The most recommended books about social networks

This book focuses on cybersecurity for parents and teenagers, specifically focusing on social media. As a parent of a teenager myself, I know how critical this area really is. Teens are often using social networks and communication channels that their parents are mostly or completely unfamiliar with. Due to that lack of familiarity, parents have a hard time monitoring or setting appropriate limits on the ways their children use social media. Author Effie Manolas wrote this book for both parents and teens, enabling an open conversation on both the benefits and the risks of social media.

As a budding professional I was told not to be so kind to others, so I wasn’t taken advantage of.

Changing who I was and wanted to be didn’t seem like the right recipe for my success. Grant’s debut book has likely had the most impact on how I show up in my career and in life – that being a giver can be the key to our success and fulfillment. A must read for anyone who wants to do well while doing good.

For decades, the most famous opening chord in rock and roll was an unsolved problem, since no one could reproduce it. But in 2004, Jason Brown, a professor at Dalhousie University, used mathematics to recreate the opening chord of the Beatles hit song, “A Hard Day’s Night”. I remember when newspapers around the world reported on Jason’s findings, as I was at Dalhousie at the time, as one of Jason’s Ph.D. students.

Jason’s Beatles story serves as the final chapter in this wonderful book, a collection of short vignettes about how mathematics relates to every aspect of our lives, including garbage pickup routes, grocery shopping, political polling, and social networks. The book’s thesis is that as we understand mathematics better, our lives become more meaningful. I couldn’t agree more.    

“The bad news is that as a society we’re blowing it.” Not because the GDP isn’t high enough, distinguished psychologist Matthew Lieberman argues, but because we don’t understand basic facts about our social brains: (1) Physical and social pain share the same neurocognitive processes, as do responses to physical and social rewards; (2) Our ability (and proclivity) to mentalize—to understand others’ actions as driven by their thoughts—relies on and competes with a different neural system than nonsocial thinking; (3) Our sense of self is a Trojan horse transmitting social influence and so harmonizing behavior in groups.  As a result, improving our social relations—not increasing our financial wealth—makes us happier; maximizing social capital increases our productivity at work; and engaging our social brains improves our learning. If that gets your attention, you’re ready to read Social. 

American Passage’s portrayal of early New England as a fluid frontier where people, goods, and information traveled is excellent.

I like how Grandjean retells the English settlement of the region in terms of how people moved and communicated with one another. She forces readers to rethink our ideas of settler colonialism. In reality, English settlements were tiny islands in a vast sea of Indian lands.

This book will open your eyes and make you see the world with an augmented lens.

Networks are everywhere; in biology, social systems, economics, and technologies, and the study of networks connects mathematics, physics, computer sciences, biology, and social sciences, producing fascinating connections. This book brings together all this, highlighting the interconnections between ideas and technical work in different areas and telling us how networks emerge, and how they evolve.

If we could just teach about the evils of climate change, people would surely change their behaviors.

I knew this idea was not born up by the facts and was searching for an alternative. This book showed me that if I wanted to get people to eat climate-friendly foods or become a climate advocate, I needed to think about social connections—in particular, what people see their friends and family doing.

Not only do the authors describe how we influence each other’s health, voting, and even happiness—they also argue that social networks provide a middle ground between individual destiny vs structural determinism.

In my work, Network Climate Action is similarly a middle ground between individual behavior change vs government policy in addressing the climate crisis. 

This book by Standage is less about papermaking and more about gossip, sharing social media, and how papyrus paper allowed for the emergence of the first social media ecosystem in the world. It also serves as a justification for the Kingdom of Paper. 

Almost three thousand years after the beginning of which came ‘Cicero’s Web’ which served as a social medium. Cicero, the Roman orator and insatiable letter writer, in the 1st Cent BC created a papyrus paper web that provided an example later used by the early Christians, and with the advent of pulp paper would serve the world until the time of Gutenberg in 1450, after which paper reigned for over a half-century until 1969 when Internet traffic began. 

It follows the use of letters. pamphlets, books, and newspapers as paper fueled the growth of social media during the evolution of Western civilization.

Though this book came out a little while ago, I first listened to it this year. Little Eyes is a near-future novel in which the latest technological fad are Kentukis (the novel’s original title in Spanish), networked devices that allow strangers to either be “keepers” or “dwellers” of these household objects (picture what you’d get if you combined Chatroulette, Furbies, and Roombas).

The popularity of this seemingly innocuous toy soon has a massive social impact throughout the globe, and the novel traces a range of unanticipated uses and consequences of this merger of public and private life.

The plausibility of this future makes the story all the more compelling

While friends are important in many ways, so are “weak ties” within our networks. In this non-fiction book, sociologist Mario Luis Small analyzes interviews with a group of graduate students, investigating who they turn to for support about a range of topics, including love, depression, and finances. Because of the obligations that close friends and family entail, Small finds that people often avoid turning to these close ties and instead rely on the convenience of people in their orbits. I’m drawn to this book because it contradicts what we think we know about who we talk to about important matters and because it’s such a rich investigation of people’s social ties and under what circumstances they actually turn to the people closest to them.