Friendship by Lydia Denworth

Author:Lydia Denworth
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2019-11-11T16:00:00+00:00

Most of us do not have only four friends. Those in our outer circles—and beyond—are an important part of our lives, too. Scientists approach the study of those people a little like they do the physics of a spider web. How are these networks built? What forces can they withstand? The web analogy breaks down, though, when it comes to purpose. Spiders build webs to catch prey. People build networks to thrive and connect.

Two essential ideas underlie social network analysis: connection and contagion. Who is connected to whom? Each individual is considered a node in a larger network. Remember the party game Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon in which you try to connect yourself to the actor within six steps? One of my sons was in preschool with a boy whose father was related to Kyra Sedgwick, who is married to . . . Kevin Bacon. Got it in five. That’s a network of sorts, though it won’t provide me any sustenance. I could also map my former journalism colleagues at their current jobs or the families whose children play basketball in Brooklyn. Contagion refers to what, if anything, flows across the network ties: job tips, germs, dollar bills, or the names of excellent basketball coaches. Connection and contagion equal the structure and function of a social network.

In 1938, what appears to be the very first map of social networks charted the friendships in one Vermont village (population: one thousand). It was created by social scientists from Bennington College mainly to show it was possible to depict what they called “the circulatory system” of a community, a phrase that nicely sums up how vital relationships are.33 In the published paper, relationships were drawn by hand, with individuals as circles, and arrows indicating friendships. Nearly every family in town (94 percent) participated. Socioeconomic status, occupation, family size, church and club membership, and favored reading material were all recorded, but what the researchers most wanted to know was who people said they liked. While there were limitations, they thought they created “a highly reliable account of the friendship nuclei . . . of this village.”

Members of the village cliques had similar levels of wealth and status—though there was a tendency to aim high in naming friends. The entire village fell, with some overlap, into “seven well-defined constellations plus a ring of isolated and semi-isolated individuals.” Each constellation centered on its most popular person. One chart, dubbed “the hub of the village,” consisted of well-off business and professional families. The matriarch at its center, the village’s “lady bountiful,” received an impressive seventeen nominations as “best friend.” (She named only two herself.) In other groups, merchants and their wives hung out together. Factory workers, many of them Catholic, formed a cohesive group around the wife of one of the skilled workmen. A woman who ran a boarding house was named as a friend by the wives of two farmers, a chauffeur, two salesmen, and a bank teller. Of the small group of unconnected residents,

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