Weakening the Strength of Weak Ties

In the past I have had a hard time completely buying into the strength of weak ties argument. While the ties that connect two different groups are undoubtedly important, I have always thought that sometimes those weak ties are actually too weak to be able to cause too much effect. I know in my personal network, a lot of my weak ties are to people who I rarely or never interact with. Some of my weak ties may have also deteriorated over time as a result of not talking to someone for a while. For example, I was not that convinced of the strength of weak ties from the study that showed how people had heard about their current job. Although it would be nice to hear about a job opportunity from an old acquaintance, there are many other ways to find a job and I feel like weak ties do not have as much of an impact for most things that would be passed through a network.

The Centola and Macy paper provides a refreshing view on the small world theories and discusses most of the doubts I had when I read other papers. Their paper shows the importance of what is being diffused through the network. In most of the other papers we read, it is usually information or disease that is considered when discussing network diffusion. Centola and Macy realize that it can be dangerous to generalize from the spread of information and disease. I strongly agreed with their views on how certain things that spread through a network require reinforcement before someone adopts it. In the paper they say that long ties do not always facilitate the spread of complex contagions if nodes have too few common neighbors to provide multiple sources of confirmation. I found that this argument was very convincing and weakens the argument of the “strength of weak ties.” After all, if someone does not have enough reinforcement to act upon the information they receive, then the information is useless in the long run.