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• Teens, Technology and Friendships
• Chapter 4: Social Media and Friendships

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Meeting, Hanging Out and Staying in Touch: The Role of Digital Technology in Teen Friendships
• Chapter 2: How Teens Hang Out and Stay in Touch With Their Closest Friends
• Chapter 3: Video Games Are Key Elements in Friendships for Many Boys
• Chapter 5: Conflict, Friendships and Technology
• About This Report

Given the thorough integration of social media into the lives of the majority of American teens, it is no surprise that these sites play an important role in the establishment of friendships and the everyday back and forth of peer relationships. This chapter takes an in-depth look at the role of social media in teens’ friendships, looking at teen friendships more broadly defined.

Social media is an important venue for interaction and conversation among America’s youth. Fully 76% of all teens use social media. Facebook is the dominant platform, with 71% of all teens using it. Instagram and Snapchat also have become increasingly important, with 52% of teens using Instagram and 41% using Snapchat. One-third of American teens use Twitter and another third use Google Plus. Fewer teens use Vine or Tumblr.

Social media plays a critical role in connecting teens to new friends, allowing teens to learn more about new friends and get to know them better. Nearly two-thirds (64%) of teens who have made a new friend online say they have met new friends on a social media platform. Two-thirds (62%) of teens say they’ve shared their social media username with a brand new friend as a way to stay in touch.

Beyond making new friends, social media is major way that teens interact with their existing friends. More than nine-in-ten teens (94%) say they spend time with friends on social media. Fully 30% say they spend time with friends on social media every day, and another third (37%) say they do so every few days. When asked to rank the ways they communicate with friends, social media sites like Facebook or Twitter are one of the top ways of communicating with friends for two-thirds (66%) of teens.

A Majority of Teens Say Social Media Better Connects Them to Their Friends’ Feelings and Lives

As discussed earlier in the report, social media is a critical platform for making and staying in touch with friends. Given this, and the frequency with which many teens use social media, it is not surprising that teen social media users report that social media makes them feel better connected to their friends’ feelings and to information about what is going on in their friends’ lives. More than eight-in-ten (83%) social media-using teens say social media makes them more connected to information about what is happening in their friends’ lives and 70% say these social platforms better connect them to their friends’ feelings.

Girls who use social media are more likely than boys to say they are “a lot” better connected to information about their friends’ lives (40% vs. 26% boys) and their friends’ feelings (24% vs. 16% of boys) thanks to social media.

While teens of all races and ethnicities are equally likely to feel more connected to information about what’s going on in their friends’ lives through social media, black youth are more likely to say they feel “a lot” more connected. Hispanic teens are more likely than whites to say they feel more connected to friends’ feelings through social media, with 78% of Hispanic youth saying this compared with 65% of white youth.

Smartphones offer near constant access to friends and for social media users, their friends’ online postings. Not surprisingly, teens who have access to smartphones and use social media are more likely to report that they feel “a lot” more connected to what’s happening in their friends lives than teens without a smartphone. While both groups are equally likely to say they feel more connected to friends through their social media use, 36% of smartphone owners say they feel “a lot” better connected to friends while a quarter (25%) of teens without smartphone access report the same degree of connectedness.

Teens from our focus groups told us that they appreciate the way social media keeps them in the loop with friends. One high school boy explained, “One good thing to come out it is you can find out what your friends do and check on them if you’re not there. So like find out who they hooked up with and what they did…”

Teens also enjoy the way social media better connects them to more people. As one high school boy said, “And you can talk to people a lot more often ‘cause you don’t need to see them in person.”

Nearly nine-in-ten social media-using teens believe people overshare on these platforms

Even as teens often feel better connected to friends’ feelings and information about their lives through social media, they also report that they are sometimes too connected to their friends’ lives. Fully 88% of social media-using teens agree that people share too much information about themselves on social media, with 35% agreeing strongly. These data hold true regardless of which social media platforms teens use.

Teens from rural areas are more likely to agree strongly that people share too much information about themselves on social media than their urban or suburban counterparts, with 46% of rural teens strongly agreeing, compared with 31% of suburban teens and 39% of urban youth.

Nearly Seven-in-Ten Teens Receive Support From Friends Through Social Media During Tough Times

Social media not only connects teens to information and friends, but also connects them to opportunities for social support from their friends, peers and broader social networks. Among teens, 68% have received support on social media during challenges or tough times.

Following adult gender patterns around asking for and receiving social support on social media , girls are more likely to report receiving such support on social media, with nearly three-quarters (73%) of girls garnering support, compared with 63% of social media-using boys.

When examining overall support on social media during tough times, white social media-using teens are more likely than Hispanic teens to report receiving support on the platforms. Nearly three-quarters (72%) of white teens who use social media receive support for tough times on these platforms, while 59% of Hispanics receive similar encouragement. Digging down into the data, black teens who use social media are just as likely overall as white and Hispanic teens to garner support on social media in these situations. Still, they are more likely than white youth who use social media to say they receive that support frequently – with 28% of black teens reporting frequent support, while 15% of white teens report similar boosting from their online network during tough times.

