Triadic closure, Without The Closure: The Impact of Covid-19 on Once-Strong Ties
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/dept-of-returns/what-did-covid-do-to-friendship
By Jane Hu
As someone who transitioned into college during the pandemic, as many of us did, I faced a particularly new challenge: losing touch with those I had considered my best friends. The three of us went from multiple facetimes per night walks around our neighborhoods and weekend trips to a silent group chat. It started in March 2020 when COVID-19 transformed the means of communication and staying in touch. I was the first out of my group of three to separate. The pandemic had forced my parents to temporarily move out of our city to a house in a quiet neighborhood, hours away from my friends. It took a few months before it fizzled, but it started with less frequent texting, once-a-week facetime, unrealistic plans to mere “how are you?” texts every month. This, however, while it may be more unique to my experience, was not uncommon.
The article by The New Yorker (pasted above) writes, “As our physical and psychological thresholds for sociality changed, I found that certain friendships no longer met them. Gone were the rhythms of the lunch break, the walk home from work, and even—I am loath to admit—the gym date, where we breathlessly traded life updates between the narrow space of our neighboring ellipticals.” The pandemic completely shifted the means by which we interacted with once-close friends. As the article continues to put it, “But, given the attenuation of social engagements during quarantine, there often seemed to be less and less to say to one another.” Previously loaded conversations and phone calls became empty, often grasping for a subject to talk about.
As we discussed in class, Triadic Closure is the basic principle described in the book as two people in a social network having a friend in common will have an incentive to at one point become friends in the future. There are particular reasons why this may occur. The first is, opportunity. If a friend hangs out with two other friends separately, there is a likelihood that those friends will at some point meet each other as well. The simple existence of having common friends also establishes a sense of trust that additionally aids in a link forming. Lastly, a friend who hangs out with these two friends will at some point, feel that they can hang out with both at the same time, providing an incentive for a link to be made. However, while this link may be strong for years, the introduction of a pandemic and its impact on the traditional methods of communication may eventually terminate a link or even two, leading to the eventual weakening of triadic closure. The pandemic’s erasure of connected social communities, with mandatory quarantines and masks, reduced the opportunity for individuals to meet, the trust that individuals could build through social interaction, and the incentives that previously existed. The reduction of in-person interactions consequently challenged the triadic closure principle, even shifting previously strong links to be weak.