From Weak Ties to Strong Ties: Community vs. Social Networks 3

Hello Mark and Mike

Thank you for the comments.

It is defnitely true that communities are dynamic entities, so are social networks. Ties form, grow in community, and then weaken over time when members leave the communities. It is the natural course of things. That is why there need to be 3 stages of relationships as mentioned in my earlier post. So weak ties or strong ties are definitely based on time and context.

I hope I didn't give the impression that they are static. Thank you for pointing this out. Good observation.  :)

However, nearly all the social network analysis (SNA) out there do not take into account of time. In fact, SNA inherently eliminated the temporal dimension (essentially freezing time) for simplicity. But there is another field called Dynamic Network Analysis (DNA) that takes into account of the temporal evolution of the network. DNA essentially combines SNA with time series analysis from statistics, and it is much more powerful than SNA.

You guys are way ahead of the crowd. Next time, I will discuss precisely what happen when you leave a community due to change interest, moving on to different stages of life, job changes etc. That should finalize this introductory mini-series that explore the anthropological roles of communities vs social networks.

Evolution of tie strength is a bit tricky, but we can certainly do it, since we compute the tie strength between every interacting pair of users in our community. Will try to put some analysis together and see if the results are interesting enough to merit a blog post. :)