What is the dynamics after the strong tradic closure?
The social triad has been the fundamental unit in social network research for a long time. In addition to the theorems discussed in class like “people who have common friends tend to know each other” and the strong triadic closure, researchers have observed many interesting behaviours in social networks. Simmel pioneered the field by pointing out how a social triad could be very different from a dyad as the interaction between members decreases, intimacy declines, but the strength and stability increase. In 1968, Caplow claimed that two members in a social triad tended to unite against the other one, which is known as two-against-one phenmone. Indeed, the “strong” or “weak” properties can vary a lot over time. A pair of friends who grew up together seldom talked with each other when they both went to college.
Even though plenty of interesting discoveries have been founded on the topic of social triads, the research conducted by Hong Huang, Yuxiao Dong and other incredible authors focused their research on a relatively innovative part: What‘s the dynamics after a strong triadic closure? Will triadic closure strengthen ties in social networks?
By employing two enormous, dynamic social networks- social media and mobile communication- as the sources of the data they used, they traced the dynamics of social interactions and discovered the interesting phenomena: “about 80% social triads, the strength of the first two ties is weakend although the averagely the strength in the two networks maintains an increasing or stable trends.” Moreover, they noticed the difference reflected by some internet users:
- The decrease in tie strength among three males is more sharply than that among females.
- The tie strength between celebrities is more likely to be weakened as the closure of a triad than those between ordinary people.
Observing the dynamics after the social triadic closure is more than being interesting and innovative. The paper written by Hong Huang, Yuxiao Dong shows a valuable perspective toward the study of social networks’ study. A bunch of people have strong ties with each other, but how strong is it? Do they have the same degree of strong ties? Will the difference of the strong degree influence the sequence of new tie’s formation? If so, how much did the difference influence the males? Why are people influenced differently? These questions can bring us to really dive into the study of networks and understand the intricate and interesting relationship among those ties.
Network is a perfect representation and visualization of connections. But what’s beyond the “strong ties” “weak ties” “positive connections” “negative ties”, there is always a vibrant, dynamic and changing world under the connections.
Source: “Will triadic closure strengthen ties in social networks?” – Hong Huang, Yuxiao Dong,Jie Tang, Hongxia Yang, Nitesh V.Chawla, Xiaoming Fu. https://doi.org/10.1145/3154399