“Weak ties” are often deemed a strength: see for example this article in Psychology Today, which says:

“[S]trong and weak ties tend to serve different functions in our lives. When we need a big favor or social or instrumental support, we ask our friends.  We call them when we need to move a washing machine.  But if we need information that we don’t have, the people to ask are our weak ties.  They have more diverse knowledge and more diverse ties than our close friends do. We ask them when we want to know who to hire to install our washing machine.“

The quote suggests that there is a certain trade-off between use of weak ties and use of strong ties.  The anti-pattern in question then is less to do with whether we are forming weak ties or strong ties, and more to do with whether we are being honest with ourselves and with each other about the nature of the ties we are forming — and their potential uses.  We can be “peers” in either a weak or a strong sense.  The question to ask is whether our needs match our expectations!

In the peeragogy context, this has to do with how we interact.  One of the participants in this project wrote:

“I am learning about peeragogy, but I think I’m failing [to be] a good peeragog[ue].  I remember that Howard [once] told us that the most important thing is that you should be responsible not only for your own learning but for your peers’ learning.  [...] So the question is, are we learning from others by ourselves or are we [...] helping others to learn?“

If we are “only” co-consumers of information (which happens to “produced” live, by some of the participants), then this seems like a classic example of a weak tie.  We are part of the same “audience” — or anyway, in the same “theater” (even if separated from each other by continuous “4th walls”).  On the other hand, actively engaging with other people (whether with “my” learning, with “their” learning, or with the co-production of knowledge) seems to be the foundation for strong ties.  In this case our aims (or needs) are more instrumental, and less informational.

People who do not put in the time and effort will remain stuck at the level of “weak ties”, and will not be able to draw on the benefits that “strong ties” offer.