Social Media and Weak Ties
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/12/style/who-are-my-real-friends.html
With the prominence of social media, it is easy to look at your 1,000+ connections on Facebook, and deem them friends. The New York Times article “Are My Friends Really My Friends” by Teddy Wayne discusses how social media sites have increased the quantity of human interactions, but not the quality. In the context of our class, this indicates that social media allows for more weak ties and fewer strong ties.
According to the article, technology allows for easier communication and more lightweight interactions, but friendships of less “thickness”. It defines “talking at length in person and involving yourself in shared activities” as a measure of the strength of a friendship. Quality of a friendship, however, is a difficult thing to quantify. In the Wellman study we looked at in class, the strength of a relationship was determined by the frequency of interaction on social media, but measuring things like “talking at length in person” is not easy. Maybe a balance between Wayne and Wellman’s ideas on this topic is to consider a relationship strong if there is frequency of interaction online and in person. The article also refers to the research of Robin Dunbar, a professor at Oxford who coined “Dunbar’s number”. This says that the average person has about 150 casual friends (casual being people who would come to your wedding or funeral), and those 150 friends are broken up into further layers of buddies, good friends, confidants, etc. Considering that social media provides access to so many people, you would think that the new era would make Dunbar’s number go up, but it hasn’t, which indicates that more access does not mean better quality interactions. Dunbar’s number shows a more complex version of the categories (strong and weak) that we came up with in class. It is a good reminder that there are several layers of intimacy, and it would be interesting to consider models of networks where there are more detailed describers of relationships.
This article pinpoints exactly what we just learned in class: distinguishing between strong and weak ties. The article is backed up by the Wellman study which says that components of social media (like liking photos and following a newsfeed) allows for passive engagement, which is what Wayne describes as lightweight interactions. Furthermore, the concept of Strong Triadic Closure property is in line with the concept of having more friends but thinner relationships. STCP says that if two people have a friend in common, then there is an increased likelihood of them becoming friends at some point in the future. Social media allows for more of these triangles to form, since it is easier to find friends in common, and as more triangles form it only makes sense that several of these closures will be weak links.