Bridge over Troubled Water
Part 1 of a episode about social capital
Back when I was first dipping my toes into network studies, part of what appealed to me about that area of inquiry was its counter-intuitiveness. The “small world” theory of social distance, for example, is based in part on the idea that we’re no more than six degrees of separation from the vast majority of other people, which still seems pretty difficult to believe1. The early days of social network analysis often demonstrated that, in large, top-down organizations, information flowed much differently from how the organizational chart imagined. Innovation often came not from centralized leadership but from the edges, for instance.
The origin story of the Post-It note is one classic example of this. The chemist who developed the adhesive (Spencer Silver) was specifically tasked by 3M to do the opposite (“It was part of my job as a researcher to develop new adhesives, and at that time we wanted to develop bigger, stronger, tougher adhesives. This was none of those.”). The other co-inventor, Art Fry, was looking for a better bookmarking solution for his church hymnal, and just happened to hear about Silver’s “unnovation” at a company event. To his credit, Fry made the link between Silver’s adhesive and the problem he wanted to solve. But even after the two connected, it took years of internal, local advocacy before 3M was willing to sell and market Post-It notes. We may take Post-Its for granted today (3M sells tens of billions per year), but it took the company more than a decade to understand what they were sitting on.
Right around the time that Fry was approaching Silver with the idea to collaborate on the Post-It note, a sociologist named Mark Granovetter published an essay that became a canonical text for folks studying networks, “The Strength of Weak Ties.” (That version may be paywalled, but here’s a direct link to the PDF if you’re interested.) Granovetter begins his essay with the observation that “A fundamental weakness of current sociological theory is that it does not relate micro-level interactions to macro-level patters in any convincing way.” (1360) If you’ve been paying attention to my writing here for any amount of time, you’ll recognize this immediately as a question of scale, one of my deep preoccupations. Synecdoche is the rhetorical trope that asserts a link between (micro) part and (macro) whole; Granovetter’s essay makes the case for studying how that link works, how micro-level interactions aggregate to form larger-scale patterns.
The “weak ties” that he mentions in his title, then, represent one of those ideas that feels counter-intuitive on the surface. He defines the “strength” of a tie—an interpersonal connection—according to “the amount of time, the emotional intensity, the intimacy, and the reciprocal services which characterize” it. He brackets off any exploration (or elaboration) of this—after all, we engage in this sort of calculus ourselves on a regular basis, when we think about whether we’d call someone a friend, colleague, acquaintance, or stranger.
Socially, our strong ties carry a lot of redundancy: we are likely to know the same people, enjoy the same things, maybe even share the same beliefs, as the people to whom we’re the closest. And those commonalities will themselves have an impact on the folks we develop strong ties with. “Thus, if strong ties connect A to B and A to C, both C and B, being similar to A, are probably similar to one another, increasing the likelihood of a friendship once they have met.” (1362). It sounds circular to say this, I know, but the more tightly-knit a given group of people is, the more likely it is that their knowledge overlaps. That sharing of information is part of what makes them tightly-knit, after all.
Granovetter’s point is that, for certain activities, weak ties are actually more useful to us than strong ones. He looks in particular at employment mobility, the possibility of changing jobs and the question of how people learn about such opportunities. While employees at a given company are more likely to hear about internal openings, information about external opportunities are almost certainly much rarer (and perhaps even discouraged). In such a case, when we’re looking to move, our weak ties are actually more valuable, because they have access to information that we do not. Social groups tend to be self-reinforcing—we share a lot of the same information channels as our closest friends—and so “weak-tie” relationships often provide us with “new” information, which can facilitate life-changes. He also notes that, “from a more macroscopic vantage, weak ties play a role in effecting social cohesion” (1373). Weak ties keep us from retreating to our own bubbles; they give us access to broader communities, more diverse viewpoints, etc.
