James Fowler, professor at UC San Diego and co-author along with Nicholas A. Christakis of Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives, will be one of the presenters at iDiplomacy.

Among the theories Fowler and Christakis posit in Connected is that you can influence people up to three degrees – such as your friend’s friend’s friend – who you might not even have met. For example, one of their studies found that obesity is contagious – a multicentric epidemic.

I spoke with Fowler on the phone last week about technology, social media and public diplomacy. (The interview has been condensed and edited.)

Q: Obviously, ordinary people have long engaged in what could be called public diplomacy, or at least building goodwill – such as Peace Corps. But that’s more of a traditional, face-to-face model. Do you think technology is accelerating the process by which the public can participate?

A: Yes. Although I would say that there’s a caveat which is what we find in our real world social networks is that people are motivated to change their behavior not by random strangers but by people they have a close social connection to. The internet gives us greater access to a larger number of people but the reason why I think it’s going to be important for diplomacy is because it’s going to help us to stay in better contact with people we already have a real world social relationship with.

Q: So it’s not going to displace it.

A: No, in essence it has to build on it. It’s very important to realize that these online social networks are not a substitute for a real world social network.

Q: What are some of the potential downsides to technology and its effect on public diplomacy?

A: I think it depends on what kind of message you want to get across. The upside is that when you increase your contacts between people of different countries I think you increase mutual trust. But the message that comes from the people of a country might be at odds with the message that the government is trying to promote.

During times of great division, like recently when we were experiencing the Iraq War and we were divided over how to deal with that problem, you can imagine there being lots of messages coming from individuals in the United States to people of other countries that were contrary to the message that the government really wanted to send at that time.

If you’re in a position where you’re trying to control the message then I think what these online contacts do is they make your job very difficult. In general as a U.S. citizen I think it’s a really good thing to increase these contacts but I can understand that diplomats or officials in the government might be frustrated. They might think a little bit like it’s opening Pandora’s box while the conversations go on that may or may not be at odds with official policy.

Q: Have you done any research into or thinking about how the decision to commit a terrorist act can spread? Have you found that some tendencies are less easily transmitted than others? Where might terrorism fall in this?

A: I think on the extreme end of the spectrum a terrorist act is an act of political participation just like any other. And so you can imagine the smallest act being reading the newspaper about an election, and then maybe getting more involved and you vote; you get more involved and you join a political group and engage in some kind of peaceful activity; and at a more extreme level you get involved in a group that is not satisfied with the rules and tries to change them violently.

What we know about the peaceful forms of participation is that those do appear to strike from person to person to person. We talked about that in our book. It’s an open question whether or not these kinds of violent behavior spread from person to person but my guess is if we had the data we would find that they also spread, because certainly participation spreads and the ideas underlying the ideologies that people use to think about whether or not to commit a violent act spread from person to person.

Q: The Israeli Consulate in New York held a press conference on Twitter last December. Some people – including Rachel Maddow – criticized them for trying to respond to such weighty issues in 140 characters. Do you think there is the potential to do harm by using the wrong medium?

A: I think this is a question of taste. Just because you can only get 140 characters in a single tweet doesn’t mean that you only get one tweet in a conversation. You can have multiple tweets and if anything what the shortness of that space does is it forces you to make your ideas very clear and you get nuance by having an interactive conversation with somebody where you send a tweet and they send one back and you go back and forth.

People have worried about going from full page consideration of an issue in the newspaper to 800 word Op-Eds; or where we go from reading about something in the newspaper to hearing about it on the radio or on TV; and more recently the television spots get shorter and shorter and shorter with sound bites. This is not a new criticism.

I understand the concern about trying to communicate in that medium but I think it’s so promising to be able to be in a medium where you’re not just broadcasting but you’re also capable of hearing reactions to what you’ve said that to me it’s worth it to lose a little of the precision and increase interactivity.

Q: You mentioned in your book that people with more attractive avatars tended to perceive themselves differently and be treated better, regardless of how they look in real life. Do you see a potential real world application for that phenomenon in public diplomacy?

A: Yeah. Just imagine – we don’t know yet all the reasons why people feel separate from each other but one can imagine that appearance is a big factor. You have people from different cultures who look different in real life wanting to be where their appearance has no bearing on how they appear in reality. You can imagine being able to change people’s minds about their ability to get along with somebody in this online context. The virtual world, I think, has the possibility of making these lines of division a lot fuzzier than we used to be.

Q: In your book you mention the case of the epidemic in World of Warcraft, a popular online game. Can you see a future in which aid to Africa will not just come in the form of cheap antiretroviral drugs but as a computerized game or simulation showing how to most effectively stop the spread of a disease like AIDS? Or swine flu?
A: Absolutely. Recently what’s really taken off in Africa is personal cell phone banking where people don’t really have access to stable currencies but a lot of them have cell phones now and they have minutes and those minutes can be traded as a currency just the same way as we would trade dollars in the United States. This is a very concrete example of something that is virtual actually having an effect on the real world economy.