Social media-using teens from households with more modest incomes are more likely than teens from the wealthiest families to say people frequently support them through challenges on social media. While 23% of teens from families earning less than $50,000 annually say they frequently have people supporting them on social media, 14% of teens from families earning more than $75,000 per year report frequent support.

Smartphone users are more likely than teens without access to smartphones to say people support them through challenges or tough times through social media. Fully 71% of smartphone-using teens who use social media say people support them through tough times on those platforms, while 58% of teens without a smartphone say the same.

Negative Feelings From Social Media Viewing

Even as social media connects teens to friends’ feelings and experiences in ways both positive and excessive, that same sharing can reveal events and activities to which teens weren’t invited, and can lead to negative comparisons between their own lives and the lives of those they are connected to on social media.

53% of social media-using teens have seen people posting to social media about events to which they were not invited

A bit more than half (53%) of social media-using teens have witnessed others posting to social media about gatherings, events or parties that they weren’t invited to. Most teens don’t experience this very often, with the bulk of teens (42%) saying it happens occasionally and just 11% saying it happens frequently.

Teens from households with more highly educated parents are more likely to say they haven’t been invited to events they later saw posted on social media. Two-thirds (65%) of teen social media users with parents with a college education or more say they’ve seen postings for events they weren’t invited to, as have half (50%) of teens whose parents have completed some college and 47% of teens whose parents have a high school diploma or less.

Most teens don’t feel worse about their lives based on what they see from others on social media

Social media exposes teens and adults to information about the lives of their friends. Given what we know about how teens curate and manage information posted to their social media platforms, some profiles post a highlight reel of individual lives, rather than a fuller picture of ups and downs. And while some youth feel worse about their own lives because of what they see on friends’ social media postings, the majority of teen social media users say they generally do not feel bad about their lives based on what they see on these platforms.

More than three-quarters (78%) of teens say they do not feel worse about their own lives based on what others post to social media, while 21% of teens say they do. Among those who do feel worse about their lives based on what they see on social media, most do not feel this particularly acutely; 17% say they feel “a little” worse and 4% say they feel “a lot” worse.

Hispanic youth are somewhat more likely to report that they feel worse about their own lives because of social media

More than a quarter (28%) of Hispanic teens report feeling worse about their lives because of social media postings, significantly more than the 12% of black youth who feel this way. The difference between these two groups and the 21% of white teens who say they feel worse is not statistically significant.

Self-Presentation and Curation of Social Media Presence

Teens as well as adults spend time curating and planning how to present themselves in online social spaces. Adults have often admonished teens to think carefully about what they post and share online, and in many cases, teens have taken this to heart. Online profiles and presence are constructed things for youth. With this need to be careful comes a need to present themselves to multiple audiences – to be authentic and compelling to peers and to simultaneously present a potentially sanitized and appropriate digital persona to adults like parents, teachers, future employers and college admissions officers.

Teens struggle to balance the needs of their different audiences and it shows in the pressures they experience and the attitudes they express about how their peers present themselves.

A large majority of teen social media users agree that people get to show different sides of themselves on social media that they cannot show offline

Some 85% of teen social media users agree that people get to show different sides of themselves on social media that they cannot show offline. This sentiment is consistent across most major demographic groups.

Teens with access to smartphones are also more likely to say people show different sides of themselves on social media, with 88% of smartphone owners agreeing with that statement, compared with 76% of teens without a smartphone.

In one of our focus groups, a high school girl explains what she considers a positive side of social media: “It allows you to show, like, a different side of yourself. … I mean, you can talk about different things. If you’re in person with them, you can joke around. But then like if you’re texting with them or talking about something serious, you can talk about serious things and politics and stuff, and it shows a different side of yourself that you might not talk about with them in person.”

Roughly three-quarters of teens think people are less authentic and real on social media than they are offline

Even as teens have the opportunity to share parts of themselves on social media that they can’t share in person, those same self-presentations don’t always feel authentic to their peers. Roughly three-quarters (77%) of social media-using teens agree people are less authentic and real on social media than they are offline.

Again, there are few major differences among different groups of teens in their agreement with this statement.

Many teens feel pressure to curate positive and well-liked content

While a majority of teens do not feel pressure to post content that makes them look good to others (such as parents or peers), 40% of teens do report feeling pressure to post positive and attractive content about themselves. The bulk of teens (30%) report feeling “a little” pressure, while just 10% say they feel “a lot” of pressure.

Teens with more highly educated parents are substantially more likely than teens who have parents with less education to report pressure to only post content that makes them look good. More than half (54%) of social media-using teens whose parents have a college degree or more report such pressure, while about of third of teens whose parents have some college experience or a high school diploma or less say the same. The bulk of teens whose parents have a college degree (42%) report feeling the pressure “a little” – just 12% feel “a lot” of pressure to post only positive content about themselves to social media. There are no significant differences between boys and girls, different ages or races and ethnicities in feeling this pressure.

