The Strength of Ties
I found the Granovetter article on “The Strength of Weak Ties” to be very interesting. However, I took issue with some of the assertions that he made. While I agree with his statement that it makes more sense to differentiate between strong and weak ties on an intuitive basis (rather than calculating it based on time spent together, etc.), I disagree with some of the assumptions that he made about strong ties. For example, he stated that “the stronger the tie connecting two individuals, the more similar they are, in various ways,” (1362). While this may be intuitively correct, I don’t agree that this is always the case. For example, I have friends who I have known since kindergarten. I would definitely consider them to be strong ties, but I would not say that we are similar. Our ties are strong because we have been friends for so long, not necessarily because we have similar personalities that draw us towards one another. Still, I find his argument that weak ties are often more beneficial than strong ties to be very compelling. I definitely know of many situations, like the ones he describes, where people have gotten jobs or made close friends through weak ties, rather than strong ties. At another point in the article though, he asserts that he will use how frequently one sees an acquaintance to judge the strength of their tie. I strongly disagree with this method. I think that there are numerous circumstances under which one might not see a very close friend for a while (college being just one such situation), but this does not decrease the strength of that tie.
Question: How do you think that the college environment correlates with Granovetter’s findings (and those of the other authors as well)? Do you think that tie strength can be measured in the same way with college students as it can be with the rest of the population?
I also really liked the questions that Grannovetter posed at the end of his article, such as “how can negative ties be handled?” I thought that these were valid questions that it would be very interesting to find answers for.
In “The Social Structure of Competition” Burt discusses social capital. He discusses the differences between efficiency and effectiveness within a social network. Essentially, his point is the same as Granovetter’s: that it is more advantageous to have a network made up of more weak ties. Burt states that it is more strategically beneficial to have fewer redundant contacts (and it is therefore better to have more structural holes). He makes the argument that it doesn’t matter as much how many ties you have, but what really matters is how many of these ties bridge structural holes. I found this point to be very interesting and very valid. While having many ties is good, it does not help you much if they all connect back to one another within the same clique.
I found McPherson et al’s study in “Social Isolation in America: Changes in Core Discussion Networks over Two Decades” to be really interesting. These authors studied the changes in the number of people we feel that we can discuss “important things” with. I found some of their results startling - particularly, the result that since 1985 the number of subjects who say that they have no confidant has increase from 10% to 24.6%. Many of the other results were interesting, but I found this one to stand out the most. As I was reading this article, I kept thinking what different things could have caused such drastic changes. Early in the article, the authors mention that “important topics” might mean something different to everyone. I agree that within one study this does not matter much because they are simply trying to find out how many people each subject feels he or she can talk to about the topics that are important to them. However, differences in the importance of topics over time could definitely account for some of the changes. I was very happy to see that the authors mentioned this possibility when they discussed potential explanations for their results. They also explained that this survey was relatively long (often taking over an hour). I think that since 1985 our society has become increasingly more impatient because of television, internet use and cell phones. Therefore it is also possible that subjects were in more of a hurry to leave in 2004 than in 1985 and thus answered accordingly.
Question: Other than the possibilities offered by the authors, what other things do you think could have been responsible for these results?