and probably be close to each other as well. Therefore, much of a social network should consist of clusters of tightly knit groups that are connected by their strong ties into little triangles. But these tight-knit groups are occasionally connected to other strong clusters by weak ties. If these weak ties are the only ties that act as bridges between these little clusters, these weak ties should therefore be very important for facilitating the spread of information far and wide through the network, from one cluster to another. What Granovetter argued for, in other words (and in the words of the title of his celebrated paper), was “The Strength of Weak Ties.”
Granovetter even backed this up with some simple data: Hesurveyed a group of people on how they got their jobs. Of those who said they got a job through personal contacts, he found that most of these personal contacts were quite “weak.”
More recently, scientists have been able to test whether Granovetter was right. Jukka-Pekka Onnela, my former coworker who I mentioned earlier, was actually involved in one of the foundational papers in this area. To understand how information spreads he used a data set that is unbelievably rich and has been the basis for many scientific papers: a collection of anonymized mobile phone calls in a country in Europe.
Using the data about who calls whom, Onnela and his colleagues were able to construct a social network that spans an entire country. But not only did they have the ties between people, they had the strength of each tie: how many minutes people spoke to one another over the course of several months.
They were able to conduct a test using this network: They created an abstract contagion in a computer-based simulation—it could be a disease, a bit of gossip, a fact, or anything else—and had it spread in the cell phone network according to one basic assumption: The stronger the tie between two people, the more likely the contagion would spread from one person to another.
This is entirely reasonable. If you spend more time with someone who has a cold, you’re more likely to get sick. The more often you speak with someone, the more likely they are to tell you a bit of juicy gossip.
For each of one thousand simulations, the team would begin by randomly choosing a few people to start the contagion. Then, at each step, a weighted coin would be flipped for each neighboring person who could possibly become infected. The stronger the tie, the more weighted the coin would be toward infection. Through running the simulations they were able to see how long it took for everyone to become infected, as well as what happened along the way.
When they tested the network and ran this experiment, they discovered that weak ties aren’t that important to spreading knowledge.While weak ties do in fact hold the network together, much as Granovetter suspected, they aren’t integral for spreading facts. Weak ties, while bringing together disparate social groups, aren’t strong enough to spread anything effectively.
But strong ties also aren’t that important. While they can spread a fact with ease, most of the time they are spreading it to people who already know it, because strong ties only exist in highly clustered groups of people who often all know similar things.
So Granovetter wasn’t quite right. Ultimately it’s the medium-strength ties that are the most important. They are that happy medium between ties that are too weak to spread anything and those too strong to be found in anything but socially (and informationally) inbred groups.
These are the types of ties that allow knowledge to spread, facts to disseminate, sometimes even errors to propagate. The people you trust a little bit but aren’t your closest friends, your work friends, or something a bit more than strangers but less than a good buddy: These people provide the ties that are the most important in allowing something to spread far and wide. They connect
Granovetter even backed this up with some simple data: Hesurveyed a group of people on how they got their jobs. Of those who said they got a job through personal contacts, he found that most of these personal contacts were quite “weak.”
More recently, scientists have been able to test whether Granovetter was right. Jukka-Pekka Onnela, my former coworker who I mentioned earlier, was actually involved in one of the foundational papers in this area. To understand how information spreads he used a data set that is unbelievably rich and has been the basis for many scientific papers: a collection of anonymized mobile phone calls in a country in Europe.
Using the data about who calls whom, Onnela and his colleagues were able to construct a social network that spans an entire country. But not only did they have the ties between people, they had the strength of each tie: how many minutes people spoke to one another over the course of several months.
They were able to conduct a test using this network: They created an abstract contagion in a computer-based simulation—it could be a disease, a bit of gossip, a fact, or anything else—and had it spread in the cell phone network according to one basic assumption: The stronger the tie between two people, the more likely the contagion would spread from one person to another.
This is entirely reasonable. If you spend more time with someone who has a cold, you’re more likely to get sick. The more often you speak with someone, the more likely they are to tell you a bit of juicy gossip.
For each of one thousand simulations, the team would begin by randomly choosing a few people to start the contagion. Then, at each step, a weighted coin would be flipped for each neighboring person who could possibly become infected. The stronger the tie, the more weighted the coin would be toward infection. Through running the simulations they were able to see how long it took for everyone to become infected, as well as what happened along the way.
When they tested the network and ran this experiment, they discovered that weak ties aren’t that important to spreading knowledge.While weak ties do in fact hold the network together, much as Granovetter suspected, they aren’t integral for spreading facts. Weak ties, while bringing together disparate social groups, aren’t strong enough to spread anything effectively.
But strong ties also aren’t that important. While they can spread a fact with ease, most of the time they are spreading it to people who already know it, because strong ties only exist in highly clustered groups of people who often all know similar things.
So Granovetter wasn’t quite right. Ultimately it’s the medium-strength ties that are the most important. They are that happy medium between ties that are too weak to spread anything and those too strong to be found in anything but socially (and informationally) inbred groups.
These are the types of ties that allow knowledge to spread, facts to disseminate, sometimes even errors to propagate. The people you trust a little bit but aren’t your closest friends, your work friends, or something a bit more than strangers but less than a good buddy: These people provide the ties that are the most important in allowing something to spread far and wide. They connect
Similar Books
