Social Media and Personal Relationships

Online Intimacies and Networked Friendship

D. Chambers

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137314444
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book explores how digital communication generates new intimacies and meanings of friendship in a networked society, developing a theory of mediated intimacies to explain how social media contributes to dramatic changes in our ideas about personal relationships, through themes of self, youth, families, digital dating and online social capital.

1

Introduction

One of the most striking changes in personal life during late modernity is the use of social media for conducting personal relationships. These changes entail a growing significance in the public display of personal connectedness and the importance of the term ‘friendship’ in managing these connections. Digital communication technologies are contributing to new ideas and experiences of intimacy, friendship and identity through new forms of social interaction and new techniques of public display, particularly on social network sites. This book explores the ways people engage with social media to build, maintain and exhibit personal networks. The aim is to provide an understanding of the mediated nature of personal relationships by developing a theory of ‘mediated intimacies’. The dramatic changes in rituals of connection brought about by the explosion in use of social network sites compel us to reconsider the concept of ‘intimacy’ and extend it beyond its former, narrow focus on family life. This book therefore enquires whether digital modes of communication are generating new intimacies and new meanings of ‘friendship’ as features of a networked society. Key debates and research evidence are assessed about emerging ways that people share their lives with each other in a digital environment and the motives for doing so. New opportunities being offered by social media to transform identities and generate new modes of self-presentation, interaction and etiquette are identified.

With a particular focus on the ways social network sites are being used to support or complicate personal ties, this book explores the intersecting uses of a range of social media. Social network sites constitute a now well-established mode of communication. Yet they only emerged in the first decade of this century. These highly popular forms of social and personal connection continue to be treated, publicly and academically, as an emergent phenomenon. Facebook, for example, now has over 900 million users globally and is regarded as a ‘new media’ success story. The company states, ‘Our mission is to make the world more open and connected’.¹ At the end of March 2012, just before its shares were floated on the market, Facebook was able to boast that it hosted 125 billion total friendships.² This detail is simply fascinating, yet in terms of its significance the figure is also totally mystifying. The implications of such an assertion are still being unravelled by those of us engaged in the study of mediated interpersonal communication. How people construct their mediated networks to build their identities and establish intimate relationships is, then, the subject matter of this book.

Social network sites are said to be increasing the number of friends that people have and strengthening ties between families, especially those separated by migration. Yet, at the same time, new media technologies are being blamed for a decrease in close, ‘genuine’ bonds. A strong belief persists that face-to-face communication is superior to mediated communication, as Nancy Baym (2010) states. This assumption is regularly expressed in news reports and by various experts (e.g. Ferguson 2012; Putnam 2000). It has had a powerful influence on debates about social media, fuelling fears that social network sites contribute to a breakdown of community. Has Zuckerberg’s vision of a more connected world transformed into a more alienating scenario with people interacting with their screens and disregarding the people around them? The current hype about social interaction on the Internet conveys some of the public anxieties and moral panics surrounding social media (see Critcher 2008). Fears have been expressed that online social networks cause alienation and uprooting, the breakdown of community, erosion of family values and traditional modes of sociability. For instance, the head of the Catholic Church in England and Wales, Archbishop Nichols, has claimed that Facebook and MySpace can provoke teenagers to commit suicide because such sites encourage them to build transient relationships and dehumanise community life (Wynne-Jones 2009).

Disturbing to some is the image of solitary individuals withdrawn in their private domestic spaces yet simultaneously in connection with a global network. A further media-generated panic includes the idea that young people have no sense of discretion or shame and have grown into the habit of exposing ‘their bodies and souls in a way their parents never could’³ (Livingstone 2008: 397). Users of social network sites are regarded as self-obsessed and narcissistic (Buffardi and Campbell 2008; Carpenter 2012; Twenge and Campbell 2009) or as socially isolated. Sites such as Facebook are also being blamed for damaging time-honoured conventions of personal communication, for generating shallow relationships and for making us all feel insecure. As journalist Keith Watson remarks in a light-hearted tone:

That’s the thing with Facebook – it has ripped up rules of social intercourse and kidded us with a vision of a bright new smiley world where we all Like each other. But really it’s just cranked up our potential for insecurity to a massive scale. Haven’t we all got a clutch of Friends Requested killing us softly with their rebuffs? Just me then.

