Washington Post Article

American Sociological Review Article

The first attached link is to an article from the Washington Post about increasing social isolation in American society. The second attached is a study referenced in the article. The study, conducted using research data collected from 1985, and a similar study conducted in 2004, concluded that the modal number of strong ties has gone from 3 to 0 in the intervening years. (Note: Within the article, strong ties are qualified as social ties in which important personal issues could be discussed freely.) Along with the general decrease in number of strong social ties, the strong ties appear to be bunching together more tightly – more often seen is a blood relation/spouse as strong tie, rather than a friend, or a co-member of a shared group/organization.

As social conditions change and communications technology improves, it would be expected that the number of social opportunities would increase, rather than decrease. Along with improved communication and social opportunities, comes the expectation that stronger friendships would be the result of extended opportunities. However, this appears to be the opposite of the case – twenty-five percent of the respondents in the 2004 survey appear to have no close ties, up from ten percent in 1984.

There are many suggested reasons for this discrepancy, but I will limit the scope of this post to one of the major reasons mentioned in the study. One of the suggested reasons for the difference between the 1985 survey and the 2004 survey is a changing social landscape in American society. Location, recreation, work habits, and most importantly, communication habits have changed, and the network linkages have changed along with them. With computerized social networks and networking becoming commonplace to bridge distances, it begins to change the dynamics of social interaction. Extremely large social networks are created, such as Facebook. However, once you create a very large network, the strength of the ties contained within the network weakens. As described in The Tipping Point (Malcolm Gladwell, p.175-181), social networks eventually reach a critical mass, past which strong social linkages become much less common. Basically, the ability to maintain deep relationships becomes that much more difficult with a large amount of fundamentally different relationships and limited resources to maintain the relationships. The overload means that most of the ties created will be weak social ties, sacrificing local stability, and a “social support base” for a more free flow of information between nodes. This inherent trade-off between network size, structure and information flow is something that should be considered when examining both current social networks, and the dynamics of social networking.