Social networks provide support in times of stress or illness; however, some
research finds that social networks are dependent on people’s ability to offer some-
thing in exchange, such as fun, excitement, or a sparkling personality. Therefore, they
tend to shrink precisely during the periods of stress and illness when they are needed
the most (Fisher, 1982). If you are sick for a few days, you may be mobbed by friends
armed with soup and get-well cards. But if your sickness lingers, you will gradually
find yourself more alone.
Networks exert an important influence on the most crucial aspects of our lives;
our membership in certain networks is often the vehicle by which we get established
in a new country or city, meet the person with whom we fall in love, or get a job.
Examine your own networks. There are your friends and relatives, your primary ties.
Then there are those people whom you actually know, but who are a little less close—
classmates and co-workers. These are your secondary ties. Together they form what
sociologist Mark Granovetter (1973, 1974) calls your “strong ties”—people who
actually know you. But your networks also include “weak ties”—people whom you
may not know personally, but perhaps you know ofthem, or they know ofyou. They
may have strong ties to one of your strong ties. By the time you would calculate your
strong and weak ties, the numbers might reach into the thousands.
Interestingly, it is not only your strong ties that most influence your life, but possi-
bly, centrally, your weak ties. Granovetter (1995) calls this “the strength of weak ties.”
While one might think strong interpersonal ties are more significant than weak ones
because close friends are more interested than acquaintances in helping us, this may not
be so, especially when what people need is information. Because our close friends tend
to move in the same circles that we do, the information they receive overlaps consider-
ably with what we already know. Acquaintances, by contrast, know people whom we
do not and thus receive more novel information. This is in part because acquaintances
are typically less similar to one another than close friends and in part because they spend
less time together. Moving in different circles from ours, they connect us to a wider world.
For example, let’s take two life-changing decisions: finding a romantic partner with
whom you fall in love and getting a job. How do people typically find the person they
expect to spend the rest of their lives with? Most often it is through being
“fixed up” with a “friend of a friend”—a network in action. If that date
works out, you are likely to thank your friend for the networking on your
behalf; if it doesn’t work out... well, let’s just hope it works out. When
initiating a job search, you won’t typically find a job from a close friend
or family member but again through a friend of a friend. This is why job
search consultants stress the importance of networking.
Some new Internet companies, such as Match.com and Monster.com,
seek to expand the range of your networking for jobs and romantic part-
ners. In fact, young people have become network experts, having devised
new and innovative ways to expand and manage their networks through interfaces with
technology. Friendster, Facebook, MySpace, and other networks utilize the ever-expand-
ing web of the Internet to create new network configurations with people whom you
will never meet but rather get to know because they are a friend of a friend of a friend
of a friend of—your friend.
Networks and Globalization
New technology, such as text messaging, satellite television, and especially the Inter-
net, has allowed us to break the bounds of geography and form groups made up of
people from all over the world. The Internet is especially important for people with
very specialized interests or very uncommon beliefs: You are unlikely to find many
SOCIAL NETWORKS 89MySpace has more than 110 million users.
If MySpace were a country, it would be the
eleventh largest country in the world, just
behind Japan and ahead of Mexico.Didyouknow