Strong Triadic Closure Property and its Social Implications
While we see close friends in our personal lives, social media is often used for keeping in touch with all sorts of people that we know. From these more distant acquaintances we can acquire knowledge about what’s going on around the world and not just keep restricted to our tight social circle. Though close friends are often viewed as important for emotional support and for being there for you, and in return you tend to interact with them the most, contacts that you don’t interact with as much are important for exposing new information. The problem between close friends is that if one person figures something out, the information is going to spread quickly within that cluster. Thus the more people you know, the more you will learn because more people will have new ideas they can share with you. Ultimately, Facebook doesn’t replay the same ideas but more so fosters and spreads new ones.
The number of ways you can get new information is infinite, such as news on the internet, but also through the huge number of social networks out there. For example, school, jobs, clubs. People who are similar also tend to associate with each other; thus people talk about if they click or are compatible when looking for friendships. Even in different settings where you have different friends, you will tend to look for those more similar to you. Thus, you and your similar friends will likely only know the same information and find similar content interesting. Another possibility is that you are influenced by what your close friends like and tend to like the same things as well. Overall, you get more information from a strong tie friend than a weak tie friend, but since you have more weak friends, you get more information overall because you have many more weak friends than strong ones.
There is a lot of relevance to class. “These distant contacts are also more likely to share novel information” – this relates to what we talked about in class in that most people found out about jobs from people who they were acquaintances with rather than close friends, because people tended to know a lot of the information that were in their own social circles and not as much from other circles, so they would learn new information, such as job information, from other circles.
“When a person interacts with two individuals frequently, those individuals are also likely to interact with one another.” – When a person interacts with two individuals frequently, this is called a strong tie, and according to the Strong Triadic Closure Property, if two individuals have a strong tie with a third person, those first two individuals will likely at least have a weak if not a strong tie between the two of them as well.
Primary source: https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-data-science/rethinking-information-diversity-in-networks/10150503499618859/