The Importance of Weak Ties to Us
https://www.socialmediatoday.com/content/strong-and-weak-ties-why-your-weak-ties-matter
Networks are an ever present topic in society today. It is because, based on how you choose to look at it, networks make up every part of our lives and effects our day to day activity, whether it is technical or social.
The article from Social Media Today discusses the differences, and pros and cons of strong ties and weak ties. They looked at the social networks in people’s lives and how the strong and weak ties tied into one another. In this article, the author, Eileen Brown, reminds us of the importance of weak ties, and shares that they are very important, perhaps even more important than strong ties because weak ties are what helps a network to run and stay connected. Most people in social networks that are looking for jobs, find the most success in reaching out to their weak ties rather than strong ties, as there are few strong ties, while many more weak ties. Both social and technical research groups study networks because of their strong correlation with the workings behind things in our everyday life, like decision making and use of social media sites.
Weak ties are important because they can connect strongly tied groups that may have been separate together. I myself have had this happen amongst my social groups in college numerous times. For example, I may have had two strong ties, or two friends who I was very close with, and now that I am their weak tie together, they became strong friends, and now we spend a lot of time together as a group. Being able to bring people like me and my friends together is the power of weak ties.
This relates back to one of our first optional readings written by Mark Granovetter about the strength of weak ties. Granovetter argued that the smaller ties, or weaker ties, are what help the groups of strong ties stay together, essentially, the weak ties create a large network, that in turn link back to smaller groups with strong ties, creating the overall system of networks that runs.
Understanding the different qualities that a strong tie can provide versus a weak tie helps one understand the ideas in CS 2850/INFO 2040 better. For example, the Strong Triadic Closure Property states that all triads with at least two strong edges, all have another edge connecting the other side. Instead of simply memorizing this as a rule, if one thinks about what a strong tie is and what a weak tie is, and how they relate to each other, you can gain a deeper, clearer understanding of this property.