Week 6 Round: Map your own weak ties

An inward Round. You draw your own network, find where each tie was made, and discover how many came from rooms you no longer enter.

8 April 2027

No site visit. Bring a large sheet of paper.

List twenty people. Not your twenty closest — twenty you have spoken to in the last year, deliberately including the ones you would not call friends. The person at the desk near yours. Someone from a group chat. A neighbour.

Annotate frequency honestly. Weekly, monthly, a few times a year. Use your messages to check rather than your impression, because your impression is generous about people you like.

Then the important column: where was this tie made? Name the actual setting. School. A job. A gym. A game. A pub. A course. A party at somebody’s house. “Online” is not an answer — which room, which server, which thread.

Now count the settings you still go to. This is the number the Round is built around, and for most people it is small. You will find a cluster of ties that all came from one place, and a good chance that place is one you left.

One concrete case. Find something that actually reached you — a job, a flat, a diagnosis, a band, a person — through somebody in the outer ring. Write down the chain. Granovetter’s claim is a claim about structure, and a single traced chain is how it stops being abstract.

Bring the sheet. We compare the shape of the maps, and the shapes differ by more than the number of people on them.