Teens who are generally more interactive with others in a digital space – using it to make friends or play games with people they have never met – are all more likely to feel pressure to only post content that makes them look good to others.

Many teens want to be liked by friends and peers and that extends to digital “likes” as well.

In addition to the pressure some teens feel to post content that makes them look good, teens also feel pressure to post content that others like and comment on. Similar to the percentage of teens who feel pressure to post content that makes them look good, 39% of teens on social media say they feel pressure to post content that will be popular and get lots of comments or likes.

One middle school girl in our focus groups explained the pressure to post cool content to Instagram and how that led to the end of a friendship: “So it’s on Instagram. In my school, it’s like so you post quality pictures, I guess, and that makes you cool. I don’t know. It’s like a lot of girls have … they buy cameras just to do this – expensive cameras. So anyway, I guess K was accusing C of like being too much like her, and one of the reasons was because C was posting pictures. So she would edit her pictures like in such a way that it would look cool. … I don’t know how to describe it. It’s just a quality cool thing, I guess. So like they lost their friendship, and part of the reason was because of her social media account.”

Teens with more highly educated parents are more likely to report feeling pressure to post content that will garner likes or comments on social media. Nearly half (47%) of teens with parents with a college degree or more report feeling such pressure, while just 36% of teens whose parents have some college experience and 35% of teens whose parents have a high school diploma or less report feeling pressure to post well-liked content.

However, there are no differences between boys and girls, younger and older teens, or those of different racial or ethnic backgrounds when it comes to feeling pressure around posting content that others will like or comment on.

Teens who feel pressure to post content that garners likes or comments frequently feel that they must post only content that makes them look good. Fully 59% of teens who feel “a lot” of pressure to post popular content feel similarly pressured to post content that makes them look good to others.

42% of teens have had someone post things about them that they cannot change or control; older teens and white teens are especially likely to report this

The pressure to post content that others like and find appealing may be, in part, to counteract another challenge that teens and adults face on social media platforms: People posting content about them that they cannot control. Some 42% of teen social media users experience people posting things about them that they can’t change or control, with 9% indicating that this happens to them “frequently.”

Older teen social media users are more likely to say they’ve experienced this: 46% of teens ages 15 to 17 say they’ve had people posting things about them that they can’t change, compared with just over a third (35%) of teens ages 13 to 14. Broadly, there are no differences between boys and girls in their likelihood of having people posting things about them that they can’t change or control.

White teen social media users are more likely than Hispanic teens to report that people have posted things about them that they can’t control: 45% of white teens have experienced this, as have 32% of Hispanic teens. The 38% of black youth who have experienced this is not significantly different than white or Hispanic teens. All groups, but especially white teens, are likely to say this happens occasionally rather than frequently.

Among social media-using teens, those with more highly educated parents are more likely than teens with parents with lower levels of educational attainment to experience people posting things about them that they can’t change or control. Nearly half (48%) of social media-using teens whose parents have a college degree or more say content has been posted about them on social media that they can’t control, while 38% of teens whose parents have a high school diploma or less report similar experiences.

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6 Friendship and Social Media

• Published: November 2016
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The last decade has witnessed widespread use of social media platforms for initiating and maintaining friendships. Indeed, given that “friend” is a colloquial/technical term for social media connections, social media may not only foster friendship but also redefine it to an extent. Given the socioemotional significance attached to social media, this chapter reviews four strands of inquiry that have characterized scholarship on social media friendship thus far: (1) warranting and impression formation, (2) relational maintenance and media multiplexity, (3) social capital and social support, and (4) psychosocial well-being outcomes. With a few notable exceptions, scholarship across these domains has indicated beneficial psychological and relational outcomes accruing from social media use. In addition to more carefully delineating between “friend” as relationship type and “friend” as social media connection, future research should consider technological contexts beyond Facebook and demographic contexts beyond teens and young adults, and pursue greater theoretical and methodological sophistication.

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Social Media Communication and Friendship Essay

At the present stage of development, the modern world is characterized by the influence of social media: they have become an integral part of people’s everyday lives. As a result, the way people communicate and interact is now different from what it used to be. In other words, the dynamics are different. Konnikova refers to the research conducted by Dunbar and informs that “The amount of social capital you have is pretty fixed” (238). It means that the number of individuals a person can meet and associate with is limited. In the context of social media, the essence of communication is new, and the question is how people will develop their social skills in these circumstances. According to Maria Konnikova, social media have altered the authenticity of relationships: the world where virtual interactions are predominant is likely to change the next generation in terms of the ability to develop full social awareness in the context of real-life communication and interact online.