And so you can imagine that the information that we’re generating now from studying how social networks can affect us can eventually be targeted to real behavior change. Can we use text messages in Africa to slightly change certain crucial people’s behavior to get a really big change in the prevalence of HIV? – for example.

Q: There’s a Facebook group called “3 Degrees of Connection.” It’s got 58 members and you’re one of them. Did you set up this group?  How hear about it?

A: No – a person who likes the paper that Nicholas [Christakis] and I have been writing wrote to me and she said that she wanted to start the group. I don’t even remember what the group is about – I think it was written in response to the happiness paper –

Q: Yes

A: — and this idea is that if more people realize that their own happiness affected not just their friends and family but their friends’ friends and their friends’ friends’ friends then more people would take a greater responsibility for their own happiness and work harder to try to spread joy because they’re not just affecting the one person they’re targeting they’re affecting a group of hundreds of other people.

Q: Do you feel like you have more responsibility knowing the potential effect you have on others and the fact you’ve publicized this effect?

A: I’m a scientist so I’m very interested in how this affects our scientific view of the world. But I also think there’s a fundamental message here of how we have to change the way that we perceive ourselves. For too long we’ve had just two choices – one choice was to think of ourselves as alone individuals, Robinson Crusoe types on the island by ourselves.

And then there’s the other alternative which is actually the individual identity doesn’t matter at all – you’re just a member of a group and I can totally predict your behavior just by knowing if you’re rich, or if you’re black or if you’re an American.

There’s a third way for perceiving yourself – you do have individual choices, but these individual choices exist in a web of interconnection with other people where they’re exerting influence on you and you’re exerting influence on them. Ultimately, when we show people these maps, these networks of their lives where they’re able to see beyond their social horizons to their friends of friends and friends of friends of friends, many of who they don’t know and have never met, I think it completely changes their attitude about what kind of effect that they personally have on the world. If you tell someone they don’t influence anybody, they’re not going to take nearly as much responsibility for their actions than if you tell them they influence 1,000.

This is a way I personally have reacted: Since publishing the obesity study I’ve lost five pounds and I’ve kept it off because I know that if I make myself healthier I’m not just helping me, I’m helping my son and my son’s best friend and my son’s best friend’s mother. These positive changes I make for my own life can spread to so many people that I really have to take responsibility for my own actions in a way that I never before comprehended.

Q: You mention in your book that the average Facebook user has 110 friends and there are plenty of studies that cite that number or similar numbers. But in my experience my younger friends tend to have far more friends – often over 500, and noticed you have 297 – which means that they’re not exactly duplicating their offline social networks. How do you think that the younger generation’s tendency to be connected to more people online will change the way that they socialize?

A: One thing that’s very clear from our own research is that Facebook friends don’t influence us on average. And the reason why is because the average strength or connection to a Facebook friend is very low.

My guess is that what we’re going to find is that influence works the same way it always has on Facebook as it does in the real world. All these extra people that we’re connected to are going to be useful not for behavior change but for the spread of information. You have, for example, much greater ability to coordinate political actions with online social media like we saw in Iran recently with Twitter. People were not being influenced to protest by someone who randomly tweeted them but that piece of information did change their attitude about the likelihood that lots of other people would show up at the same time.

All these additional acquaintances are not going to have a direct effect on us but they’re going to give us greater access to information that’s important to us which [can] lead to coordinated political action.

Q: You conclude in your book that we need to pay more attention to addressing positional inequality instead of just inequalities arising from race, income, gender and geography. To what extent is lack of technology hurting people in countries where mainstream access to internet is still just a dream? Should we be focusing more resources on providing internet and cell phone access versus more traditional aid like ditches and roads?

A: My guess is that the people at the edges of the network – their real world social network – are still living in a state where a lot of the people they are close to are not very far away from them. People in rich countries are much more mobile than people in poor countries are. I’m not sure necessarily that technology is where I would start.

I think where I would start is with real world social networks where we try to make sure that people who are not able to visit their friends or be visited by their friends because of basic needs are given greater access to a healthy lifestyle. Just for example, if you break your leg and you don’t have health insurance and there’s no doctor and you have to stay in your home you’re not going to be able to stay connected to your friends and family unless they come to visit you. And if you’re in a poor country chances are very good that they’re out working and trying to make ends meet.

One way that I think we can really help people to stay connected, very simply, is to make sure people have access to basic health care, to clean water, to safe environments. Because then they’re going to be able to freely connect in these real world social networks and continue to stay connected to the network as a whole.