How Facebook Cultivates Community Through Weak Ties
When signing up for a Facebook page, many people do so with one intention in mind – to connect with others. However, within that reasoning is a multitude of others; connecting with family, close friends, acquaintances, or long-lost connections. However, within all these connections forms a community. In her article, “Facebook and the Strength of Weak Ties” in Psychology Today, Professor Nancy Darling of Oberlin College argues that instead of allowing a user to connect with close friends and family, “Facebook. . .serves an entirely different function: that of community”. She argues that Facebook allows a user to form a community with those that a person would hardly ever see – friends from grade school, or relatives that moved far away.
One of the first topics covered in CS 2850 was the topic of strong and weak ties. These concepts connect well with the advent of social media. In our textbook, it is shown that strong ties tend to saturate as number of followers increase.
However, social media is not focused around strong connections, as Dr. Darling argues. Instead, it is focused around weak connections and forming a community. In fact, there was a homework problem in the first problem set on this exact phenomenon. It showed that there was a stronger probability of a person sharing information with their Facebook followers if it had been presented by a distant friendship versus a close friendship. This is due to the fact that weak connections tend to present new and more thought-provoking information, which the user will want to share with their friend group. However, a strong connection will generally know most of the information that the user will know, due to the nature of their bond.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/thinking-about-kids/201005/facebook-and-the-strength-weak-ties