Initially, communication among people demanded the cultivation of relationships face to face. One cannot have unlimited contacts. The studies demonstrate that “the number of people the average could have in her social group was a hundred and fifty” (Konnikova 236). It is the nature of a human being that makes them include approximately 150 persons in their social circle. The number of people who may be invited to a large party exemplifies this characteristic. The author argues that early childhood experiences form future social relationships and interactions. This idea seems relevant to any society: people’s background prescribes a certain model of social behavior that will be used in adulthood. To put it bluntly, children translate their real-life experience into their future.

However, in the context of social media, the situation is different. One of the most important features is the lack of touching. According to the research, it plays a significant role for human beings since it provokes emotions directly connected with communication (Konnikova 239). Deprived of touching, a person interacts in a different way. Social media give the opportunity to exchange facts, but they cannot provide tactile perception. As a result, they cannot replace the face to face full communication. People do not communicate in the usual way: they do not obtain most of the non-verbal information even if they use, for instance, video. Something is always missing. The author conveys the idea that communication almost equals to guesstimation. It is unknown how the next generation will communicate face to face: the level of social awareness is likely to decrease.

Apart from the different contents of communication, social media also enlarge people’s circle of acquaintances. The number of contacts rises dramatically. A human being contacts not only with persons from the same city but also from all over the world – there are no barriers. However, the majority of these people are not friends or relatives. The author gives an objective assessment of these social networks. Facebook “allows you to keep track of people who would otherwise effectively disappear” (Konnikova 237).

To sum it up, social media have changed human interaction to a large extent. The way people view their partners in real-life differs from communication within online settings. What the future holds is not clear, but Maria Konnikova attempts to analyze the current tendencies and arrives at the conclusion that people may become less communicative in terms of face to face interaction. Taking into account the present-day environment, online friends will probably continue to be more important for people than their real-life fellows.

Works Cited

Konnikova, Maria. “The Limits of Friendship.” Emerging: Contemporary Readings for Writers . Ed. Barclay Barrios. New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2015. 236-239. Print.

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Social Media and Friendships Overview

Introduction.

The Internet revolution of the 21st century has redefined the way people meet, make friends, and sustain friendships. Social network sites (SNSs) have changed the conventional meet-and-talk scenarios where people would have face-to-face communication, know each other, and form meaningful friendships. SNSs encourage individuals to visit various social media platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter, among others, create a personal profile, and request other people to become friends. This process seems straightforward, simple, and effective, as it saves people the hustle of meeting physically, which involves planning, traveling, and other logistical issues. SNSs have solved the underlying problems and barriers to communication and making friendships because all that is needed is a simple mobile device and access to Internet connectivity. Additionally, social media has become timeless, and people can connect with each other regardless of location and time. As such, a person in Mumbai, India, would have friends all over the world from Canada in North America to Argentina in South America, Botswana in Africa, Russia in Europe, to Australia. From the outside, this removal of barriers in the process of forming friendships should be celebrated.

However, taking a closer look at the speed at which friendships are developed and the surrounding context, social media has both negative and positive impacts in terms of initiating and nurturing meaningful relationships. To some extent, social media as a medium could be highly ineffective as a channel for maintaining genuine friendships. This paper examines how the introduction of social media has impacted the development of friendships. In particular, it will look at how social media has changed the way relationships are nurtured, the speed at which they are developed, and the context under which they are developed. Finally, the discussion on this topic will highlight both positive and negative impacts, also looking at how relationships might develop under false pretenses, or how social media as a medium may not be as genuine to maintaining friendships.

Problem Statement

Social media plays a central role in the way people interact, communicate, and make friends in modern times. SNSs create an enabling environment for people to connect and become friends within a short time, regardless of time and space. However, based on the guiding principles of friendship, the context under which individuals befriend each other through social media may not facilitate the nurturing of meaningful and lasting relationships. Therefore, it is important to understand these contexts, examine the way through which friendships are nurtured, and assess both negative and positive impacts of social medial on friendships. Ultimately, this paper seeks to discuss why social media, as a medium of communication, might not be the right channel for making and maintaining genuine friendships.

Literature Review

The impacts of social media on friendships have been studied and documented widely in the literature. A study by Linaa Jensen and Scott Serensen (2013) sought to discuss the norms of friendships formed through SNSs by focusing on the privacy of users. This article is about the way people make friends through social media, specifically focusing on the process that individuals follow when letting other people into their circle of online friends. This article sought to address the research question about how SNSs friendship norms are “made more explicit, through strategies of friending, privacy settings, and identity performance, than in “traditional” social relationships, where they are often more implicit” (Linaa Jensen & Scott Serensen, 2013, p. 50). The authors used a qualitative survey to study 1710 Internet users in Denmark, with 970 of them being Facebook users, and later recruited 20 of them in a focus group meeting where their profiles were monitored for 12 months. This article added important knowledge in the area of understanding how social media has affected friendships, especially by highlighting that SNSs allow explicit friendship formations. The results showed that social media allows users to have a “mixture of strong, weak and even latent ties, representing close friends and family as well as mere acquaintances” (Linaa Jensen & Scott Serensen, 2013, p. 60). While the authors did not make suggestions for future research, the results of this study contribute significantly to understanding how social media affects friendship. It is clear that the majority of friendships created over SNSs, especially by young people, are mere acquaintances without lasting utility, which supports the claim that such platforms are not suitable for the maintenance of genuine and long-term relationships.

