“weak link” ontology

Actually, it only occurs to me now that what ANT doesn’t really account for is “the strength of weak links.” The study has been around for decades and is well-known to sociologists, but I first learned of it quite late, while reading Bogost’s Unit Operations a few years ago.

It’s an intriguing idea. Some of our links with people are very close, and these provide emotional support and various other forms of intimacy. Some of our links with other people are weaker, but these “weaker” links are often far more likely to yield practical benefits. You are more likely to find a job, lover, or other benefit through the weaker links.

This makes sense, if you think about it. You and your close friends probably have many of the same interests and desires. They’re already standing very much in the same place in the world as you are, and hence may not be able to offer anything new.

The same is true, of course, of people with whom you have no link at all. I might someday have a good random human interaction with a rice farmer in Tamil Nadu, but for now we really have no link at all and aren’t going to be able to do much for each other.

But what about someone who is sort of linked to me? These are usually the people with whom exciting things happen. You have some sort of partial overlap with them (say, “Latour’s philosophy,” in my case) and on that basis they invite you somewhere, recommend you to someone else, etc., and this is how new things happen in your life. The non-links obviously make nothing happen, and the close links provide deep friendship and personal satisfaction, but it’s the weak links that really move you from one point in life to the next. (Some of these later develop into close links, of course, and then the nature of the relationship changes.)

Enough of that summary, because if you’re interested you can find good articles on the web that describe the sociological phenomenon much better than I just did.

The point here is… I’m not sure that Latour’s model adequately allows for weak links, whereas mine does. For Latour it generally seems to be the case that stronger links always strengthens the actor who has them, whereas the “weak link” case shows that you or any other object can in many ways be stronger by withholding something of yourself from the link. Or rather, since it is not usually a deliberate conscious choice, by interacting with people or other objects with which you have some connection, but not a close one.

This also links up with one of the more important realizations I’ve had in the past couple of years about people… Namely, it’s not always a good idea to get closer to people, even if you like them a great deal. There’s a natural tendency to think “I really like this person, and want to spend more and more time with them and get to know them even better.” But then you get closer and negative things start happening. Every person is best known at a certain distance, and there’s nothing wrong if you function best with that person in not-too-close proximity. But I can’t think of any easy principles for knowing when to get closer and when not. We all do this on a trial-and-error basis, and often enough the error predominates. I can think of 3 or 4 acquaintances (not readers of this blog) who I liked a lot better several years ago than I do today, and it’s precisely because we had more casual ties in the past, and closer ties soured the associations in various ways. And once you’ve had the closer ties, you can’t really distance them again without pissing them off or causing suspicion, so it’s really over once you’ve gone too far.