05 January 2004A theoretical note on why blogs matter: The Strength of Weak Ties. Why do blogs have such a large social influence, given that the total number of active bloggers is tiny relative to the number of human beings on the planet?
Many years ago the sociologist Mark Granoveter wrote a seminal article on the special import of "weak ties"--the links among people that are not closely bonded--as being critical for spreading ideas and for helping people join together for action. <b style="color: black; background-color: rgb(160, 255, 255);">Granovetter, M. (1973), "The Strength of Weak Ties," American Journal of Sociology, 78 (6): 1360-1380.
This article and its simple but profound idea helped stimulate an academic movement of rich analysis of networks, ranging from neurology to social movements. The best book I know summarizing this science and its relevance to social change and social capital formation is Nexus, by Mark Buchanan.
Here is a passage from the book, where Buchanan discusses the "it's a small world" "Kevin Bacon six degrees of separation" phenomena, and how it is related to weak ties. Buchanan features both Harvard social psychologist Stanley Milgram, who studied the six degrees phenomena many years ago, and the Cornell mathematicians who are leading this study today, Duncan Watts and Stanley Strogatz (D. <b style="color: black; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><b style="color: black; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Watts and S. <b style="color: black; background-color: rgb(160, 255, 255);">Strogatz. Collective dynamics of small-world networks. Nature, 363:202--204, 1998. Citations.):
So let's go back to a circle of six billion, the world's population, with each person linked to his or her nearest 50 neighbors. In the ordered network, the number of degrees of separation is something like 60 million--this being the number of steps it takes, even moving 50 at a time, to go halfway around the circle. Throw in a few random links, however, and this number comes crashing down. According to Watts and Strogatz's calculations, even if the fraction of new random links is only 2 out of 10,000, the number of degrees of separation drops from 60 million to about 8; if the fracton is 3 out of 10,000, it falls to 5. Meanwhile, the random links, being so few in number, have no noteceable effect on the degree of local clustering that makes social networks what they are.
These small world networks work magic. From a conceptual point of view, they reveal how it is possible to wire up a social world so as to get only six degrees of separation, while still permitting the richly clustered and intertwined social structure of of groups and communities that we see in the real world. (Buchanan, Nexus, page 55)
We want to spread good ideas and creative new relationships across society. One example, the Dean campaign. We sometimes talk about "social capital" (to use Bob Putnam's term) as a kind of measure of progressive interconnection among citizens. We can't enhance social capital by working only within our closest relationships and network. We need to spread ideas into new social networks that are not initially connected closely to us, and we need to find ways to collaborate with people who are new to us. We need to connect to many different social worlds.
We can best connect to other social worlds through the social shortcuts of weak ties, by which we engage folks that are not necessarily that close to us initially--e.g. Uncle Albert, or an old high school friend, or someone we know at work, at the dry cleaners, or where we have our car repaired. These bridge persons may not be that emotionally close to the people we hope to reach on the other end of the connection, either--but the value of bridging is that the relationship may be just strong enough, as a social tie, to spread an idea or enable a new connection for action.
Blogs have a special social relevance because they allow their bloggers to create and maintain a network of weak social ties. The network of weak ties that a blogger can sustain is open to all comers, and is potentially vast and highly diverse (as diverse as the web itself--which of couse is not diverse enough, but is more diverse than, say, academic journals). Blogs are weak tie machines! Anyone (you!) can read my blog.
If my ideas seem relevant to you, you can take them and plant them within your local, strong-bonded social network. Of course, if you are a blogger, you can also spread them across your own blog-based weak ties--and thus diffuse the ideas even farther.
Blogging helps us expand and maintain a large number of loose ties. And loose ties, to go back to Granovetter's point, are the vital links for social progress. Social progress may be (oversimply, of course) defined as the spread of good ideas across society, and the combination and recombination of people into new groups that can take collective action.
Finally, a good thing about weak social ties is that it appears to be difficult to exert conventional social pressure across such ties. It is hard to "pressure" someone into agreeing with an idea or an action. Loose ties are voluntary. Thus ideas and actions that grow across networks of weak ties can perhaps be presumed to be better vetted by each person--based on merit rather than coercion. Perhaps this process of individual discernment helps filter out bad ideas seeking to spread across the network of loose ties. Perhaps this filtering in turn contributes to collective wisdom being developed across the loose-tie long distance network as a whole, and thus also within the strong-tie local communities at the edges.
Finally, if we really want to understand the effect of blogging and bloggers, we need to study the conversion of ideas into face-to-face community organization. This is the move I think of as "from netroots to grassroots" and that is my present passion.
PS: A special hello, with this piece, to my colleagues at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, who cross the worlds of law, academics, and the web--and to Kaye Trammell at Florida State, one of the most visible and weak-tie-maintaining academics who are focused on blogging and society.
