Musings on Entrepreneurship and Innovation
Wednesday, September 24, 2003The Weakening of Strong Ties
Ross Mayfield is a prolific and insightful commentator on the emergence of a new generation of social networking tools. In a recent essay, he discusses how the transparency of relationships can have inadvertent, negative consequences. Here are some of my thoughts and elaborations upon the highlights of Mayfield's piece:
Ross is critical of "top-down" networking tools. In his nomenclature, top-down tools depend upon coerced data entry and/or organizational data-mining of individuals' email correspondence to map relationships. I share Ross's skepticism. Relationships exist between individual people, not organizations. Consequently, they are ultimately controlled by individuals. Even if relationships can be mapped, they can't be activated without the consent of the individuals in which those relationships are vested.
Human relationships are n-dimensional. Discerning the parameters of trust and reciprocity is difficult enough for human beings (and we spend most of our waking hours at the task!). Although undoubtedly useful in catalyzing and sustaining relationships, or software is not likely to master the subtlety required to purposefully activate relationships.
Duncan Watts, among others, has noted that a small world network is not necessarily a robust network. A basic building block of the latter, not surprisingly, is transitive linking (or, more familiarly, friend-of-a-friend connections). My colleague, Laura Black, has inquired about the conditions under which transitive linking can occur. Mayfield points out how the transparency of new networking tools can actually enable social externalities when transitive linking is attempted when such conditions don't exist.
There's been some background discussion of whether strong ties are more, or less, valuable than weak social ties. Valdis Krebs, and other informed observers, are undoubtedly correct when they answer, "yes." Both are required for a robust personal network. Furthermore, both kinds of ties are inevitable, notwithstanding changes in their geography and social scope. Relationships are built on reciprocity and functional trust. Both place demands upon our limited time and cognitive capacities. As they are relative, we'll have the same number and ratio of strong and weak ties, notwithstanding the availability of new social networking tools. That said, our social networks can be more dynamic than in the past, which is particularly good news for entrepreneurs who live in a very dynamic world. (On the flip side, as noted above, we can screw up our relationships at an unprecedented pace, as well.)
As I noted in my comments to Ross's post, social networks convey social capital to the extent that they help you achieve your goals. Different goals call for different social networking strategies. And, they call for different tools. Today, there is no universal social networking tool. Even limited to the electronic world, I use the phone, email, IM, chat, weblogs, online forums, and web pages on a daily basis. I think the challenge is to understand our objectives and choose the right strategy and tool for the job.
