Facebook and the Strength of Weak Ties
Psychology professor Nancy Darling, Ph.D., discusses her growth as a Facebook user throughout the years. Darling mentions initially not quite understanding why she’d “want to post little details of [her] life up for public inspection” when referring to the daily interactions of millions of Facebook users. She discusses her progression as a user as she learned about the strength of weak ties. A massive social network like Facebook thrives on overlapping social groups and creating communities through diverse weak ties, highlighting the true importance of weak ties and how they allow social groups to expand and enter a larger, more diverse network.
As mentioned in the article, “a well balanced social network has both types of ties.” This statement brings up an important point about strong and weak ties and how they impact our social life: strong and weak ties are both important because they “serve different functions” in our lives. For any immediate support, we tend to ask family members and close friends — the strong ties in our life. Weak ties, on the other hand, tend to come in handy for situations in which we need information that we don’t have. It is because of the “diverse knowledge” that is attainable through weak ties that social networks are able to form and expand completely — a network of only strong ties would be unbalanced. Facebook does a great job of amplifying just how much weak ties help expand social networks between groups through countless of its features: updating your status, posting/liking photos, commenting on other posts, etc. It is through these built-in features that friend groups will interact and begin expanding through a mixture of strong and weak ties. Weak ties are the bridges and connections between social groups that hold together social networks.