Close friends with social media connections
https://www.nydailynews.com/life-style/health/people-close-friends-study-article-1.1577832
It can be difficult to start talking to new people without having things or friends in common. Especially, when you want to make friends, it can be intimidating to approach new people. The article talks about the “social signature”, which means that we keep our friends by dropping old friends and making new friends. The researcher states that this number varies by the things in common between friends and emotional closeness.
The emotional closeness can be referred to the social network. The social network suggests one to make friends who like to be friends with one. The article states that “Although social communication is now easier than ever, it seems that our capacity for maintaining the close relationship is finite.” This means that even though social media has helped to develop the size of the network, it does not expand the capacity of close friends with strong ties.
The article says that most of the people make new friends when they are dropping their old friends. This happens mostly during university and work. This applies to the triadic closure property. The triadic closure property states two people with a common friend are very likely to become friends. In university and workplaces, they replace old friends with new friends because there is a number of people who are also new to the place. This enables the students and workers to have many common friends as they socialize in the community.
The relationship between the contents from the networks and the real-life examples from the article shows that people who have emotional closeness and friends in common will likely to have a strong tie. The article states that people with weak emotional closeness are replaced out with new friends because they are considered as a weak tie. This was very interesting that the network effect can be applied to real life. Although, in real life, there are numerous influential factors that can affect the triadic closure property, theories I learned in class play big parts in real life.