We are inevitably living in a social networking environment with the establishment of numerous social networking sites. The most popular one for me is definitely Facebook. With the use of Facebook, I keep in touch with friends, even the ones we don’t know very much about them, communicate with friends, play games, make new contacts and promote my modeling job.
I have 442 friends in Facebook. However, there are some unknown friends. I don’t know even why they are accepted. It makes me confused that do I really have connection with all the friends. Let’s find out the answer with Friend Wheel.
Now, I can identify different kinds of friends. The different clusters that make up my network are basically my primary school classmates, secondary school classmates, associate degree classmates, university classmates, models, photographers and unknown “friends”. The ones whom I have strong ties are primary school classmates, secondary school classmates and university classmates. They are the active members on my wall. They post comments on my wall and comment on my photos and I also make comments back. People whom I know from my work and unknown friends have weak ties with me. I am also surprised to find out that who the connectors between different clusters are.
The people whom I have “strong weak ties” are models and photographers. Actually, I don’t always communicate with my model friends as with the active members on my Facebook as some of them are only “friends of friends” But I can know what job they are going to attend via “activities” and I can apply the job via them as well. Moreover, they also act as bridges between me and different photographers and model agencies. They may know some model agencies and photographers very well. Thus, they can refer jobs to me and I have a higher opportunity to win that job. If I know the model agencies in my own, they may not trust me as a stranger.
The “strong weak ties” is really useful in my modeling job hunting!
An intriguing analysis: it's interesting to see how you can make use of those "strong-weak" ties. I thought your description of "unknown friends" was intriguing as well - do you think the definition of friendship is changing with these social networking sites?
ReplyDeleteActually, people can add everyone as friends even they don't know each other in those social networking sites, the definition of friendship is definitely changing within these sites as we can “claim” to have many friends whom we never interact with. It’s not strange to have “unknown friends” in the friend list of Facebook. But it’s very strange to have “unknown friends” in real life. No one will regard a person, whom they never interact withas friend. Those social networking sites not only give a new definition of friends, but also enlarging our social network in a way that impossible to happen in the real life.
ReplyDeleteI think it's not important to define who are friends and who aren't in facebook, the most important thing is how to make good use of this social media. Real friends are always surrounding you, but won't be on internet only.
ReplyDelete