Strength of Weak Ties

The concept of the “strength of weak ties” was first proposed and developed by Mark Granovetter in a 1973 article of the same title. The argument is that while one might think strong interpersonal ties are more significant than weak for most purposes, this may not be so 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 considerably with what we already know. Acquaintances, by contrast, know people that 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, ...