Nicholas Christakis on network interventions | WIRED (2012)

By understanding the connections within social networks we can understand how to use network interventions to effect positive change, argued Harvard social scientist Nicholas Christakis at Wired 2012.He explained to the audience that social networks are "deeply embedded in our evolutionary heritage"."We've been making social networks for hundreds of thousands of years and they have always looked the same," he said.When visualised in charts, they tend to be dots representing people and lines representing their connections. They are always varied and interconnected, with some people having more connections than others. "They never look like a regular lattice [where everyone has the same number of friends]. We don't live our lives like that. Nor has any naturally-occurring social network been found to look like this.