Tie Strength
I found this week's readings to be very comprehensive and all brought up some very important social network issues in our modern world. The Granovetter and McPherson pieces were very thorough and both explored many issues, ideas, and possible limitations of the ideas, while the Burt piece was definitely comprehensive but a bit less clear and also could have been more concise.
First off the Granovetter piece had an interesting link to ideas in social psychology about similarity and proximity and how they lead to more intimate relationships. While his "strength" of weak ties notion is well known, hearing it in his own words made the idea very clear. I liked that he used both his own theory and supported all of it with empirical data, and when he didn't have evidence he clearly noted that his ideas were speculatory (as in the case with the failed Charlestown organization). This bolstered his argument and helped a reader see how his theory works, by incorporating ideas such as the invisible triad and exploring ideas related to similarity and its effects on the passing of information. Not only that but the data on people finding jobs more through people they only occasionally/rarely see and the study about the marginal employees starting the contagion in the factory did an excellent job of supplementing his ideas in real-world settings. I found this similar in effect to the original work by Milgrim in the way that it made the concepts so crystal clear. I wonder if that says anything about why these works are so famous. It's true that they are groundbreaking, but furthermore in comparison to articles such as the Burt or the Watts one from last week they just seem to be more concise, organized ideas and better supported with evidence. I wonder if this has anything to do with the idea that simply repeating findings is often looked down upon and there's pressure in social science to present new and groundbreaking ideas. It's almost as if the newer ideas (like in Burt) try to do too much in the fact that the ideas just keep buidling upon each other and all get meshed into a more confusing mess than the reader started with. Also. I feel that Granovetter's ideas connect very closely to the ideas of Gladwell in last week's reading. Gladwell even mentioned how Lois benefitted from this weak ties idea in his article and putting the two stories together the conclusion makes even more sense. Lois seems to be one of Granovetter's early adopters, who has a million weak ties and can take things from all sorts of "marginal" people and help make them popular (as with the numerous reforms she made in Chicago).
The McPherson article brings up an interesting debate in the fact that it shows that strong contacts are dwindling in America and that less and less people are finding strong contacts ouside of their kin. This relates to the other articles because while this at first seems alarming and unhealthy it may just be due to the fact that people are taking the weak ties argument to heart and focusing more on weak ties to get ahead then on maintaining strong close ties. I wonder if there is a certain threshold at which people will stop giving up strong ties in favor of weak ties if this if truly the case. It was surprising that so many people reported having no close contacts and I wonder if that is a result of the changing ideas about community that were brought up in the first Wellman article in the way that now communities are composed of people who don't see each other as much and hence have a harder time keeping up close contacts. In any case this article clearly brought up some important questions that still need to be answered. Not only that but this article was well supported and went through to explain all of the possible limitations. I think this is a major strength because most articles have a short paragraph about limitations but this one went through so many instances that could lead to error and attempted to knock them all down. I found this impressive and very helpful in understanding not just the result of the experiment but all of the methodological pieces that go into it.
Finally, as I mentioned before I found the Burt article to be long and arduous. It made some important poins about structural holes and how it's important to get ahead by having weak ties and being between many bridges but it was hard to really grapple all of the information thrown at you. I also feel like the article seemed to really look at strong ties in a negative light and made it seem like competition and weak ties were the most important to succeeding and thus being happy. I found this a pretty economical piece that saw social networks as a pure science that can be used to an individual's advantage against others. While there were some examples to support his claim I found these very confusing too and I couldn't get a good grasp of the connection between his concrete examples and theory. So while there were many good points in individual sections I think the main points were lost and less effective considering the breadth of the piece.
Questions:
-How many strong social ties is a good number for humans to have so that they maximize their utility? (meaning they have enough strong ties for support but enough weak ties to get ahead). Why do you feel this way? Is it alarming that some people report having no weak ties or do you think this might be the best way to live?
-Do you think social network analysis should solely focus on the science and how social networks can help one get ahead or do you think it needs to be supplemented with an emotional component? In other words should it solely be about the way social networks are or why social networks are the way they are?