Incredible advancements in technology coupled with growing technological adoption rates render the discussion of social capital and technology timely and salient. Some suggest that technology might weaken our relationships while others suggest it creates and maintains ties in a fashion never before possible. In exploring the relationship between social capital and the Internet, we argue that Internet is a worldwide network of weak ties which facilitate the sharing of novel information between groups and that the Internet and Social Capital are not at odds.
In his seminal work “The Strength of Weak Ties,” Granovetter (1973), asserts that interpersonal ties create a macro-micro link between small-scale interaction and large-scale patterns of political and community organization. Granovetter (1973) defines the strength of an interpersonal tie as “the amount of time, the emotional intensity, the intimacy, and the reciprocal services which characterize the tie” (p. 1361) and characterizes ties as strong, weak, or absent. The diagram below represents the ties between several individuals. Person A and Person B are strongly connected; therefore, their networks and the information they share should be very similar. However, these strong ties are generally closed systems without new information and, similar to biological frameworks, when an ecosystem goes without resources from the environment, it will not grow.
Granovetter (1973) suggests that we need to rely on our weak ties for outside resources. Therefore, a weak tie (Person C), with weak and strong ties to others, can introduce new and unique information into the closed system of Person A and Person B. Although this discussion is an incredibly simplified explanation of both Graovetter’s (1973) work and network analysis in general, the impact technology has on the communication of information is still evident.
Accepting the assertion that internet technologies create a worldwide network of weak ties has incredible implications. For the first time, our technological society has the ability to not only share information through our unprecedented amount of weak ties, but also to express ideas to strangers (to individuals in which a tie is previously nonexistent). For instance, Person A and Person B may be having a discussion on Twitter which Person C, D, and E stumble upon. By searching for key words that are of interest to them- potentially spreading the message in a more rapid, unpredictable pattern. The Internet has become a place of discourse in modern society but, many argue this has societal consequences.
In the early days of Internet accessibility to the general public, there were concerns that adaption of technology would result consequently recede from social involvement. For instance, Putnam (2000) in Bowling Alone discusses the concept of social capital (the networks of relationships based on cooperation, trust, and reciprocity). He argues that traditional mass media, because it is highly individualized and consumed in isolation, has contributed to the erosion of civic and community engagement that is integral to the development and maintenance of social capital. His argument is based on television usage; however, one can see how his arguments centering on television (i.e., individualized and isolated consumption) have application to internet usage. Yet, current data suggest the internet does not represent the decline social interaction. In a longitudinal study of internet usage, Katz, Rice, and Aspden (2001), found that internet use is associated with increased socialability, increased face-to-face meetings with friends, and not associated with a decrease in time spent with family and friends. These findings suggest individuals who use the Internet regularly are still interacting on a social level and that the use of Internet doesn’t mark the end of the relational ties. To the contrary, mediated communication might help us maintain our relationships near and far.
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