(Watson 2011⁴)

There is, then, a concern that digital media is creating a dysfunctional society in which past tight-knit communities are being fragmented and gradually taken over by more dispersed social networks. Exaggerated claims have also been made in the opposite direction through assertions that, in the era of ‘communicative abundance’ (Keane 2009), social barriers and inequalities will be broken down by the rise of a new global digital network. Within this extravagant scenario, an egalitarian public sphere is envisaged in which each individual is liberated through digital autonomy with a shift of control from governments and big business to individuals. Whether optimistic or pessimistic, such exaggerated claims suffer from a media centrism: a technological determinism in which digital communication is misrepresented as being at the centre of society as the determining or principal factor of social change and that we all orient our lives around it (Postman 1993; Smith and Marx 1998; Williams 1974). In both scenarios, social network sites seem to have become the index of the progress or collapse of social connectedness.

Changing meanings and practices of friendship

Despite widespread social anxieties about the impact of digital technologies on traditional social ties, emerging findings indicate that social network sites and other social media have become important sites for cultivating personal relationships. The research addressed in the following chapters contests the view that heavy social network site users are more isolated than occasional or non-users. Growing evidence suggests that this technology is contributing to a dramatic reconfiguration of our ideas about intimacy and friendship. While sites such as Facebook, MySpace and Friendster are reshaping the landscapes of business, culture and research, these sites are also forging new ways of being intimate and ‘doing intimacy’.

Although research in this field is embryonic, a growing body of scholarship is now assessing the ways that social network sites and other social media are being drawn on to sustain personal relationships. This book engages with the disciplinary traditions of media studies and sociology to explore the key features of changing personal relationships and modes of sociability in the context of social media. The book draws on and combines traditional and new sociological debates about intimacy, family, friendship and new social ties with new media studies of computer-mediated communication and social network sites. Social network interactions and intimacies are examined from a range of theoretical and methodological angles. The aim is to revisit and advance the concept of ‘intimacy’ through the lens of social media use and to develop a theory of ‘mediated intimacy’.

This emphasis on intimacy, family and friendship is something that Facebook is keen to promote in describing its attributes. It states, ‘People use Facebook to stay connected with their friends and family, to discover what is going on in the world around them, and to share and express what matters to them, to the people they care about.’⁵ The company is keen to become embedded in our personal lives. It now has strong commercial motives for doing so (see Chapter 9). At the same time, this communication technology is capable of facilitating weak, thin ties of acquaintanceship (Morgan 2009). Close relationships with family, children, lovers and friends are being sustained in concert with loose ties connecting work colleagues, acquaintances, neighbours and also virtual networks composed of shared interests and causes. The transformative potential and affirmative values of choice and agency associated with social media, particularly social network sites, are therefore foregrounded in this book. However, while social network sites offer us opportunities to express our identities and connections online, individuals are subjected to certain social pressures and constraints in the presentation of an online self. The personal profile requires constant monitoring and remodelling. The kind of self-regulation involved in online self-presentations suggests that social network sites can be viewed as sites that cultivate the enterprise of self-improvement (Rose 1999). This issue is explored in Chapter 4 on self-presentation online.

‘Friendship’ is a major ideal being exploited as a principal feature of social network site communication, within the process of publicly displaying connectedness. However, this new, mediated friendship is being shaped by conventions that vary considerably from those associated with the traditional sense of friendship formed before Web 2.0. In contrast to the public display of matrimony, for example, friendship has not generally been publicly declared until now in Western contexts (Baym 2010). This digitalised era is the first in which personal connections of friendship become formalised through online public display. The question is whether this emergent ritual of displaying non-familial as well as familial social connections online affects conventional meanings and values associated with ‘friendship’ and ‘intimacy’. Questions about the intensity and speed of self-disclosure online, the unforeseen side effect of constant self-disclosure and how to sustain digital connections are issues that provoke questions about the sorts of skills now required to be ‘a friend’. These social skills may include initiation of contact, changing expressions of self-disclosure, rejecting self-disclosure or friendships, self-management of identity and creating social distance from others. The internal rhetoric used by social network sites promotes ‘friendship’ signifiers and imagery through the choice of terms employed by the sites themselves. For example, MySpace.com has described itself as a place to ‘find old friends’ and ‘make new friends’, as a place to ‘connect’, as a community (Parks 2011: 106).

The design of social network sites, including the software applications or ‘tools’ of engagement for making personal connections, plays a key role in shaping users’ communication. The processes are therefore worthy of some attention here. Participants create an online profile by listing personal information and interest, connecting with other site users and sharing updates about their activities and thoughts in their networks (boyd and Ellison 2007). Sites such as Myspace and Facebook encourage users to publicly display a record number of ‘Friends’ by offering specific incentives for users to add people to their Friends list. Users are provided with the tools to create an individual web page to post personal information such as self-descriptions and photos, to connect with other members by creating ‘friends lists’ and to interact with other members. After joining a social network site, users are invited to link up with others on the site that they know. Although the label for these connections differs according to site, common words are used to emphasise the informality, sociability and casualness of the links including ‘Friends’, ‘Contacts’, ‘Fans’ and ‘Followers’. On Facebook, individuals invite other users to be ‘Friends,’ in a relationship that is made visible to others on the site. This enables two users to communicate with each other and share content. The decision to include someone as an online ‘Friend’ prompts a ‘Friend request’ which asks the receiver to accept or reject the connection. This generates a further stage of processing or friendship management.

