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

Hello Hans,

Thanks for the affirmation of the value of this little research project of mine.

Yes, the Internet + web 2.0 technologies definitely make the creation of weak ties much easier (either via community or social network). There are actually some social psychology theory that can explain why that is the case. This particular aspect has to do with a sense of safe distance. This is a topic that I promised that I will cover after I finish exploring the social anthropological roles of community and social network in human history.  See previous post when I talked about The Desire to Connect is a Basic Requirement to move through the 3 stages of relationship lifecycle.

I also like to take the opportunity here to address some of your question in email, so others can pitch in if they like.

Having been through so many discipline of science and research. I've come to the realization that reality is usually never as simple as any model that people can build or any theory that people can come up with. People can always build  models and hypothesize theories, but none will ever be complete. Good models/theories that tend to stay are those that can explain a lot with very few simle underlying principles. And great models and theories are those that have predictive power.

The key is to understand when will a theory/model work, and under what conditions will the theory/model break down. For example, Newton's law of motion works great on earth. But when you are traveling near light speed or near very massive objects that are millions times larger than the our sun, Newtonian Mechanics fails! And you need Einstein's Theory of Relativity to make sense of things. In the ultra-tiny regime, Newtonian Mechanics also fail, and Shroedinger, Dirac and other bright modern physicist develop Quantum Mechanics to deal with small particles like atoms, electrons, and other subatomic particles. There are so many more case that I can think of.

But to your point, social media is very new and many people are still exploring and testing their own hypothesis. We are all still learning. Lots of new theory will be proposed and refuted in this pre-paradigm era before the good/great one emerge and stay. So whether it is social objects, social network analysis (SNA), or dynamics network analysis (DNA), they all have their validity. None of them explains everything, but that doesn't mean the theory is bad. Some expains more, but that doesn't meant it's better either (if the theory is too complex).

Newtonian Mechanics, although incomplete, still governs all the civil/mechanical engineering that builds the building we live and work in, and the cars we drive every day. Relativity, although more complete is too complex that most people only use it when they have to. You get the idea, is the Occam's Razor, the simplest theory that explain the most.

With respect to DNA, not many people use it out there, because it is a more complex theory than SNA and SNA is already quite daunting for some people already. Since most data are stored by date, many people just apply SNA for a series of dates (e.g. daily, weekly or monthly). This method seem to fits better with the data architecture within most organization. I know LinkedIn uses SNA. But I am not sure if FB use SNA, although I'm quite certain that they are not using DNA. However, DNA is more powerful when you are looking at many years of network data all at once, rather than week by week or month after month. Researchers and scientists tend to do that lot more than enterprises, which focuses more on the daily, weekly, monthly operational metrics.

Alright, this reply is getting a bit long... But thank you for dropping by and commenting.