The Meaning of Friends

A couple posts ago I recapped how the event I created on facebook was doing. What I noticed was that the majority of people who responded "yes" to attending the event were my friends that I verbally spoke to about interviewing them. It led me to start thinking about how successful facebook really is. All the people I have interviewed are people that I spoke to in person or people who I have signaled out and emailed. I haven't had one person from my facebook event actually try and get in touch with me. So although facebook allows you to send out mass information to as many people as you know, I think I sent it out to about 250 people, the success rate of hearing from those people is very low.

What is also interesting to take note of is the fact that the majority of the six people who responded yes to attending are close friends that I see almost daily. When I was doing some reading the other day, the article questioned "what the meaning of 'friends' [are] in these environments" and I am starting to wonder the same thing (533). According to facebook I have 933 friends, but really when I think about it I talk to about 20 of them on facebook. The reason I believe I have so many friends that I don't talk is because they are "superficial relationships" (533).

Freshman year of college I went on a friending spree (don't judge you know we all do it) and friended almost every single person I met during the first couple of months I was here. Looking back on it I am not exactly sure why I did it, I would argue that it allowed me to get in contact with these people and try and meet up with them after just meeting them but I'm going to be honest, that never actually happened. The reason I believe I went on such a friending craze is because the number of friends one has on facebook does affect judgments. For example, "popularity, pleasantness, heterosexual appeal, and confidence of the profile owner were greater when there was a high number of friends on an individual's profile than when the lower coefficients were displayed" (536). We know that to have a lot of friends on facebook it will make us seem more popular and therefore we will be more liked.

When you first meet someone what is one of the first things you do? Most likely you go on facebook and try to see their pictures and who they are friends with. If you have mutual friends you will probably be more inclined to want to friend them. This raises questions on what is means to be a facebook friend? And there isn't much of an answer except that "on Facebook, the meaning of friend does not always have traditional connotations" (537). In some cases "other literature has speculated that the meaning of friends changes in social networking sites, particularly as numbers grow higher" (537). So does the more friends you have on facebook mean the less intense those friendships actually are? I think so, because what it comes down to is that I don't talk to all 933 of my facebook friends.

This isn't to say that having friends on facebook is a bad thing. Actually it can be very helpful at times, for example "Donath and boyd (2004) argue that online social networking systems can help individuals to maintain a larger number of close ties than people can typically maintain without such technology, as the systems allow people to check one another's sites for updates, reflect new activities, as well as to facilitate brief verbal exchanges through asynchronous wall postings" (537). For example a lot of friends I had in elementary school I have been able to get back in touch with and re-form those close ties I had with them when I was younger.  Over the summer my best friend from kindergarten and I actually were able to get together for dinner through facebook and ever since then we have been meeting up and staying in touch, it has been like no time has passed.

So I think the main thing to take away from this post and the idea about friendship is that what "is labeled 'friend' on Facebook often does not correspond to the same label offline" (537).
 
Works Cited

Walther, Joseph, Stephanie Tom Tong, Brandon Von Der Heide, and Lindsey Langwell. "Too Much of a Good Thing? 
              The Relationship Between Number of Friends and Interpersonal Impressions on Facebook." Journal of 
              Computer Mediated 13 (2008) 531-549.