Intimacy and Friendship on Facebook

A. Lambert

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781137322845, 9781137287137
• eBook ISBN: 9781137287144
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Computer Science General
• Index: Social Sciences

Intimacy and Friendship on Facebook theorises the impact of Facebook on our social lives through the lens of intimacy. Lambert constructs an original understanding of why people welcome public intimacy on Facebook and how they attempt to control it, asking the reader to re-imagine what it means to be intimate online.

1

Discovering Intimacy on Facebook

Positioning Facebook

Fundamentally, SNSs are online worlds which facilitate the creation of personal profiles capable of connecting people with other users (Lenhart & Madden 2007a; boyd & Ellison 2008). Profiles often afford forms of social interaction and the expression of personal information such as tastes, interests, political views, sexual orientation, and so forth (Stutzman 2006). They also afford the articulation of one’s connections, commonly displayed as a ‘friends list’ (Donath & boyd 2004).

Profiles and connections can range from being ‘semi-public within a bounded system’ (boyd & Ellison 2008: 211), to being public to the entire Internet. SNSs are distinguished partly by these degrees of publicity. For instance, ASmallWorld is a relatively closed service in which people must be invited by users to join and access member profiles. On the other hand, Twitter is open to the Internet proper, and does not prejudice membership. Somewhere in between, Facebook affords varying degrees of self-tailored publicity. People can choose to set their profiles to ‘public’, thus open to anyone, or restrict them to ‘friends only’. They can also customise individual posts such that only specific friends may see them.

According to boyd and Ellison (2008), SNS users connect with people they share a prior relationship with. Various studies confirm this (Lampe, Ellison, & Steinfield 2006; Ellison, Steinfield, & Lampe 2007; Zhao, Grasmuch, & Martin 2008). Where SNS networks are found to contain weak ties and strangers, these are explained as ‘friends-of-friends’ who are contacted through mutual friends to reap social capital benefits (Ellison, Steinfield, & Lampe 2011).

People use Facebook and like SNSs to socialise with their connections (Pempek, Yermolayeva and Calvert 2009), gather information on these people (Joinson 2008, Rau, Gao and Ding 2008, Burke, Marlow and Lento 2010), increase their self-esteem and popularity (Zhao, Grasmuch, & Martin 2008; Zywica & Danowski 2008; Barker 2009; Ross et al. 2009), express their identities through novel forms of content and association (Zhao, Grasmuch, and Martin 2008, Liu 2008, Pempek, Yermolayeva, and Calvert 2009, Donath and boyd 2004), and entertain themselves through interactive applications such as social games (Rao 2008).

Scholars find that certain SNSs, Facebook in particular, are deeply embedded in everyday life, weaving through online and offline experience (Ellison, Steinfield, and Lampe 2011, Debatin, et al. 2009, Tufekci 2008, Dwyer, Hiltz, and Passerini 2007). Facebook has been referred to as a ‘pervasive technology’, ‘deeply ingrained in [peoples’] daily routines’ (Debatin et al. 2009: 96). I am particularly concerned with how this rich entanglement influences intimacy.

In this chapter I review literature which either explicitly or implicitly investigates intimacy on Facebook and like SNSs. Modern conceptions of intimacy are firmly routed in relationships which share genuine love, liking, care and commitment (Inness 1992; Prager 1995; Jamieson 1998). As thinkers such as Giddens (1991, 1992) and Illouz (2007) note, the upkeep of healthy intimate relationships has become a central value in the West, vitally entangled with the ideal of personal happiness. These writers, combined with a host of social psychologists (Reis & Shaver 1988; Prager 1995; Parks & Floyd 1996; Laurenceau, Pietromonaco, & Barret 1998), emphasise the importance of self-disclosure in the construction of intimate relationships. Interestingly, ‘self-disclosures’ and ‘relationships’ (friendships in particular) constitute key areas of interest for SNS scholars. These are conventionally valued as private phenomena. Intimacy is fostered over time through private interactions in which both parties disclose and validate each other’s emotional inner selves (Reis & Shaver 1988). Hence, a chief question is: what happens to these factors when they play out publicly on SNSs? In what follows, I interrogate how SNS scholarship has dealt with friendships, romantic relationships and self-disclosures; then I turn to a broader cultural critique of public intimacy.

