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Bridging is not what makes the world small

The question which presents itself is how important bridging ties are for connecting together a social network. In this analysis I look at a large Facebook network in New Orleans, and answer the question of how small-world the network is by starting with a single node and taking larger and larger neighborhoods (friend of friend of…), until the neighborhood is the entire network of 63,731 nodes. We do this again and again, plotting the results from a sample of 500 nodes.

We then conduct the same analysis on the same network, except that local bridges have been removed. That is, whenever a tie exists but there is no friend in common, we remove the edge.

In the third plot we remove edges which do share a friend in common, keeping all the bridging ties only.

The answer is in the title, that bridging doesn’t make the world small, and in fact when removing them we still have a remarkably small world.

In all the plots below I’ve drawn a horizontal line at the total number of nodes in the network.