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How COVID-19 Wrecked Our “Weak Ties”
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Earlier this week, the comedian Sean Bair Flannery tweeted something that neatly described a side-effect of the pandemic.
As he wrote …
This clearly resonated with people; there were 38,000 retweets only a day later. (Here’s a link to his original tweet.)
Several of the replies coined some fun terms for these “incidental buddies” that Flannery talked about; one of my favorites was this one …
“Satellite friends” is a great metaphor!
But it turns out there’s also a phrase from sociology that describes precisely these sorts of peripheral people:
They’re “weak ties”.
And it turns out they play surprisingly important roles in our lives.
The theory of “weak ties” is usually attributed to the sociologist Mark Granovetter. Back in the early 1970s, he asked an interesting question: When people find a new job, how do they hear about it?
After interviewing a few hundred job-seekers, Granovetter realized there were three main ways people found jobs. Some would do it formally, by responding to job advertisements. Others would cold-call companies to see if there were any openings. And a final group would use personal contacts — asking folks in their social network if they knew of any good jobs.
When Granovetter analyzed the responses, two things jumped out at him. The first was that the absolute best jobs came from asking personal contacts. When people found a job by networking with their contacts, those jobs were more likely to be a) high paying and b) personally fulfilling than the ones found by advertisements or cold-calling.
