A case study on personal social network in microblogging

Microblogging is a passive broadcast medium in the form of blogging. By publishing message independently and focusing on others´ message, people build new interpersonal social network. In Granovetter´s framework of strong tie and weak tie, different distances of relationship in reality would influence the efficiency of individual action. The paper analyzes the relationship among microbloggers by four dimensions including a linear combination of the amount of time, the emotional intensity, the intimacy, and the reciprocal. Furthermore the paper proposes three hypotheses: 1) Personal social network would get greatly extended by microblogging; 2) Personal strong ties in microblogging are not identical with his/her strong ties in reality. 3) Strong ties in microblogging would be beneficial to satisfy personal emotion need and information need. By doing case study on 2 microbloggers, the paper tests the three hypotheses and gives a short comment on the influence of microblogging on personal social network.