Friends and lovers

People utilise SNSs to connect with strong and weak ties. Various studies find the latter number far exceeds the former. For example, Ellison and colleagues (2011) find that American university students possess a mean of 300 Facebook ‘friends’, but only 25 per cent are considered ‘actual friends’. Similarly, West and colleagues find users from the United Kingdom possess a mean of 200 Facebook ‘friends’, a mean of 82 ‘real friends’, and a mean of 19 ‘close friends’. It seems Facebook users express complex gradations of friendship. Moreover, terms such as ‘actual’ and ‘real’ bring into question the relationship between friendship and authenticity (boyd 2006). It is important to probe the different benefits these different social ties provide. What benefits accrue from articulating one’s strong, intimate friendships online? Ellison and colleagues (2007) understand this phenomenon in terms of social capital. That is, people’s broader collection of weak ties offer opportunities to claim on bridging social capital, such as new information and the feeling of being in a broader community. On the other hand, people’s relatively stable set of strong ties provides the opportunity for bonding social capital, for emotional support and solidarity. Scholarship elucidates how communication with these strong ties on Facebook has become an everyday aspect of social life (Goggin 2010; Robards 2012) which involves sharing emotional disclosures publicly (Mallan 2009; Sas et al. 2009). This suggests that Facebook has become an important tool for the reproduction of interpersonal bonds and, hence, interpersonal intimacy. However, just what this process involves remains fuzzy. One of the central aims of this book is to offer a more fine-grained, qualitative understanding of how this occurs, and what benefits Facebook offers in this regard.

Much of the research into SNSs and friendship has focused on adolescent groups. Within this field, the relationship between friendship and selfhood is highly significant. For instance, boyd’s (2008a) influential ethnography into adolescents on MySpace views SNSs as autonomous spaces where youths can experiment with identity and friendship. SNSs offer a chance to develop experiences of intimacy, public ‘face’ and authenticity beyond the bounds of parental authority. Like boyd, Livingstone (2008) locates SNS friendships within developmental processes. Livingstone conducts a series of in-depth interviews with adolescent MySpace and Facebook users from the United Kingdom. Younger users cultivate a form of self-presentation on MySpace which Livingstone terms ‘identity as display’. This involves a heavy focus on performing visual self-aspects. However, older youths abandon MySpace for Facebook, where they practice ‘identity as connection’, the performance of self through the signification of friendships. Robards (2012) notices a similar phenomenon while investigating the migration of Australian youths from MySpace to Facebook. Robards’s participants reflect on the autobiographical, introspective nature of MySpace, which is considered ‘juvenile’, and they privilege the social interaction-focused Facebook, which is ‘grown up’. The transition from one to the other is considered a ritualised passage into adulthood.

These ideas echo a central motif in the study of intimacy, namely that selfhood is achieved through voluntary, intimate relationships (Bellah et al. 1985; Giddens 1991). A more direct exposition of this will follow shortly.

The allure of SNSs extends beyond socialising with close friends. As mentioned above, people articulate both strong and weak ties online. What value lies in ‘friending’ people one does not share a close interpersonal relationship with? Based on an ethnography of teenage Friendster users, boyd (2006) suggests a series of reasons for sending and accepting friend requests. Users genuinely want to connect with actual friends, as well as with acquaintances, family, and colleagues. They also connect with others so as to see their profiles and gather social information. They connect to affiliate with popular peers and in turn look popular and ‘cool’. They cultivate a list of friends as a performance of identity. Sometimes they are forced to connect due to social pressures and to avoid the awkwardness of saying ‘no’. Hence, users do not follow one distinct strategy, and neither are they completely empowered. Rather, they are embedded within a fabric of different social pressures and motivations.

Research into Facebook also reflects these themes. Pempek and colleagues (2009) find American university students mainly use Facebook to ‘keep up’ with friends. Implicitly, this involves surveying friends, keeping informed as to what they are posting and who they are interacting with. Similarly, Joinson (2008) finds that people use Facebook to both watch and socialise with friends. He emphasises the powerful allure of social surveillance as a means of acquiring information on different ties. Tufekci (2008b) expands on this, finding that SNSs increased the ability to ‘keep in touch’ with a wide variety of connections. Facebook’s own in-house research reveals that users passively survey about 2.5 times more people than they regularly interact with online (Marlow 2009). Collectively, these results suggest that users are motivated to friend weak ties so as to covertly monitor them. Authors suggest that much of this behaviour is driven by social curiosity, especially in regard to discovering how estranged contacts have changed over time (Joinson 2008; Tufekci 2008b; Pempek, Yermolayeva, & Calvert 2009).

