Early Morning Reading: The Rise of the Creative Class. Mostly useful reading.
"The key to understanding these changes lies in the idea of weak ties. Putnam and other social capital theorists favor ‘strong ties.’ These are the kinds of relationships we tend to have with family members, close friends and longtime neighbors or coworkers. They tend to be ties of long duration, marked by trust and reciprocity in multiple areas of life. When you have strong ties with someone, you are likely to know one another’s personal affairs and do things like trade visits, run errands, and do favors for one another. Practically all of us have at least a few such relationships. According to sociologists who study networks, most people have and can manage between five and ten strong-tie relationships. Their advantages are obvious. You have friends you can confide in, a neighbor who watches your house while you’re away, perhaps the uncle who gets you a job.
But weak ties are often more important. The modern theory of the ‘strength of weak ties’ comes from the sociologist Mark Granovetter’s classic research on how people find jobs. Granovetter found that weak ties matter more to people than strong ones in finding work. Other research on social networks has shown that weak ties are the key mechanism for mobilizing resources, ideas, and information, whether for finding a job, solving a problem, launching a new product or establishing a new enterprise. A key reason that weak ties are important is that we can manage many more of them. Strong ties, by their nature, consume much more of our time and energy. Weak ties require less investment and we can use them more opportunistically. Weak ties are critical to the creative environment of a city or region because they allow for rapid entry of new people and rapid absorption of new ideas and are thus critical to the creative process.
I am not advocating that we adopt lives composed entirely of weak ties. That would be a lonely and shallow life indeed, and it is the very fate that Putnam fears we all face. But most Creative Class people that I’ve met and studied do not aspire to such a life and don’t’ seem to be falling into it. Most maintain a core of strong ties. They have significant others; they have close friends; they call mom. But their lives are not dominated or dictated by strong ties to the extent that many lives were in the past. In a classical social capital community, a relatively small and dense network of strong ties would dominate every aspect of your life, from its day-to-day content to its long-term trajectory. You would hang out mostly with people you knew well and who would shape your career, tastes and personal life according to their values. … Weak ties allow us to mobilize more resources and more possibilities for ourselves and others, and expose us to novel ideas that are the source of creativity."
Good stuff. I can generally handle about ten strong ties and hundreds of weak ties. Given my calendar and existing commitments, problems arise when weak ties wish to become stronger.
* * *
Still Rising: : 152,448 people have now viewed the first Ch9 Vista Sounds video. Robert has now sailed past IainMc and BillG in terms of number of views.
* * *
More news since my last posting: Night Wall will become a DVD with the next reprinting according to a quick mail from Duncan. This means there is some voice-over work to complete this weekend!
* * *
Little Jewels Update: Also, it appears that there is rising interest from the Island in a sort of collaborative reunion via an 'amuse bouche's' or 'spacers' project between certain co-inventors of ambient music. More on this as it unfolds across 2006.
* * *
Airport Exercise update: David LaVallee dropped off edit V3 in a surprise walk-by visit. It's getting good!
* * *
Recent Comments