Tangential to that last post on social capital, I wanted to share something else I learned from my social networking class. For our final paper and presentation, we were asked to keep a social network site diary–recording which sites we used, how often, and how. Yes, this was a graduate-level course.
I didn’t learn any great truths about my social network site usage (except that in comparison to the rest of the class, my paltry list of 164 Facebook friends is shamefully low), but I did start to wonder: in this world of social media, does the number of ways I am connected to a person have any correlation to the strength of our relationship? In other words, would someone be able to predict who my closest friends are by seeing how many times I’m connected to them online?
First, just because it’s pretty, here’s a look at how long I’ve been involved in various social network sites. There’s some debate as to what the definition of a “social network site” (SNS) is, but lets just say these are the ones I define as an SNS.
Pretty, no? Next I wondered how many “friends” I had on each site. Not surprisingly, Facebook outstrips all the rest. Surprisingly, I used to be a pretty big deal on LiveJournal. No, I’m not linking you to my old LiveJournal blog. It’s full of post-teenage angst and emoticons and early-aughts song lyrics.
Yes, quite. Finally, I gathered an absolute list of all my connections across all of the sites I currently interact with (nixing ye olde LJ), and ranked them by how many times I was connected to each person through social media.
Here’s where I found my answer: will the people with the highest number of connections be my strongest ties, my closest friends and relatives? Well, no. Although Fiance is the winner at 8 connections, it was not a hard and fast rule that a person in the “5 connections” group was a closer friend than someone in the “4 connections” group. It does seem that, generally, people in the higher connection groups are stronger ties than, say, people in the “1 connection” group. I probably don’t feel close enough to those people to seek them out (stalk them? creep them out?) on every social network site I find. But we all have friends who are anti-social media or nonchalant-social media, and whether they’re just on Facebook or nowhere to be found on the Internet does not mean we aren’t still friends. It just means that all my other cool online friends will never know they exist. And they won’t be able to see what I’m doing, thinking, reading, watching, smelling and thinking about doing or smelling at any given minute.
Although it doesn’t tie into the story, here is a bonus diagram showing the overlap between the three SNS within which I have the most connections. It is my favorite (don’t tell those guys up there).
Groovy. I tried to do it with all 9 SNSs but it was getting out of control. Circles wouldn’t have cut it. There would have to be some weird doughnut and giraffe shapes in there.
Do the strength of your offline ties match up with your online ties? One argument for calling these “social network sites” rather than networking is because these sites are first and foremost a representation of your already-existing social network, rather than a place to create new connections. What do you think?
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