In another study, Lebedko (2014) sought to examine how social networking, together with globalization, has affected intercultural communication. The article is about how SNSs create platforms that encourage communication through writing as opposed to speech, which affects intercultural communication and changes the conceptualization of friendship. The research question that the author sought to answer is – how globalization, networking, and intercultural communication interact and the way students perceive them and regard the underlying changes to conventional communication. For this study, surveys were conducted using 59 students drawn from a university in Russia, and data was collected through questionnaires. The author added to the knowledge of the subject area by highlighting how people conceptualize friendship in modern times. The results indicated that the concept of friendship has significantly evolved with the use of SNSs. For instance, Lebedko (2014) found that regarding Internet ‘friendship’, “identity can be disguised when ‘friends’ are reluctant to know their ‘friends’ and use nicknames” (p. 34). This assertion points to the negative impacts of social media on friendship, which has become a superficial concept without meaningful connections. For example, as pointed in this study, people are willing to use an alias instead of their real names, which means that they are unwilling to reveal their identity, and thus not yearning for the creation of genuine friendships. The author did not suggest areas for future study.

Similarly, another study by Koban and Krüger (2017) wanted to understand how the strength of ties between individuals affects direct interaction and social surveillance among Facebook friends in both the same and different geographical areas. This article is about the role of social media in maintaining friendships. For example, the article investigated whether social media would play an important role in keeping friendships among people living in different geographical locations. The research questions used in this study include “i) How does tie strength influence social surveillance? ii) Does tie strength moderate the link between physical distance and direct interaction as well as social surveillance? iii) Does tie strength moderate the link between temporal distance and direct interaction?” (Koban & Krüger, 2017, p. 76). The authors surveyed 302 participants to collect data on the role of social media in maintaining long-distance friendships. The authors contributed to the subject area by highlighting that in terms of maintaining friendships, face-to-face interaction is a more effective way as compared to social media. The results showed that even after forming friendships off-line, when face-to-face interaction is minimized, such friendships tend to wane. These findings are important in understanding how social media affects friendship. The data suggest that meaningful and lasting relationships might not be sustained through social media interaction, especially when face-to-face communication is missing. While on the one hand social media allows people who became friends off-line to stay connected even after geographical separation, the strength of such online friendships is weak, which entrenches the concept of “out of sight, out of mind”.

When trying to understand to impact of social media on friendship, it is important to ask some critical questions. In his study, Hall (2016) raised an important research question, “when is social media use social interaction?” (p. 162). This article is about the context under which social media use could be termed as social interaction. For instance, people could be reading posts on Facebook, but such use of social media might not amount to social interaction. Therefore, Hall (2016) seeks to discuss the concept of mediated social interaction within the context of social media use. The quantitative study method was chosen for this research. The author adds to the knowledge of the subject area by indicating that the majority of time spent on social media does not go to social interaction. For instance, when a Facebook user spends time reading newsfeeds and posts by his or her friends, it does not translate into social interaction. On the surface, this engagement creates the illusion that people are communicating or interacting meaningfully; however, a closer look at the data reveals that social media is destroying the concept of friendship. This study found that over 50 percent of time spent on Twitter involves passive consumption of information posted by others and newsfeed, while activities that contribute to meaningful relations, such as chatting, occupied a paltry 4 percent. The implication of these findings is that social media gives users the false hope that they are communicating with their friends, while, in essence, they are not, which ultimately affects friendship negatively. The author gave directions for future studies by stating that research should be conducted to understand both the theoretical and operational differences of social media usage and social interaction.

In another study, Hogan (2018) sought to understand how the quest to ensure the privacy of users’ data on SNSs has affected the process of making friends. This article unpacks the complicated privacy rules that regulate the kind of information concerning users that could be gathered and accessed by third parties, including fellow users. For instance, a person seeking to make friends online is limited in terms of the data that can be accessed about these individuals. The article’s research question is how privacy regulations by SNSs platforms affect generativity and access to users’ data. The author added significant knowledge to the area of the effects of social media on friendships. The results show that social media platforms, such as Twitter and Facebook, have intensified their efforts to protect their users’ data from access by third parties. Hogan (2018) notes that this aspect could be explained using two legitimate considerations, “The first is privacy, which is in the user’s interest, and the second control, which is in the platform’s interest” (p. 603). In the context of making and maintaining friendships, the problem with highly restrictive privacy policies is that they limit people in terms of the background information that could be gathered concerning the involved parties. For instance, if person A wants to become friends with person B, the information about person B that person A could gather is highly limited. Therefore, while on the one hand, social media creates an environment to make friends, it controls the strength of those relationships as people are compelled to connect with strangers with very little knowledge about each other.