Only the Lonely
I’ve gone on at length about Granovetter because, in many ways, his essay presaged the work of Robert Putnam, whose book Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community is nearing its 25-year anniversary.2 The New York Times recently featured an interview with Putnam, and coming across it triggered memories for me of my work in network studies. Although there are a few others, I suspect that Putnam’s phrase is perhaps the most famous bit of culture to emerge from network studies (alongside Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon). “Bowling alone” is media shorthand for the diagnosis that the book makes and it’s sufficiently well-known that I suspect many of the folks who “cite” it haven’t actually read it.3
You can see the glimmers of the Bowling Alone thesis in Granovetter’s work, and specifically in his discussion of social cohesion. Ultimately, he’s more intent on thinking about the differences between strong and weak ties, though he does include “absent” in places as a third category. And obviously, the trends that Putnam identifies in Bowling Alone, despite the attention they received at the time (and since), have continued to worsen. In many ways, I suspect, the internet played a substantial role in that fact (Putnam revised his book in 2020 to celebrate its anniversary and to update his take in light of social media4), but Putnam’s analysis stretches much further back than that. While we might make the case that social media has accelerated the trend of civic disengagement, the trend itself dates back to the 1950s, according to Putnam.
Loneliness is big news these days. It’s only been a bit over a year since the Surgeon General used the language of epidemiology (too soon?) to warn the country of our “Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation.” More recently, there’s been a lot of attention on one of that report’s recommendations, which calls for us to “reform digital environments.” Writing over at Jonathan Haidt’s After Babel, Freya India talks about how “Friendship has become another joyless thing to do on a screen.” Among other things, she notes that 3/4 of children in the UK “spend less time outside than prison inmates.” Further on in her essay, she offers the depressing idea that friendship has just become “another thing to be performed and marketed and publicly measured.”
And so, many of us don’t have friends anymore; we have followers. We don’t deeply care about each other’s lives; we consume them as content. We don’t have people we can be vulnerable with; we have people who view our Stories. It’s hard to tell if we have loyalty, or just people hoping we like their photo back. Nowadays we meet someone new and immediately exchange socials and end up committing to scrolling and skipping through each other’s lives, forever. Friends are for keeping up Snapstreaks. Friends are for forwarding each other memes that our algorithms sent us first. Friends are numbers.
She mentions other factors beyond the internet, including the decline of so-called third places5, which happened to coincide for me with Drew Austin’s recent piece on Starbucks. “Starbucks didn’t invent the third place,” Austin explains, “but did make it fungible and scalable, thereby restoring it to an environment from which it had receded.” In recent years, however, Starbucks has progressively enshittified its identity, to the point where more than 70% of its revenue comes from mobile and drive-thru ordering. Their spaces are now actively designed to eject customers, to turn them over. “Or, as Nolan Gray put it, Starbucks ‘went from classic ‘third place’ to the cutting edge of hostile architecture in a span of like a decade.’” Rather than actually offering third places, Starbucks is following the model (pioneered by private equity) of evacuating its material value while gaslighting us about the virtues of the brand. “Starbucks says that it’s evolving its third place model from being a physical store to a feeling,” according to a CNN article on this shift.
I’ve drifted a bit from the original vector of this post, but perhaps not entirely. Part of Granovetter’s motive for writing about social ties was his interest in examining sociality across scales, in understanding how the micro and macro connect. India’s title is “Aren’t You Lonely?” and the Putnam interview is called “Robert Putnam Knows Why You’re Lonely,” but all of these discussions are informed by the underlying assumption that our social lives aren’t simply a matter of personal effort. Social ties take place against and within the infrastructure that we provide for them. And Putnam’s argument, as relevant now as it was 20+ years ago, is that our social infrastructure has been in decline. India (and Haidt’s crew more generally) argues that, far from rejuvenating it, the internet has accelerated its decay: “when phone-based social media platforms emerged in the early 2010s they did not just take time away from real-life friendships. They redefined friendship for an entire generation. They gutted it.” Much like Starbucks CEO Laxman Narasimhan’s gamble that all we really need is the afterglow of the coffeeshop experience in order to keep buying their product (itself originally priced to support that experience), social media offers us the algorithmically generated simulation of social ties.
A Bridge to Nowhere
There is an actual bridge in the US called the Bridge to Nowhere, built in the San Gabriel Mountains in California. (“The East Fork Road project was abandoned as a result of the floods, leaving the bridge forever stranded in the middle of what is now the Sheep Mountain Wilderness.”) But my first encounter with the phrase came in a political context6, as a critique of pork barrel legislative appropriations.
