A recent article in The Washington Post entitled In High-Tech World, Access To Students Still Difficult discusses the idea that technological progress often hinders college officials’ ability to communicate quickly and effectively with the school’s students, especially in emergency situations.  Students are adopting more and more modes of communication, but there is no standard, reliable method of communication that administrators can use to reach its students.  Email is now ubiquitous, but students often ignore messages or do not receive them at all due to the limited capacity of their Inbox.  Furthermore, students are shifting away from email in favor of social networking sites such as Facebook or MySpace. 

Although most students these days carry cell phones on them, their cell phone numbers are dynamic, changing much more often than a landline phone number would. Landline phones, of course, are nearly obsolete when it comes to students on college campuses.  The article describes the efforts that administrators at some colleges are implementing in an effort to keep up with technology and stay connected with their students. These efforts include creating a web portal that each student can customize to integrates all of the information that he or she feels is important. Helping students integrate many communication channels together seems to be the best way for administrators to maintain ties with its students.

This article applies to our discussion of the strength of ties between entities.  As advancing technology continues to reshape the methods and the number of ways in which students communicate, the strength of the communication links to which school officials and administrators have with the students tends to diminish. Although the various modes of communication that today’s students have likely increases the number of ties that a given student has, this expansion weakens existing links, especially if the existing ties are not maintained through the same mode of communication as the new links.  By integrating modes of communication, administrators, are trying to counter this effect of diminishing ties, since ties made through these integrated channels would not conflict with each other as much as ties made through distinct channels.