[Jim Moore's cybernetics, politics, emergence, etc.]
7:10:45 PM #
Many years ago the sociologist Mark Granoveter wrote a seminal article on the special import of "weak ties"--the links among people that are not closely bonded--as being critical for spreading ideas and for helping people join together for action. <b style="color: black; background-color: rgb(160, 255, 255);">Granovetter, M. (1973), "The Strength of Weak Ties," American Journal of Sociology, 78 (6): 1360-1380.
This article and its simple but profound idea helped stimulate an academic movement of rich analysis of networks, ranging from neurology to social movements. The best book I know summarizing this science and its relevance to social change and social capital formation is Nexus, by Mark Buchanan.
Here is a passage from the book, where Buchanan discusses the "it's a small world" "Kevin Bacon six degrees of separation" phenomena, and how it is related to weak ties. Buchanan features both Harvard social psychologist Stanley Milgram, who studied the six degrees phenomena many years ago, and the Cornell mathematicians who are leading this study today, Duncan Watts and Stanley Strogatz (D. <b style="color: black; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><b style="color: black; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Watts and S. <b style="color: black; background-color: rgb(160, 255, 255);">Strogatz. Collective dynamics of small-world networks. Nature, 363:202--204, 1998. Citations.):
So let's go back to a circle of six billion, the world's population, with each person linked to his or her nearest 50 neighbors. In the ordered network, the number of degrees of separation is something like 60 million--this being the number of steps it takes, even moving 50 at a time, to go halfway around the circle. Throw in a few random links, however, and this number comes crashing down. According to Watts and Strogatz's calculations, even if the fraction of new random links is only 2 out of 10,000, the number of degrees of separation drops from 60 million to about 8; if the fracton is 3 out of 10,000, it falls to 5. Meanwhile, the random links, being so few in number, have no noteceable effect on the degree of local clustering that makes social networks what they are.
These small world networks work magic. From a conceptual point of view, they reveal how it is possible to wire up a social world so as to get only six degrees of separation, while still permitting the richly clustered and intertwined social structure of of groups and communities that we see in the real world. (Buchanan, Nexus, page 55)
We want to spread good ideas and creative new relationships across society. One example, the Dean campaign. We sometimes talk about "social capital" (to use Bob Putnam's term) as a kind of measure of progressive interconnection among citizens. We can't enhance social capital by working only within our closest relationships and network. We need to spread ideas into new social networks that are not initially connected closely to us, and we need to find ways to collaborate with people who are new to us. We need to connect to many different social worlds.
We can best connect to other social worlds through the social shortcuts of weak ties, by which we engage folks that are not necessarily that close to us initially--e.g. Uncle Albert, or an old high school friend, or someone we know at work, at the dry cleaners, or where we have our car repaired. These bridge persons may not be that emotionally close to the people we hope to reach on the other end of the connection, either--but the value of bridging is that the relationship may be just strong enough, as a social tie, to spread an idea or enable a new connection for action.
Blogs have a special social relevance because they allow their bloggers to create and maintain a network of weak social ties. The network of weak ties that a blogger can sustain is open to all comers, and is potentially vast and highly diverse (as diverse as the web itself--which of couse is not diverse enough, but is more diverse than, say, academic journals). Blogs are weak tie machines! Anyone (you!) can read my blog.
If my ideas seem relevant to you, you can take them and plant them within your local, strong-bonded social network. Of course, if you are a blogger, you can also spread them across your own blog-based weak ties--and thus diffuse the ideas even farther.
Blogging helps us expand and maintain a large number of loose ties. And loose ties, to go back to Granovetter's point, are the vital links for social progress. Social progress may be (oversimply, of course) defined as the spread of good ideas across society, and the combination and recombination of people into new groups that can take collective action.
Finally, a good thing about weak social ties is that it appears to be difficult to exert conventional social pressure across such ties. It is hard to "pressure" someone into agreeing with an idea or an action. Loose ties are voluntary. Thus ideas and actions that grow across networks of weak ties can perhaps be presumed to be better vetted by each person--based on merit rather than coercion. Perhaps this process of individual discernment helps filter out bad ideas seeking to spread across the network of loose ties. Perhaps this filtering in turn contributes to collective wisdom being developed across the loose-tie long distance network as a whole, and thus also within the strong-tie local communities at the edges.
Finally, if we really want to understand the effect of blogging and bloggers, we need to study the conversion of ideas into face-to-face community organization. This is the move I think of as "from netroots to grassroots" and that is my present passion.
PS: A special hello, with this piece, to my colleagues at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, who cross the worlds of law, academics, and the web--and to Kaye Trammell at Florida State, one of the most visible and weak-tie-maintaining academics who are focused on blogging and society.
[Jim Moore's cybernetics, politics, emergence, etc.]
7:10:45 PM #
Copyright 2004 Lance Knobel
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