The Networked Self

Evaluating how networked I am I decided to evaluate my physical personal relationships vs my online network.

My strong ties tend to all be physical. Of course, I am friends with them on the accompanying social media accounts, but I noticed I don’t have a strong tie to a person online whom I haven’t met in person yet. Beyond my family, the only strong ties I have are my boyfriend and my friends. I don’t have many friends, I have about 6 friends whom I am extremely close with. I’ve never worked long enough to develop close ties with any co-workers and I am obviously very intimate with my boyfriend.

It really feels like a start contrast to my weak ties which the majority are social media connections. The people who you message and converse with on Twitter from time to time and connections on LinkedIn who are following your career journey and vice versa. I find it astonishing that I have 295 LinkedIn connections, 631 Facebook friends, 546 Twitter followers and 357 Instagram followers (Even for a private Instagram account). I don’t like the cause and effect of it that it leaves the impression that people think I’m much more popular than I am.  What is happening is that my close-knit friends are seeing me have occasional online interaction with these connections and since there’s a big volume of them, I’m always engaging with someone. It makes the impression I’m too busy to hang out with my close-knit friends and they reach out to you less and less.

The trouble continues as many of us don’t want to public admit that all these connections we curated aren’t strong ties. While engagement between us on social media can give that impression, they are not as satisfying as sitting down for dinner with a close friend. I would take much more of that any day over an extra Twitter follower.