Last week, I got a surprise pack from my friends over at Accel (a venture capital company). In the package was the book by Christakis & Fowler which as a best seller for 2009.
The book is titled Connected : The surprising power of our social networks and how they shape our lives. A long title, but, will probably be referred to as they do in their website connectedthebook.com
I think this is an extremely well researched book in the sense that there has been an attempt to cover linkages / social networks from both a behavioral aspect and a media / tool aspect. While some of the analysis result seems to be quite obvious (maybe my Asian - relationship oriented thought bias is showing), some are quite revealing.
There were 2 major "current news" items that kept flashing in my mind while reading the set. The first being the H1N1 scare that most of India saw a few months ago with the media feeding in a frenzy for the first few days. I guess saner minds prevailed over the news channels from day 3 of transmission.
The second news item was much more recent and "topical" - this was the scare in a textile unit where people were driven off to the hospital complaining of dysentery and stomach ailment.
Apparently, there was no problem with the water (infact, most people I know tend to carry water today), there was no food distributed and the air was "normal" ?. We are not talking about a couple of people here - the total was closer to about 70 individuals with only one being retained in the hospital for a "real" cause ?
Seemed like a touch a "socially" stimulated disease ?
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