Network Shrinkage Post Pandemic & STC Property
In “Research: We’re Losing Touch with Our Networks” by Marissa King and Kovács, King and Kovác discussed how the pandemic has reduced people’s work and personal networks, especially in the outermost ring. They encouraged the readers to think of their network as 6 concentric circles that go from strong emotional ties to weaker ties. It is interesting to think about this theory and the strong and weak ties we learned about in class. According to the strong triadic closure property, if a person has strong edges to two people, those two people tend to form a tie of some sort. To explain how the ties deteriorated over the pandemic, we can think about STC, where either one or both of the original two strong ties weakened into weak ties.
If you look at the graph above, this network started with 4 strong ties and 3 triangles that satisfy STC property, including triangles AED, CDE, ABE. If we suppose that after the pandemic, close friends C and D lost touch and became weakly tied, and close friends A&B also stopped communication to become weak ties, then there are only 2 strong ties left. There is triangle ADE that has two strong ties and a weak tie, following the STC property. While the rest of the triangles still technically satisfy STC property since there are no strong ties, the whole network becomes very fragile as it is mostly connected by weak ties. The weak ties with “x” are not a part of any triangles with at least 2 strong ties, which makes them not as stable. One can easily identify that even with just 2 strong ties becoming weak because of the pandemic, the entire network becomes much more fragile, with ties with higher tendencies to be broken.
Another interesting point brought up by the article is the formation of ties through the perspective of gender. King and Kovác concluded from data in June 2019 and 2020 that “women’s network hasn’t shrunken nearly as much as men.” They argued that women’s network, especially strong ties, can be maintained via communication, either via technology or in person. On the other hand, men tend to maintain strong bonds by spending time together, rather than through talking, so men have lost a lot more of their extended network during the pandemic due to social distancing. It would be interesting to further explore the STC property in the context of gender and which tends to satisfy STC property more frequently.
Works Cited
King, Marissa, and Balázs Kovács. “Research: We’re Losing Touch with Our Networks.” Harvard Business Review, February 12, 2021. https://hbr.org/2021/02/research-were-losing-touch-with-our-networks.
Easley, David, and Jon Kleinberg. Network, Crowds, and Markets: Reasoning about a Highly Connected World. Ithaca, Cambridge University Press, June 10, 2010.