LinkedIn... to Twinkies?

Fascinating piece by Nicholas A. Christakis (Professor at Harvard Medical School) over at edge.org on the impacts and dynamics of social networks:

...it turns out that all kinds of things, many of them quite unexpected, can flow through social networks, and this process obeys certain rules we are seeking to discover.  We’ve been investigating the spread of obesity through a network, the spread of smoking cessation through a network, the spread of happiness through a network, the spread of loneliness through a network, the spread of altruism through a network.  And we have been thinking about these kinds of things while also keeping an eye on the fact that networks do not just arise from nothing or for nothing.  Very interesting rules determine their structure. 

UPDATE: Taking a somewhat more serious tack than my snarky, early-morning title would suggest is friend and colleague Patti Anklam over at her blog, 'Networks, Complexity and Relatedness'. (She actually specializes in this stuff and can speak with authority on it). She writes:

This work is truly boundary-crossing... His research indicates that it's the norms that are most influential because, as he says, "they can fly through the ether" whereas for behaviors to propagate we need to be physically together. He echoes many of the themes I've developed in my book (Net Work): one of the the things that I have been saying for years is that the key distinction of this 3rd generation of knowledge management is that knowledge is in the network. (In generation 1, we assumed knowledge was in artifacts; in generation 2 it was in people.) Christakis comes to the same conclusion...