Most sites reveal the list of Friends to anyone permitted to view the profile but several recently launched privacy features enable users to prevent ‘non-Friends’ from either viewing their profiles, adding comments or sending messages. ‘Friend’ selection allows choice in excluding people from one’s friendship list. Excluding and ‘deFriending’ a person known to the member can generate offence. This practice is particularly an issue among teenagers for whom the management and public display of Friends can play a major role in peer group interactions. These are often characterised as intense, dramatic and occasionally volatile (see Chapter 5). In addition, a whole range of information about online status and idle status and about ‘away messages’ can reveal personal information about a person’s context and movement (Baron 2008).

While the contact lists on our mobile phones are used as personal reference tools for connecting with significant others, social network sites are unique in publicly displaying personal contact lists to all who have access to our profile. Contact lists publicise our networks as our ‘Friends’. Friends have therefore come to function as a key dimension of a person’s identity and self-presentation (see Chapter 4) as well as part of the regulation of access to certain features (such as commenting) and content (such as blog posts). The rise of social media has coincided with the introduction of several new words in the English language such as to ‘Friend’, to ‘defriend’ or to ‘unfriend’ a person; ‘offline friends’ and ‘non-friend’. The term ‘frenemies’ is used in the context of online stalking: ‘stalking your frenemies’. The term ‘unfriend’ was selected as the Oxford Word of the Year in 2009, defined as the action of deleting a person as a ‘friend’ on a social network site. ‘Friending’ a person on a social network site presupposes and evokes the idea of a degree of purpose and determination in establishing the connection (Madden and Smith 2010). Following boyd and Ellison (2007), the word ‘Friend’ is capitalised here to indicate social network contacts and to distinguish the term from conversational understandings of the term.

In a study of friendship in LiveJournal, Raynes-Goldie and Fono (2005) discovered considerable variation in the reasons people gave for Friending each other. Friendship represented content, offline facilitator, online community, trust, courtesy, declaration or nothing. Similar motives were found by danah boyd (2006) in a study of participants’ activities on Friendster and MySpace. Thirteen incentives were identified by boyd in descending importance, as follows:

1. Actual friends;
2. Acquaintances, family members, colleagues;
3. It would be socially inappropriate to say ‘no’ because you know them;
4. Having lots of Friends makes you look popular;
5. It’s a way of indicating that you are a fan (of that person, band, product, etc.);
6. Your list of Friends reveals who you are;
7. Their Profile is cool so being Friends makes you look cool;
8. Collecting Friends lets you see more people (Friendster);
9. It’s the only way to see a private Profile (MySpace);
10. Being Friends lets you see someone’s bulletins and their Friends-only blog posts (MySpace);
11. You want them to see your bulletins, private Profile, private blog (MySpace);
12. 12. You can use your Friends list to find someone later;
13. 13. It’s easier to say yes than no.

The first three incentives involve already known connections. The rest provide clues about why people connect to people whom they do not know. Most of the reasons given reveal how significant the technical facilitators are in affecting individuals’ incentives to connect (boyd 2006). There is evidence that Friending encompasses a wide range of contact categories and that, as boyd’s findings show, not all users view all ‘Friends’ as actual friends. The implications of these changing practices are explored in the following chapters.

The emerging principles and customs shaping online friendship and intimacy are having a profound impact on the way companionship is practised and experienced offline. This is particularly the case for young people (see Chapter 5). For example, users of sites such as MySpace are invited to rank their ‘Friends’ in order of preference as a routine feature of engagement. These online customs are also influencing conventions surrounding intimacy for adults. The word ‘Friend’ is being applied to all declared connections whatever their nature or intensity. Family members, work colleagues, school friends and acquaintances are regularly being listed and publicly displayed as ‘friends’. In 2007, Facebook set up a feature for users to group friends into categories. Before that, all contacts were indistinguishable, all being labelled as ‘Friends’. MySpace differed, with a tool enabling users to mark out their ‘Top 8’ contacts.

Modes of online connectivity

Levels of engagement

This section addresses variations in levels of social network site engagement according to social groups and online experiences. It acts as a backdrop to some fascinating details outlined in the following section about why and how people engage on si...