lack of wisdom in the face of this technological upheaval is sadly too obvious.

The actual quantitative study of what is happening is only now emerging as a science. It involves elements of graph theory, big data know-how, sociology, anthropology, and a whole lot of math.  There are many names for it. I am partial to Physics of Society but, then again, I am really not that great at naming things.  For non-math explanations I would turn to the seminal Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, “Linked” and “Bursts”.

It’s not going to be easy and there are going to be uproarious debates and symposium’s and mistakes and foolish interpretations, but we can safely say, as far as social media is concerned, wisdom may begin to catch up to technology.

One theory is that the geniuses at the top of these creative dynasties — Steve Jobs, for example — are the wellspring of this creativity. But of course, there are large teams within companies like Apple, and very few of the employees worked directly with Jobs. So, to a great extent creativity in business has to be a distributed characteristic: a sort of emergent property.

Being a student of social networks, I have long suspected that creativity in groups is a function of a balance in the strength of social connections, and I discovered that Brian Uzzi, a sociologist at Northwestern, has dedicated a great deal of time looking into the world of Broadway musicals, using that as a template of creativity in general:

Jonah Lehrer, Brainstorming Doesn’t Really Work via The New Yorker

Uzzi wanted to understand how the relationships of these team members affected the product. Was it better to have a group composed of close friends who had worked together before? Or did strangers make better theatre? He undertook a study of every musical produced on Broadway between 1945 and 1989. To get a full list of collaborators, he sometimes had to track down dusty old Playbills in theatre basements. He spent years analyzing the teams behind four hundred and seventy-four productions, and charted the relationships of thousands of artists, from Cole Porter to Andrew Lloyd Webber.

Uzzi found that the people who worked on Broadway were part of a social network with lots of interconnections: it didn’t take many links to get from the librettist of “Guys and Dolls” to the choreographer of “Cats.” Uzzi devised a way to quantify the density of these connections, a figure he called Q. If musicals were being developed by teams of artists that had worked together several times before—a common practice, because Broadway producers see “incumbent teams” as less risky—those musicals would have an extremely high Q. A musical created by a team of strangers would have a low Q.

Uzzi then tallied his Q readings with information about how successful the productions had been. “Frankly, I was surprised by how big the effect was,” Uzzi told me. “I expected Q to matter, but I had no idea it would matter this much.” According to the data, the relationships among collaborators emerged as a reliable predictor of Broadway success. When the Q was low—less than 1.7 on Uzzi’s five-point scale—the musicals were likely to fail. Because the artists didn’t know one another, they struggled to work together and exchange ideas. “This wasn’t so surprising,” Uzzi says. “It takes time to develop a successful collaboration.” But, when the Q was too high (above 3.2), the work also suffered. The artists all thought in similar ways, which crushed innovation. According to Uzzi, this is what happened on Broadway during the nineteen-twenties, which he made the focus of a separate study. The decade is remembered for its glittering array of talent—Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers, Lorenz Hart, Oscar Hammerstein II, and so on—but Uzzi’s data reveals that ninety per cent of musicals produced during the decade were flops, far above the historical norm. “Broadway had some of the biggest names ever,” Uzzi explains. “But the shows were too full of repeat relationships, and that stifled creativity.”

Uzzi’s work is based on small world theory, originally formulated by Stanley Milgram:

Fred Jones of Peoria, sitting in a sidewalk cafe in Tunis, and needing a light for his cigarette, asks the man at the next table for a match. They fall into conversation; the stranger is an Englishman who, it turns out, spent several months in Detroit studying the operation of an interchangeable-bottle cap-factory. “I know it’s a foolish question,” says Jones, “but did you ever by any chance run into a fellow named Ben Arkadian? He’s an old friend of mine, manages a chain of supermarkets in Detroit. . .”“Arkadian, Arkadian,” the Englishman mutters. “Why, upon my soul, I believe I do! Small chap, very energetic, raised merry hell with the factory over a shipment of defective bottle caps.” “No kidding!” Jones exclaims in amazement. “Good lord, it’s a small world, isn’t it?” (Milgram 1967, p. 61)

We are aware of Milgram’s experiment that led to the notion of ‘six degrees of separation’ to get a letter from a random citizen of Omaha, Nebraska to a stockbroker in Boston, passed along from connection to connection, proving that it is a small world.

Small world networks have two important characteristics: short global separation (six degrees to anyone in the world) and high local clustering (where all the established players on Broadway know each other). And in situations like Broadway plays, all the players form a fully linked clique: they are clustered together for the duration of the play. And of course, Boradway is made up of a large number of these cliques at any time, with some degree of cross-over from one clique to another.

Here ‘s the result of a social scene like Broadway: the more small worldly a scene is, the more links will exists across cliques, so creative ideas will spread rapidly and broadly. (Have you ever noticed how Hollywood will produce two or even three similar movies in the same year?) Secondly, over time, the players increase their connections, and strengthen relationships, leading to high cohesion.

But Uzzi’s empirical examination of Broadway success shows that creativity is linked to a happy middle ground: a high degree of cohesion between many of the players is an advantage, until it grows too large, and then its not. There has to be a tension, a frisson, or outright disagreement — some working through of different perspectives and backgrounds — between those who have been in the clique for a long time, and one or more outsiders. Let’s call this the Sondheim Factor.

The extrapolation to the world of business is direct. Many companies are too chummy, too inbred, and lack the diversity of viewpoints that could lead to real creativity. Companies like Apple have a constant churn, with established developers and business types leaving the company to start new things, and new bright minds showing up with dreams of building the next great thing. Getting the rate of turnover right is one consideration, but at the level of team formation it is more crucial. Injecting random (but high quality) DNA into working teams might be the critical factor to creativity in business, rather than procedural approaches, or simply trying to hire creative people. It may be that the most creative companies are those that look for that sort of tension in teams, that less-than-perfectly aligned not-quite-a-clique dynamic, where creativity arises.