As useful platforms of communication and making friendships, SNSs are subject to abuse by various users. In their study, Valencia Ortiz and Castaño Garrido (2019) sought to “examine the extent of addiction of young Mexicans to online social media networks by adapting the Sahin scale” (p. 7). The article is about the negative effects of social media, especially on young users. The research question for the study focused on the extent of addiction to online social media among young Mexicans. The quantitative study method was chosen for this study to understand the extent of addiction to social media. The authors contributed positively to the subject area by providing useful data concerning the state of social media misuse among young people, which ultimately leads to addiction. The results showed that while most respondents were addicted to social media, they were unaware of such addiction, which is dangerous because they cannot seek help. While this study focused on social media addiction, it relates strongly to the effects of SNSs on friendships. One of the issues that arise in this article is that young people are highly addicted to social media, which means that they spend a lot of time on these platforms. Consequently, they lack time for face-to-face communication and interaction with their peers, which ultimately affects the kind of relationships and friendships that they form offline. As such, while social media is a useful tool for connecting people, it is making its users anti-social at the same time, which negatively affects the concept of friendship forming and maintenance.

In yet another study, Dubois et al. (2016) wanted to understand what happens when people share information online with friends and strangers. The article is about word-of-mouth valence changes when subjected to both low and high levels of interpersonal closeness. For instance, when talking about the effects of social media on people’s lives, how does communication this information change based on the level of interpersonal closeness. The research question for this article was on the effect of interpersonal closeness on word-of-mouth valence and the underlying process and boundary conditions (Dubois et al., 2016). The authors used the quantitative study method to conduct four different experiments. This article contributes important knowledge to the subject area by highlighting how interpersonal closeness shapes the communicated information. The results show that people are likely to share the good side of a story with strangers in the quest to enhance their self-image and present themselves as credible. Concerning suggestions for future research, the authors highlighted the need to investigate “how IC might affect the likelihood to share valenced information” (Dubois et al., 2016, p. 724). While this paper is about marketing and how the contents of word-of-mouth are subject to interpersonal closeness, it highlights important aspects of the impacts of social media on friendship. For instance, the article showed that people are likely to focus on their positive sides when talking to strangers. This aspect implies that individuals are likely to misrepresent themselves and create an image of perfection, which is misleading for social media users seeking to make friendships. This assertion explains how innocent people become friends with criminals and serial killers without their knowledge because they are duped into believing that they are dealing with genuine people.

This literature review has explored the various impacts of social media on the concept of friendship. From the data gathered, it is clear that social medial has played a central role in connecting individuals around the world. The ease with which users could access SNSs allows people to make friends from all over the globe within a short period. However, this review has shown the many negative effects of social media on friendships. For instance, the excessive usage of these platforms has led to addiction, which means that people do not have time for face-to-face connections and interactions, and thus meaningful relationships and friendships are on declining among social media users. Additionally, the context under which online friendships are initiated, nurtured, and developed are full of ambiguity, which affects the quality and strength of the resulting relationships. For instance, social media platforms have imposed stringent privacy rules in the interest of protecting the personal and sensitive information of various users. While it is important to keep users’ privacy, this aspect works against the spirit of initiating meaningful friendships. When strangers meet online, the least they can do before starting any form of relationship is to conduct a background check of one another. However, the privacy rules in place do not allow people to access relevant information. Therefore, users are left on their own to figure out the authenticity of their online friends. This problem is compounded by the fact that users can decide to hide their real identities and instead use pseudo names. Consequently, online relationships via social media platforms could develop under pretenses leading to adverse consequences, such as rape and murder, among other social ills. For instance, a serial killer might take advantage of social media to initiate friendships with various victims before luring them to a trap and murdering them ultimately.

One of the interesting findings from this literature review is the idea that the use of social media does not amount to social interaction. People get the impression that they are engaging in social interaction when scrolling through newsfeeds and posts by friends and strangers alike. These arguments, as put forward by Hall (2016), are highly valuable, especially when examining the impact of social media on friendships. Users get the illusion that they are socializing when, in essence, they are consuming information that does not contribute to the basic definition of social interaction. Another interesting issue is the possibility that social media is essentially anti-social, as highlighted by Valencia Ortiz and Castaño Garrido (2019). The widespread of social media misuse leads to addiction means that users do not have the time to form meaningful face-to-face connections and relationships because they spend the majority of their time on social media. Ultimately, such individuals become anti-social because they cannot sustain useful face-to-face conversations. Therefore, it suffices to argue that social media, as a medium, may not be a reliable channel for forming and maintaining genuine friendships. In the future, research should explore ways through which social media could be designed for the creation of lasting friendships.