Indeed, Facebook is highly valued for its affordance for reclaiming distant and estranged ties. For example, Ellison et al. (Ellison, Steinfield, & Lampe 2007), and Manago et al. (2012) find that university students value the ability to reconnect with high school friends. Joinson’s (2008) research finds that users are motivated to use Facebook so as to keep in touch with distant friends, and reacquire lost contacts. Madden and Smith (2010) report on a wide-ranging survey into the Internet use of American adults. They find that SNS users are four times more likely than non-users to be contacted by people from their past. It seems that Facebook is emblematic of a highly mobile society, a tool for sustaining bonds over distances of time and space. Hence, Facebook networks are not communities in the traditional sense, defined by ‘kinship and acquaintanceship’ and a ‘common isolation’ (Pahl 2005: 622). They transcend locals, and are composed of people from different walks of life. Hence, they can be called ‘personal communities’ (Wilkinson 2010). They are organised around specific individuals, and in this sense are a matter of perspective. As Pahl writes, personal communities are ‘frameworks of belonging’ which are provided, not by locals, but by ‘the individual’s biography’ (2005: 636).

Scholars also find that relatively young SNS users friend others so as to accrue popularity, or at least the perception of popularity. For example, boyd (2006) discusses how Friendster users will friend popular kids so as to acquire similar social status. Based on in-depth interviews with Australian MySpace users, Mallan finds that the ‘Top Friends’ list not only performs a kind of identity through connection, but is taken as a ‘quantifiable measure of one’s popularity’ (2009: 59). Tongand colleagues (2008) seek to confirm whether having a large quantity of friends is perceived by users to indicate popularity. They ask a large sample of American university students to judge mock-up Facebook profiles with differing friend counts; one finding was that profiles with around 300 friends were perceived to be most attractive. However, those who increasingly exceeded this amount decreased in perceived popularity. Following Donath and boyd (2004), they suggest that too many friends can lead to the perception of being a social networking ‘whore’, ‘friending out of desperation rather than popularity’ (Tong et al. 2008: 542).

Other scholars have linked the ability to select and grow a personal audience to both popularity and self-esteem. Zywica and Danowski (2008) ask students to address self-esteem measures and answer open-ended questions regarding their popularity online and offline. Extroverted participants with high self-esteem utilise Facebook to further enhance their self-esteem by increasing their sociability. Introverted students with low self-esteem also profit from Facebook by posting images and descriptions which make them look ‘cool’, and by accumulating friends. These users increase their self-esteem by elevating their self-perception as popular and attractive.

Barker (2009) also explores the relationship between SNS use and self-esteem. Her arguments are based on a large-sample survey of late adolescents, most of whom use Facebook and MySpace. Barker measures for ‘collective-self esteem’, ‘the aspect of identity that has to do with the value placed on group membership’ (2009: 210). Hence, as apposed to a measure of self-esteem in general, Barker specifically examines the relationship between self-esteem and the ability to identify with a social group and experience a sense of belonging. Barker finds that people compensate for low collective self-esteem by developing more fulfilling online bonds. Both Barker and Zywica and Danowski confirm the ‘social compensation thesis’ that Internet environments allow people to overcome negative social identities by re-creating themselves online. This process, however, inevitably involves the searching out of new, weak connections which must be strengthened. Here, Facebook is implicitly cast as a kind of ‘psychotherapeutic milieu’ (Turkle 1994), in which friending is part of a healing, or self-improvement process.

Another position argues that Facebook users accumulate large networks to act as audiences which provide narcissistic self-gratification (Rosen 2007; Ibrahim 2010; Mehdizadeh 2010; Ong et al. 2011). This key point of critique is highly relevant for this study, as modern conceptions of narcissism and public intimacy are crucially related (Sennett 1977; Lasch 1979). I return to examine this position in detail shortly.

These issues demand that we consider how the concept of intimacy elucidates the relationship between different ties. Throughout this book I respond to this problem by going beyond a mere ‘weak/strong’ or ‘bridging/bonding’ dichotomy. Instead I interrogate how intimacy plays out in specific social contexts across a range of different ties.

