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Facebook friends and strong/weak ties

Earlier last year, Oxford University did a study on the relationship between a Facebook user and his/her Facebook friends. The study found that the average Facebook user has 155 friends but would only turn to 4 of those friends in a state of emergency. This is surprising because many people are constantly trying to increase the number of friends/followers they have on social media, but doing so does not cultivate true friendships. People are more concerned with being popular online than having “face-to-face” friends, as Oxford anthropologist Dunbar says.

This idea relates to the idea of strong and weak edges in networks. Suppose each user’s friend list was a network. Most of the ties connecting the user’s friends to the user would be weak ties. Because it seems like a user’s Facebook friends consist of many random friends as opposed to several close-knit groups of friends, using properties of bridges, we can assume that the type of information that a user get’s on Facebook from his/her friends mainly consists of new, novel information since there aren’t many friend triangles.

There are upsides and downsides to Facebook. Though the platform is definitely not the best way to create and maintain close relationships, it is a useful way to get information.

Sources:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/science-news/12108412/Facebook-users-have-155-friends-but-would-trust-just-four-in-a-crisis.html

 

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