Meribeth looked at me with a puzzled expression, "she’s not my friend — she’s just my Friendster." It was the summer of 2003 and Friendster was just emerging as the first large-scale social network site. Urban dwelling twenty and thirty somethings were flocking to the site to model their social networks and meet new people. Once on the site, users were encouraged to mark other users as “Friends.” Friendster expected that these users would list their actual friends but this was not the norm that took hold among early adopters. The types of relations people included varied immensely as did the motivations for including certain people but not others. In trying to articulate Friendship, participants were forced to navigate the nuances of what it meant to publicly display their connections to others (Donath and boyd, 2004).
Social network sites like Friendster and MySpace are constructed in a way that requires people to indicate relationships or “friendships” with other participants. A prevalent assumption by many observers is that the articulation of Friendship is equivalent to friendship (Kornblum, 2006). In other words, if people say that they are Friends on these sites, they must be friends in other contexts as well [1].
This paper challenges that assumption. While some participants believe that people should only indicate meaningful relationships, it is primarily non-participants who perpetuate the expectation that Friending is the same as listing one’s closest buddies. Failing to understand the culture of Friending that has emerged in social network sites contributes to the fear of the media and concerned parents over how they envision participants to be socializing.
Meribeth looked at me with a puzzled expression, "she’s not my friend — she’s just my Friendster." It was the summer of 2003 and Friendster was just emerging as the first large-scale social network site. Urban dwelling twenty and thirty somethings were flocking to the site to model their social networks and meet new people. Once on the site, users were encouraged to mark other users as “Friends.” Friendster expected that these users would list their actual friends but this was not the norm that took hold among early adopters. The types of relations people included varied immensely as did the motivations for including certain people but not others. In trying to articulate Friendship, participants were forced to navigate the nuances of what it meant to publicly display their connections to others (Donath and boyd, 2004).Social network sites like Friendster and MySpace are constructed in a way that requires people to indicate relationships or “friendships” with other participants. A prevalent assumption by many observers is that the articulation of Friendship is equivalent to friendship (Kornblum, 2006). In other words, if people say that they are Friends on these sites, they must be friends in other contexts as well [1].This paper challenges that assumption. While some participants believe that people should only indicate meaningful relationships, it is primarily non-participants who perpetuate the expectation that Friending is the same as listing one’s closest buddies. Failing to understand the culture of Friending that has emerged in social network sites contributes to the fear of the media and concerned parents over how they envision participants to be socializing.
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