Who Cares About Your Big Day? Impact of Life Events on Dynamics of Social Networks

摘要

With online social networking having revolutionized the way in which individuals communicateand interact with each other, there is heightened research interest in the dynamics of socialnetworks. However, there is a gap in this stream of literature in addressing the key question ofthe impact of major life events, such as getting married or graduating, on network evolution. Weseek to answer the fundamental question “Do major life events play a role in altering thestructural properties of an individual’s activity network?” Consistent with prior studies on theevolution of individuals’ social networks, we specifically focus on two key attributes of anindividual’s network – degree of ties and extent of relational embeddedness. We hypothesizedthat the dissemination of information on major life events changed network structure by: a)increasing the level of communication activity; b) reinforcing or strengthening of existingrelationships. We tested our hypotheses by longitudinally analyzing the network activities of15,276 users of a social network affiliated with a major US university. We found that the degreeof ties or the level of activity that a user engaged in increased significantly following a major lifeevent. Interestingly, we also found that the broadcast of major life events primarily served torevive dormant ties but not the formation of new ties.