Friendship on SNSs

For this week’s readings, I first read Weeks’ Social Responsibility and the Web: A Drama Unfolds. The author highlighted the influence of social media on our life by saying that, “Although social media may change how we interact with others, it's unlikely to change core human concepts of friendship and community.” I agree to it. Regarding my experience of using Facebook, the SNS connects me with my friends, whom I know in different social organizations, such as schools and workplace, and with the friends of my friends. Through the SNS, I can easily make new friends and keep in touch with my old friends without time-and-space limitation. Weeks’ opinion also corresponds to what Galston (2002) said, “Contemporary American cultural value is about individual choice and longing for community.” In my mind, the value of individual choice is a good example of how social media change the way we used to communicate. In Weeks’ article, Fogg held that the text-based communication of social media is unfavorable to expressing emotion and deepening online relationships. Therefore, a question that I have been asking myself came up again—why do people want to friend someone whom they don’t know? If you receive the request, will you add those people as your friends? After posting the question on my Facebook, I got many insightful answers. One said, “I will accept their requests. It is nice to talk to someone who is fun. However, if the new friend is boring or odd, I can choose not to talk to them anymore. The right of choice is one of the values that the social network site brings to us.”

In Galston’s article, the meaning of online community is an interesting issue for me. According to Licklider and Taylor, online communication facilitates the growth of shared interests. Snyder said that people in a community should have greater things in common than a fascination with a narrowly defined topic. These points are in line with the example of Ayelet Waldman’s call for help in Weeks’ article (2009) and with what LaRose et al (2001) said that social support for major life crises might be more forthcoming from online discussion groups organized around major life crises (e.g., cancer support groups) than from e-mail with known associates. I think that the power of online community should never be downplayed because the social support from online community can empower a person. Several years ago, there was a very popular Japanese movie Train Man, adapted from a true story happening in a Japanese SNS. A 20-something man protected several women from a drunk man’s harassment on a train, and because of that he had a chance to date one of the women. However, in the subsequent dates, he encountered trouble and frustration, and started questioning whether he was right for the woman. He posted his question online and got many Net pals’ positive feedback. Thank to the Net pals’ encouragement, he started to have faith in the relationship.

Although Thomas Bender believed that a community should have a sense of mutual obligation, Ryan (2006) pointed out the commodification of social relationships, which reveals the possible dark side of the online relationships among the community. As I posted my question on Facebook, several people commented that they are cautious about accepting the requests from strangers because they want to keep their privacy and doubt that those requests can be the spam. Despite the doubts from SNSs’ users, some SNSs do make use of the commodification of social relationships, such as what FriendFlood.com does, as mentioned in Rosen (2007). Rosen and LaRose have different viewpoints to the online relationships. LaRose pointed out the possibility that the superficial, weak online relationships will diminish the meaningful, strong real-life relationships, reduce social support and increase depression. However, Rosen held that the weak ties can be more useful in passing out certain types of information than the strong ties. In my mind, the two viewpoints are both right depending on who uses the relationships for what purposes. Many people addicted to virtual worlds have trouble in real life. They withdraw from social events and are only comfortable in talking through texts. By contrast, a socializing person with many virtual friends can make use of the large online social networks to get and exchange information to fulfill his / her real-life needs. One of the respondents on my Facebook said that she treated the SNS as a place to accumulate social capital, so she is willing to be a friend of someone whom she doesn’t know before.

By sharing ideas with my respondents, I learned that people are using SNSs to systematically deal with their friendship. They sort their friends by actively deciding whether to accept the request of adding someone as a friend. They want to be someone’s friend due to a bunch of reasons. The top reason is how much I know the person. In addition, some of them care to know more people, so they are open to accepting the request from a stranger. After having many friends, the next step that technology can do is to help us collect, manage, and rank the people we know, as mentioned by Rosen (2007). All of these are very precious experience that we can do better online than offline.