Digg and the Strength of Weak Ties

To begin our joint blog, my partner and I began looking for ties between articles, namely the Granovetter and Boyd articles. Facebook (and other networking sites), it seems, through helping us establish and maintain our weak ties allows us to build stronger communities. Granovetter claims that for a community to be strong such as in Boston's West End (a fragmented community of strong ties) versus Charlestown (a community connected through its weak ties), Charlestown turned out to be a much stronger community. Social networking sites allow you to maintain and keep weak and even absent ties. This could suggest that a community based on an online social network could wield more power than a strong real-life community. A good instance of the strength and power of online communities is the Digg communities reaction to the administrator taking down the copy-right-infringing code to crack HD DVDs encryption key. The entire community of weak and strong ties mobilized against the administrator forcing the administrators to reverse their position, stating ... "now, after seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you’ve made it clear. You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be."

The Digg scenario is a modern example of an online social network exibiting the same strength through weak ties that Grannovetter talks about in real life communities. If one takes the notion that weak ties make for a powerful community, then the prevelance of weak ties in online social networking must make for very strong communities indeed.

Adrik and Mark