THE Lowly Peon

Online Social Networking as Weak-Tie Networking

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27 September 2010, 6:00am

A very articulate essay discussing how social networks — like Twitter, Facebook, or even Avalantern — develop so-called "weak-tie" relationships rather than the stronger-tie relationships that you may have with face to face friends.

The New Yorker's Gladwell's point isn't necessarily that this is a bad thing, but rather that it is vastly different than the networking people used in the past. His main point of discussion is in social networks as a tool for revolution, comparing things like the "Twitter Revolution" in Moldova in the spring of 2009 to the Woolworth sit-in in Greensboro in 1960. The former, he argues, hardly used Twitter to organize at all, making the astute (and seemingly obvious) observation that most of the tweets about the revolution in Moldova were in English, posted by users in the US.

He also makes a good point that any revolution needs a structured hierarchy, and that a weak-tie network could never do so.

The platforms of social media are built around weak ties. Twitter is a way of following (or being followed by) people you may never have met. Facebook is a tool for efficiently managing your acquaintances, for keeping up with the people you would not otherwise be able to stay in touch with. That’s why you can have a thousand "friends" on Facebook, as you never could in real life.

This is in many ways a wonderful thing. There is strength in weak ties, as the sociologist Mark Granovetter has observed. Our acquaintances—not our friends—are our greatest source of new ideas and information. The Internet lets us exploit the power of these kinds of distant connections with marvelous efficiency. It's terrific at the diffusion of innovation, interdisciplinary collaboration, seamlessly matching up buyers and sellers, and the logistical functions of the dating world. But weak ties seldom lead to high-risk activism.