I went into this post thinking about bridges specifically, because although Granovetter mentions the fact that weak ties allow members of a given social cluster a “bridge” that helps them connect with other groups of people, the idea of bridging takes on a much more central role in Putnam’s work, which lays out two forms of what he calls “social capital,” bonding and bridging7:
Ties that link you to people like yourself are called bonding social capital. So, my ties to other elderly, male, white, Jewish professors — that’s my bonding social capital. And bridging social capital is your ties to people unlike yourself. So my ties to people of a different generation or a different gender or a different religion or a different politic or whatever, that’s my bridging social capital.
I’ve got more to say about bonding and bridging, but I’m going to save that for a sequel, I think. If there’s one weakness to this metaphor, though, it’s that framing this phenomenon in terms of capital raises the question of how we describe it. And I think this excerpt from Putnam demonstrates it perfectly, as he characterizes these connections as “my…capital.”
There’s a sense in which I get what he’s talking about. I actively try to include and incorporate ideas in my writing here that I would characterize as “bridging.” Nearly all of the books that I’ve reviewed in the past year or so come from disciplines other than my own—I get a little tired of apologizing for my lack of expertise. When it comes to reading matter, both in terms of newsletters and books, I’d describe my tastes as aggressively bridgey. And it is in that sense that I feel comfortable talking about bridging social capital. But those aren’t ties in the way that Granovetter means, they’re not bidirectional. And I’m a little leery of counting this or that friendship (or even mere acquaintanceship) as part of my capital in any meaningful way. For me, that begins to feel a lot like the situation that India describes. (If I had a clever joke to make here about needing to diversify our portfolios, I would.)
One of the ways that the social media internet has helped to accelerate the decay of our social infrastructure is precisely by interposing almost economic metrics into our relationships. How many people read, liked, or commented upon this post? How many friends, followers, or subscribers do I have? How big is my audience? The parasociality of social media is literally a bridge to nowhere; it looks like a bridge from the perspective of the person doing the following, reading, watching, liking, subscribing, but is just noise from the other end. The screens that separate us are only getting thicker and more expensive, even as the corporations that own them pretend the opposite. Like the contemporary vintage of Starbucks, they’ll sell us the feeling of social capital (and the analytics to “prove” it), but when it comes down to it, most of what they provide to us is merely clickbait.
I have to say that I didn’t anticipate ending up here when I started this post. Seriously. 2500 words in, and I haven’t even gotten to the original reason why I titled the post the way I did. But don’t worry. I will ease your mind. More soon.
And to be fair, the “six degrees” part of it is kind of an urban myth. But the broader point, that we’re far more interconnected socially than geographically, remains one of those counter-intuitive notions that appeal to me. But there are spaces where the idea still holds—academic disciplines, for instance, are particularly “small worlds.”
The book elaborated upon Putnam’s 1995 article, “Bowling Alone: America's Declining Social Capital.”
My own copy is almost certainly boxed up somewhere, and it’s been many years since I cracked it.
A review at Jacobin described his new afterword as “melancholic,” explaining that, according to Putnam, “there was no “correlation between internet usage and civic engagement,” while “cyberbalkanization” and not “digital democracy” was the future. The stock of “social capital” had not been replenished.”
Coined by Roy Oldenburg in 1989, third places are “social settings other than home and work (the first and second places), such as cafes and bars and community centers.”
In what will almost certainly be the only time this will ever happen, I feel obligated to mention Sarah Palin, whose “bridge to nowhere” comment gave this metaphor its 15 minutes of viral fame back in the mid-2000s. In an ironic pivot of near-Vancean proportions, she campaigned for governor on support for the bridge, and then after Congress cut most of the funding, she publicly came out against it and used what money they’d received for other projects, and finally pretended as a VP candidate that she’d opposed it all along. We’ve forgotten, but the good folks of Alaska, it seems, did not.
I do take some issue with the choice to frame this phenomenon in economic terms (“social capital”). As I thought about it, though, there was some interesting resonance for me with Ashby’s law of requisite variety, which I talked about in the context of Davies’ book.