We have family. We meet friends. We talk to other people. We argue and make progress with coworkers. Those are part of human lives. By interacting with other people like this, a person not only goes through socialization but also becomes a society member. Socialization is the process of both finding one’s identity and learning social norms. It can be learned from family, school, friends, company and anywhere people gather. Through this whole socialization process, you would make friends as well as some acquaintances.
The older you are, the more people you would meet generally. It is because the number of groups you’ve passed through is increasing. For example, when you were a baby, you lived in your parents’ cradle and met only a few close relatives. However, from school age, you’ve met lots of friends, teachers, professors and some staffs. After you graduate, there are numerous chances to meet diverse people such as fellows, marriage partner, club members and so on. In this reason, the number of relationship is being accumulated.
Since a person’s capacity to maintain stable relationship is limited due to practical reason, it is hard to keep in touch with your all acquaintances you have ever met. However, thanks to social network platforms, it is available to interact with other people easily. By simply uploading your recent picture and comment on your friends’ posts, you are able to maintain your relationships. Furthermore, chatting apps based on wireless internet environment make us communicate more easily and fast.
Despite of these conveniences, people are getting sick and tired of maintaining relationships. Several people no more want to make active communication, so that they return to their close relations. This tendency is called Social Minimalism. It is recent phenomenon and there are several reasons why people started minimizing social interaction.
Firstly, Social minimalists want to spend time alone to reduce stress. Whether it is cognitive or not, it is impossible to avoid confronting emotionally stressful situation during life time. Since human life is full of social interaction, you might get hurt sometimes. In addition, they deny wearing a persona, which is pretending to be other person. To being shown cool, you would try to act like popular star, even though it doesn’t fit to you. Secondly, after realizing that comparing their life with others’ makes them unhappy, social minimalists tend to quit communicating on the internet. As much as giving up the advantages of internet service, they have no choice but interacting less than before. Lastly, it is because simply they don’t want to waste money and time. Your money and time is limited, thus, distributing them wisely is up to you. Social minimalists tend to focus on a few of sincere relationship such as family and intimate friends instead of spending meaningless time to keep weak connections.
But minimizing your connection is abandoning network advantages. Here are basic network advantages: Information benefit, control benefit, brokerage benefit. Although complicate conditions should be satisfied to get these benefits, concepts are not that difficult to understand. Let’s see how to analyze human network. First, you should understand what dots and lines mean. Dot or nodes represent individuals and lines mean interactions of the dots. Figure_1, dot A and dot B are connected with a line. It means that A, B are friends each other. Once you draw human network following this rule, you can find the form of relationships within a group. Figure_2 is an example of social network map.
Figure_1
Figure_2
Secondly, count how many dots are connected to a single dot. The more lines a dot has, the more centrality is given to a person. Since the person knows lots of people, he or she is more likely to have information benefit. Furthermore, if a person connects redundant groups like figure_3, the node P has brokerage benefit. Without P, nothing can be flowed among the groups. Lastly, consider each tie’s strength. The closer two relationships are, the stronger of tie strength. According to a paper, it is said that weak ties can facilitate an individual’s creativity. Finding that the number of weak ties and background heterogeneity are statistically significant, the researcher proves that network diversity positively affects an individual’s creativity.
Figure_3
To sum up, I’ve shown you two types of social relations so far. Both cases have their own advantages and costs. Social minimalists rarely get stress from others, because they solely focus on their close relations. At the same time, they have little chances of getting fresh information. On the other hand, those who are willing to meet various people have several network benefits. Instead, they need to pay much attention to maintain vast range of human network. What I want to say here is that whichever you choose either social minimalist or socially active person, nobody can say that a certain type is superior to another. Just have in mind the two types of relational perspectives, and find which one is best fit to you.
References:
Jill E. Perry-Smith, 2006, Social Yet Creative: The Role of Social Relationships in Facilitating Individual Creativity, The Academy of Management Journal Vol.40: pp. 85-101
Analyzing Social Networks - Stephen P Borgatti, Martin G Everett, Jeffrey C Johnson
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