Friendship in the Digital Age

Social network sites arise questions over the changing form and meaning of friendship. Do SNS encourage us to develop a narrow sense of friendship, to treat all friends the same way? Are we flattening friendships by essentially commodifying them? How many of our friends do we actually talk to on facebook or would we cross the road to talk to them in real life?

The Dunbar number 150 is the number of people one can have stable, cohesive social ties, this theory is disrupted now as we can have hundreds and thousands of friends on SNS. With facebook we can 'handle' having more friends beyond the number of friendships which actually matter significantly to us. Facebook has become more efficient in cultivating relationships in shorter space of time, but that doesn't mean the friendships are as meaningful, but are more likely to have weaker ties than strong ones as time and investment becomes an issue. The convenience of SNS helps make communication with different people easy and more fluid, but also to keep up with friends who live far away or are overseas. We can look at their status and photos to see what they are getting up to in their lives, this can make contacting friends more 'lazy' in a sense because instead of making an effort to contact them you can just click on their profile or check the newsfeed, depending on how actively engaged they are online and how often they update.

Judith Donath (2008) in her reading "Signals in Social Supernets" differentiates between strong ties which are close confidants who require a large commitment of time and attention and have frequent acts of contact while weak ties are distant acquaintances who whom one feels less responsibility to make contact with. No relationships means it is better than the other, just different and have new forms of opportunities. The strength in weak ties is that they are the ones to most likely gain new insights as there is a wider diversity of people than strong ties. Donath states that weaker ties are beneficial because it gives users the potential to expand their range of information sources; "Whether as a means for bolstering status, strengthening ties, or for showing one's esoteric knowledge, people use information strategically." This breaks us out of existence to modern citizens of the world which is not bad but essential for "social grooming." SNS can encourage us to waste time on people we won't ever be close to but that becomes the strength of them. SNS is a way of extending one's social network to ties outside of your offline existence and people who are just acquaintances or 'mutual friends' of your friends may become friends of value if an effort is made by both.

Judith Donath questions if SNS will shift people's social world from one focused on a few important relationships to one consisting of an immense number of weak relationships? While the term 'friend' has taken on new meanings now in social network platforms because of the ambiguity and nostalgia, in facebook we cannot list who are our close friends and who are mere acquaintances, but it is our interactions which determine this. I have people on my friends list who I wouldn't necessarily label a friend, nor would I cross the road to talk to them in real life, but facebook gets you, to some extent, caring and paying attention to everyone on your friends list and in return it is hoped that they also care about you, even if you may never contact them online or offline. So while SNS encourages people to extend their social networks to wider circle of acquaintances, it can also strengthen bonds already in place.