Matthew O. Jackson

In case you didn't know there's a new area of study in academia called network theory. Jackson's a good guide through how visually mapping nodes in human networks illuminates many aspects of how society and information works. For example it illustrates the way in which power is influenced by certain people in networks disproportionately (take the Medici who were central in many of Renaissance Florence's social networks through strategic marriages of family members), or how information bias can result from just getting information through a social network (we gravitate towards people like us, homophily, and then double count information when one person hears something from one of our friends and then tells us to us and then we hear it from the friend - thus social media bubbles in part). In the year of a global health pandemic we need to understand human social networks better than ever before - and thankfully here we have an up to date overview of how they work. Many of the observations require looking at actual network maps rather than laboriously trying to verbally articulate the predicament - so grab the book and have a look.… (mais)