The Reader

  It is a well and clearly written book, so I could finish reading it quite fast. As a renowned expert on the dynamics and influences of the social network, the author conveyed his major experiment findings and relevant important concepts interestingly and concisely. Unlike simple information transfer or viral infection (‘simple contagion’), meaningful social changes or innovations (‘complex contagion’) have to overcome people’s inertia to keep the status quo, so the author mentioned that such social changes start in the periphery of the networks, against our expectations. Good innovations require isolation or protection from the skepticism of non-adopters (“countervailing influences”), and also need reinforcement from surrounding people (“relevances”), which require redundancies of connectedness or clustering. It is said that the periphery or outer rim of social networks fulfills such conditions that social changes are actually initiated by people in the periphery, not by hig...