Dubois, D., Bonezzi, A., & De Angelis, M. (2016). Sharing with friends versus strangers: How interpersonal closeness influences word-of-mouth valence. Journal of Marketing Research , 53 (5), 712-727.

Hall, J. A. (2018). When is social media use social interaction? Defining mediated social interaction. New Media & Society, 20 (1), 162-179.

Hogan, B. (2018). Social media giveth, social media taketh away: Facebook, friendships, and APIs. International Journal of Communication, 12 , 592-611.

Koban, K., & Krüger, S. (2018). Out of sight, (not yet) out of mind: The impact of tie strength on direct interaction and social surveillance among geographically close and long-distance Facebook friends. Communication Research Reports , 35 (1), 74-84.

Lebedko, M. G. (2014). Globalization, networking, and intercultural communication. Intercultural Communication Studies , 23 (1), 712-727.

Linaa Jensen, J., & Scott Serensen, A. (2013). “Nobody has 257 friends” strategies of friending, disclosure and privacy on Facebook. Nordicom Review, 34 (1), 49-62.

Valencia Ortiz, R., & Castaño Garrido, C. (2019). Use and abuse of social media by adolescents: A study in Mexico . Píxel-BIT Revista de Medios y Educación , 54, 7-28.

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Social Media and the Devolution of Friendship: Full Essay (Pts I & II)

“Well, you saw what I posted on Facebook, right?”

I don’t know about you, but when I get this question from a friend, my answer is usually “no.” No, I don’t see everything my friends post on Facebook—not even the 25 or so people I make a regular effort to keep up with on Facebook, and not even the subset of friends I count as family. I don’t see everything most of my friends tweet, either; in fact, “update Twitter lists” has been hovering in the middle of my to-do list for the better part of a year. And even after I update those lists, I probably still won’t be able to keep up with everything every friend says on Twitter, either.

I feel guilty when I get the “You saw what I posted, right?” question. I feel like a bad friend, like I’m slacking off in my care work, like I’m failing to value my important human relationships. Danah boyd ( @zephoria ) was talking about something similar in October of this year at “ Boom and Bust “—about how social networking sites create pressure to put time and effort into tending weak ties, and how it can be impossible to keep up with them all. Personally, I also find it difficult to keep up with my strong ties. I’m a great “pick up where we left off” friend, as are most of the people closest to me (makes sense, right?). I’m decidedly sub-awesome, however, at being in constant contact with more than a few people at a time.

Anyway, I have a bad case of Social Media Saturation Guilt, and “You saw what I posted, right?” hits that guilt square on its head. Recently, however, I’ve been thinking about how the awkward collisions of online and offline conversation used to run in the opposite direction. Twelve years ago [i] I was on an email list that was basically a private, 70-someodd person pre-Facebook: members shared links, asked questions, had serious conversations, sent invitations to parties, and circulated photos taken at those parties after they happened. It wasn’t uncommon to talk about something someone had posted to “the list” in face-to-face conversation, whether in small groups or at larger events.

Then, over a period of a month or two, most of us on “the list” got on Livejournal , and most of us who had Livejournals started ‘reading’ most of the rest of us who had Livejournals. (Yeah, Livejournal. We’re back in late 2000, remember?)

The affordances of Livejournal being what they are, most of us posted different content to our Livejournals than we did to “the list.” The intersection of Livejournal content and in-person conversation, however, wasn’t as seamless as the intersection of list content and in-person conversation. A new phenomenon popped up that a good portion of “the list” found anywhere from off-putting to downright hurtful, and it looked something like this:

The Scene: a “list” party.

List Member A: Hey, it’s good to see you! What have you been up to recently? List Member B: [ Starts to tell story ]— List Member A: [ Cuts off List Member B ] Yeah, I know. I read your Livejournal.

These aborted conversations became common enough that they spawned a long, intense debate on “the list” about what should be the proper etiquette for intersections of Livejournal and life-in-the-moment. Some list members felt it was rude and insensitive for friends to cut each other off; other list members felt it was rude and entitled for friends to expect each other to sit through the same story twice. The eventual compromise was to declare a sort of ‘best practice,’ which was that List Member A should signal being caught up with List Member B’s Livejournal by chiming in with a detail from the story: “Oh yeah! But then you found your cat hiding in the wall, right?” List Member B, on the other hand, should truncate the story accordingly: “Yeah! I have no idea how she got in there!”

So how did the Awkward Party Comment shift from “I know, I read your Livejournal” to “You read what I posted on Facebook, right?” There’s a simple explanation, which is that each of us was probably consuming less friend-generated and friend-circulated digital content back then. This could be because those of us on “the list” were just maintaining fewer digital connections in 2000, but there’s also the mode of communication to consider: though some list members juggled multiple different list subscriptions, and Livejournal, and usenet or BBS groups, all of these revolved primarily around text-based communication, and original text takes time to create (something of which I’m particularly aware at the moment, as I write this). When the rate of friend-content production was slower, it was easier to consume most if not all of what our friends produced and circulated.

