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Perceived Friendships vs. Actual Friendships

This article talks about the discrepancy between perceived friendships and actual friendships. It talks about the commonly understood notion that most people would want their friendly feelings to be reciprocated. With the emergence of numerous social networking tools, it seems like the proportion of real friends and online friends is becoming skewed to the wrong direction. According to the article, “recent research indicates that only about half of perceived friendships are mutual.” Because the authenticity of one’s relationship has a big effect on one’s mental health, people continuously try to distinguish who their friends are and who their acquaintances are. And, this issue of reciprocity and authenticity is an important one because friends shape and widen one’s narrow perspective to ultimately see the bigger world.

This article relates to what we learn in social networks about local bridges and the strength of weaker ties. Examining Mark Granovetter’s interview regarding subjects who reported that their best job information came from not their close friends but mere acquaintances, we learn that acquaintances are sometimes more useful than close friends. When considering modern people’s obsession with the efficiency in their relationships, this idea sheds a new light into the article in that having more acquaintances might not be so beneficial to one’s mental health, but is indeed very useful in job search. The structural peculiarity of the local bridge in the model of nodes and edges shows how this peculiarity can make a positive difference in one’s everyday life. However, one must understand that there are not only benefits of having several local bridges. One should accept that these local bridges cannot be and are not all strong ties. In addition, bridges are actually very rare in real life, and that local bridges are helplessly weak when there already exists a sufficient number of strong ties in one’s network.

The construction in the model of networks fundamentally results in weaker ties for local bridges. Although we may easily decide to call strong ties as friends and weak ties as acquaintances, we cannot decide which one of the two ties is a better one under all circumstances.

Article Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/07/opinion/sunday/do-your-friends-actually-like-you.html?_r=0

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