We can walk away
Social media platforms benefit from weakening strong ties, and establishing connections that shouldn't exist. AI will only make this worse.
Remember when there wasn’t social media? Of course you do, it was less than 20 years ago. The 9/11 attacks (2001) existed in a world where there was little to no ‘social networking,’ MySpace hadn’t even launched yet (2002), let alone our current iteration of ‘social media.’
And yet, perhaps even more so than Roe v. Wade (1973) in America, and universal public healthcare (1984) in Canada, we have (reluctantly?) succumbed to the inevitability of its existence into our perpetuity.
The Naivete of Disconnection
Social media has cultivated the perception, and near monopoly, on connection. Especially between groups, geographically dispersed, with few demographic and socioeconomic ties.
“Just 500 acquaintances require more than 100,000 bits of information to track who knows whom, and if each acquaintance knows 500 others, there can be as many as a quarter of a million people at one remove.” Granovetter (2003) Ignorance, Knowledge, and Outcomes in a Small World.
He continues, “‘all targets may in fact be reachable from random initial senders in only a few steps,’ but that small differences in incentives and confidence may produce large differences in completion rates.”
If we want to connect with a CEO, for a job or maybe a journalistic interview, we assume those ties are made through those that share similar characteristics - in this case, other CEOs.
But we know that this CEO might have a partner, children, a therapist, barber or personal trainer.
Social Networking’s evolution into ‘Media’
Current social media platforms, whether they know it or not, willingly or otherwise, have a vested interest in weakening strong social ties. In 1973, Dr. Mark Granovetter made a supposition, in his seminal work, The Strength of Weak Ties:
The construct, paradigm and platforms oriented and optimized the strength of weak ties. Perhaps not purposefully.
I’m tracking down Dr. Granovetter, and hope to pick his brain about the modern state of weak ties within social media networks. Feel free to include your questions in the comment section below.