Strong and Weak Ties in Social Media
https://medium.com/@natalie.michelle.chow/strong-weak-ties-in-social-media-9d1ad07b93dd
This article considers the power of weak and strong ties and their applications in social media. It talks about the patterns that show up when weak and strong ties are present, and how we can use them to learn about ‘new groups of people’. The article cites the article The Strength of Weak Ties by Mark Grannovetter, and provides a description of the various ways weak ties could affect communities. Grannovetter argues that weak ties play a heavy role in the level of community and organization a community has.
The application of the power of strong/weak ties in our communities is shown through Facebook. The article focuses on patterns between strong and weak ties can be seen through the social media network. Gilbert and Karahalios are cited, and the article details how they were able to predict how closely a participant would rank their friends to an accuracy of 90%.
The article asserts that Facebook should use the distinction between strong and weak ties between it’s users, and that this could provide further information about their customer base. In the instance of privacy, Facebook could possibly institute photo sharing that is only shown to close friends (strong ties) over those that aren’t as close with the user (weak ties)
This relates to what we talked about in class, especially on the topic of the Strong Triadic Theory. The ability to predict and find patterns amongst strong and weak connections made sense to me after learning about this theorem in class. It was interesting learning about how this related a little more deeply in the lens of social media and how these concepts can be applied in the real world.