Why weak ties are not so weak
Link: http://www.socialmediatoday.com/content/strong-and-weak-ties-why-your-weak-ties-matter
We started out this course talking about ties such as strong and weak ties. This article differentiates what we would consider as strong and weak ties in the real world such that strong ties are friendships and weak ties are acquaintances. Most people tend to focus on the properties involving strong ties or strong friendships such as with the strong triadic property that we learned in class. However, as this article points out, weak ties are also important to look at. Strong and weak ties have their own roles in creating and analyzing your network. While strong ties are mainly for looking at small, well-defined groups, weak ties are used to analyze relationships between groups especially when it is difficult to segment groups apart and easier to look at the entire network as a whole.
In our day to day lives, we interact mostly with those we have strong ties with whereas our weak ties are usually those we have more tenuous relationships with. But weak ties play a crucial role in “binding groups of strong ties together [by] bring[ing] circles of networks into contact with each other”. This strengthens and forms new bonds within and between other social networks. In other words, weak ties oftentimes function as a bridge. As we have learned from class, bridges are often weak ties if they do not violate the strong triadic property.
Weak ties are also important in bringing in variety in news as the article states. Those who do not have many weak ties tend to only hear information from their close friends which puts them at risk of being cut off from a lot of recent information and positions them at a disadvantage. Being so stuck within our own friend group for news will also function as an echo chamber, promoting confirmation bias which alienates other opinions. This has been a recent concern, especially in our current political climate where people seem to be taking to extremes, because solutions depend on agreement or compromise and echo chambers discourage that. Our acquaintances oftentimes run in different social circles and keeping in touch with them may bring in new ideas to better understand those who are not so similar to us. Doing so may help prevent us from getting trapped in our own ideas and allow us to be more agreeable with others.
Moreover, weak ties may also be a source of new opportunities such as for finding a new job or starting a business. Cultivating our weak ties would encourage the flow of information throughout your network. One day, information that flow through may be useful to you so it is good to keep the channels open. Although weak ties are often not the focus of networks due to the distance it my span across various social circles and the complications that may bring, they still have a function in how a network is built on a macro-level and how information travels between groups.