Breaking the Network

So far in the course, I’m starting to see networks as having more effect on us than the other way around. It’s somehow becoming another variable to be added to the list of things that ultimately determines the course of our lives, such as economic determinism or cultural determinism and so on. We can be thinking of a network-determinism that affects our entire lives, or basically guides and shapes them. It looks to me that once you are born in a certain network with certain attributes (socioeconomic status, education, size,..), this will first of all shape who you are, what kind of network you are likely to build and remain in and so it shapes you life. What sustains this is that there is also a flow of norms within each network. The only way to break the network seems to literally break it and start from scratch, especially if you want to stand out in a strong way that will not conform with your existing network. But I think that’s something of extraordinary difficulty considering that change itself is a huge burden, and so adding the factor of replacing the social networks is a barrier strong enough that hinders most people from changing. That’s why I think cycles such as the poverty cycle are usually self-sustainable and permanent until it’s broken by an external force. This force can be someone within who choose to go against all the norms and spend his life to do so (MLK, Ghandi,…), or an external factor that causes that network to naturally break and reshape (natural disaster, war, death, diffusion of idea/behavior,…). There are things that affect these factors such as the propensity of population for change (it might be easier to break a whole network and rebuild it in the US as opposed to Egypt). Also, how strong and how large family ties are and their position in the social network (it’s easier to break in an individualistic society where nuclear families are the norm as opposed to a collectivistic society where extended families are the norm). There is also the question of can we replace only a part of our network and how stable will that be in a highly clustered one. I also think that we are living in an age (especially in the west) where our strong ties are actually decreasing as we keep moving from one place to another and changing careers and postponing marriage. All of this cased our weak ties (and overall network) to increase but our strong ones I think are decreasing, which maybe makes breaking our networks and starting from scratch (new career, new wife/husband, new city/country,..) much easier.