Relationships are not without their problems on Facebook. Tokunaga (2011) investigates the degree to which relationships are put under strain due to the way Facebook facilitates negative interpersonal events. He asks American university students to recall an SNS-related scenario which caused ‘relational distrust, worry, dislike, problems, and/or damage’ (2011: 426). Responses describe denied or ignored friend requests, removed tags, and deleted posts from friends’ walls. A denied friend request is a direct affront. Removed tags or posts are similarly hurtful, as they suggest a friend does not want to be socially associated with the one who is denied. Interestingly, Tokunaga finds that much of the activity which causes strain is due to the desire to negotiate social contexts in a complex public space, rather than to intentionally cause harm. In order to protect face within one social sphere, one may need to prevent that sphere from witnessing relationships with peers from other spheres (Binder, Howes, & Smart 2012). The necessity for this form of impression management, argues Tokunaga, sometimes contradicts the expectations on ‘politeness and decorum’ which friends foster in offline spaces. Various literature, covered in the next chapter, explores how conflicting social contexts jeopardise people’s social privacy. This intensifies the politics of friendship on Facebook. It is apparent that friendships can no longer be left to ‘go on’ according to their own rhythms. Friends are ranked and shuffled, their comments and images tagged, untagged, copied, and removed. Friendships are bureaucratised, while the labour of intimacy is intensified.

Facebook also complicates romantic relationships. Muise and colleagues (2009) find that undergraduates who are naturally prone to jealousy will monitor their partners covertly on Facebook. When they witness their partners socialising with other friends they are more likely to take what they see out of context, as indicative of suspiciously unfaithful behaviour. This causes a vicious circle of more surveillance activity and, hence, more jealousy. While researching romantic partners from the United Kingdom, Marshall and colleagues (2012) connect Facebook-related jealousy with relationship quality, self-esteem, neuroticism, and attachment style. Of particular salience is ‘attachment style’, which describes the mode in which a person engages in intimate relationships based on early developmental relationships with his or her parents. The authors find that those with an ‘anxious’ attachment style (characterised by low trust, low self-esteem and high insecurity – caused by an inconsistently available parent) utilise Facebook to survey their partners and confirm subjective suspicions, causing jealousy and relationship conflict.

Utz and Beukeboom (2011) build on the above empirical work. They recruit a large sample of mostly female Dutch university students and have them complete a survey on the characteristics of their romantic relationships, their propensity toward jealousy, their use of SNSs for relationship maintenance and their surveillance behaviour. Again, they find that those with low self-esteem experience higher degrees of jealousy. Conversely, they also find that those who are in trusting, secure relationships experience an augmentation of relationship quality on Facebook due to monitoring their partners’ online activities. The observation of finding a publicly posted comment which lovingly references oneself, for example, is experienced as a positive event.

Importantly, this data does not suggest that Facebook creates bad relationships. Rather, Facebook intensifies dispositions which already exist. A common theme in the above literature, I argue, is that Facebook intensifies intimacy in one way or another. For example: through projects of constructing the self through intimacy; through maintaining many contacts: through forging and building new relationships; through protecting oneself against weak ties; through the politics of friendship; or through the intensified intimate (and potentially jealous) gaze.

Intimate disclosures

Contemporary social psychology emphasises the importance of self-disclosure in the establishment of intimate relationships (Prager 1995; Laurenceau, Pietromonaco, & Barret 1998). Intimacy is constructed when one reveals one’s inner self and perceives the validation and support of another (Reis & Shaver 1988). Likewise, sociologists such as Anthony Giddens (1991) view self-disclosure as an essential ingredient in the kinds of relationships which can endure the risky milieus of modern life. Jamieson (1998) refers to today’s personal relationships as constructed around a regime of ‘intimate disclosure’. Rather than viewing this as an essential aspect of intimacy, Jamieson locates this regime within historical processes which involve the dissemination of therapeutic discourses, the privileging of egalitarian relationships, and the individualisation of self-concepts.

These ideas help frame SNS scholarship, which heavily focuses on self-disclosures. Drawing on a survey of Canadian users, Christofides and colleagues (2009) discover that people are more likely to disclose personal information on Facebook than in general. They hypothesise that norms of self-disclosure are more permissive on Facebook. Certainly, researchers have noticed the preponderance of self-disclosures one encounters when navigating Facebook. Some of these constitute people’s day-to-day trivialities and ephemeral thoughts (Robards 2012). Some of these are of a more emotional and intimate nature. For example, based ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1  Discovering Intimacy on Facebook
• 2  Frameworks: Privacy, Performance, Social Capital
• 3  Methodology
• 4  The Performance of Connection
• 5  Distant Intimacy
• 6  Prosthetic Intimacy
• 7  When Insecurity Looms
• 8  Negotiating Intimacy
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index