The Emotional Strength of Weak Ties: Reevaluating Social Support Online

While many theorists have argued that weak ties facilitate online social support, strong evidence within these communities clearly show that the distinction between weak ties and strong ties should be reexamined. After a short expose on tie strength and online social support, we give an example of how this research has operationalized weak ties only in terms of one of Granovetter's four basic components of tie strength: frequency of interaction. Furthermore, our analysis provides counterexamples against frequency of interaction as a predictor of relational closeness. While we portray past research as confounding weak and strong ties, we go on to provide examples of emerging online social support between ties that are obviously weak ties. Finally, our study points to future directions of research on online social support.