Yet I don’t think this shift in content production alone explains the shift in social expectation. I think there’s something else in play, which I’m going to call the devolution of friendship . As I explain over the course of this essay, I link the devolution of friendship to—but do not “blame” it on—the affordances of various social networking platforms, especially (but not exclusively) so-called “frictionless sharing” features.

What does “devolution” mean? I’m using the word here in the same way that people use it to talk about the devolution of health care . One example of devolution of health care is some outpatient surgeries: patients are allowed to go home after their operations, but they still require a good deal of post-operative care such as changing bandages, irrigating wounds, administering medications, etc. Whereas before these patients would stay in the hospital and nurses would perform the care-labor necessary for their recoveries, patients must now find their own caregivers (usually family members or friends; sometimes themselves) to perform free care-labor. In this context, devolution marks the shift of labor and responsibility away from the medical establishment and onto the patient; within the patient-medical establishment collaboration, the patient must now provide a greater portion of the necessary work. Similarly, in some ways, we now expect our friends to do a greater portion of the work of being friends with us.

[Obligatory “We” Check: by “we,” here I mean some social media users some of the time. I’m not saying that all social media users’ expectations have shifted in this way, or that any given social media user’s friendship expectations are uniform across different friends, times, or contexts, or that the devolution of friendship applies only to people who use social media. Got it? Ok good.]

Through social media, “sharing with friends” is rationalized to the point of relentless efficiency. The current apex of such rationalization is frictionless sharing : we no longer need to perform the labor of telling our individual friends about what we read online, or of copy-pasting links and emailing them to “the list,” or of clicking a button for one-step posting of links on our Facebook walls. With frictionless sharing, all we have to do is look, or listen; what we’ve read or watched or listened to is then “shared” or “scrobbled” to our Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, or whatever other online profiles. Whether we share content actively or passively, however, we feel as though we’ve done our half of the friendship-labor by ‘pushing’ the information to our walls, streams, and tumblelogs . It’s then up to our friends to perform their halves of the friendship-labor by ‘pulling’ the information we share from those platforms.

When we think about this form of “bulk sharing” from our perspectives as content-creators and circulators, there are ways in which it seems like a good thing. We’re busy people; we like the idea of making one announcement on Facebook and being done with it, rather than having to repeat the same story over and over again to different friends individually. We also like not always having to think about which friends might like which stories or songs; we like the idea of sharing with all of our friends at once, and then letting them sort out amongst themselves who is and isn’t interested. Though social media can create burdensome expectations to keep up with strong ties, weak ties, and everyone in between, social media platforms can also be very efficient. Using the same moment of friendship-labor to tend multiple friendships at once kills more birds with fewer stones.

There are also ways in which we like being on the “more labor” side of devolution. For instance, sometimes we like the devolution of health care: if we are privileged enough to have people who can perform the necessary care-labor for us, many of us would prefer to recover from surgery in the comfort of our own homes rather than in hospitals. Theorists point out that we provide free labor when we use self-checkout machines at grocery stores and pharmacies, but to some of us that ‘free labor’ is a small price to pay for getting in and out faster, for waiting in a shorter line, and for not dealing with (“dealing with”) another human being at a conventional checkout counter.

Similarly, sometimes we like the devolution of friendship. When we have to ‘pull’ friendship-content instead of receiving it in a ‘push’, we can pick and choose which content items to pull. We can ignore the baby pictures, or the pet pictures, or the sushi pictures—whatever it is our friends post that we only pretend to care about (if we even bother to pretend). Whether we interact through digital media, through the telephone, or through speech in face-to-face conversations, socializing with specific individual friends requires that we mask our disinterest in [babies/pets/sushi/other] by actively ‘smiling and nodding,’ in one form or another. The non-specific sharing of devolved friendship, however, lets us skip this step. We can leave it to everyone else to respond, or tell ourselves that our sushi baby pet friend isn’t really talking to us in particular. Within devolved friendship interactions, it takes less effort to be polite while secretly waiting for someone to please just stop talking .

So if we like devolved friendship from the perspective of both share-producers and share-consumers, what’s the problem? While I won’t go so far as to say they’re definitely ‘problems,’ there are two major things about devolved friendship that I think are worth noting. The first is the non-uniform rationalization of friendship-labor, and the second is the depersonalization of friendship-labor. I explore both below.

The Non-Uniform Rationalization of Friendship-Labor Social media has rationalized “sharing with friends” to the point of relentless efficiency, but it has not rationalized “being shared with” to the same degree. Instead, the ease of sharing means that we are now bombarded with ‘shared’ information —something Facebook itself has acknowledged with its new “sponsored” status updates , and that some of us acknowledge when we turn off frictionless sharing because we’re concerned about “spamming” our friends . We produce “sharing” at a rate far greater than we can consume it, and we flood the marketplace for attention.

Of course, some of our friends might not mind performing more friendship-labor. Their own friends:time ratios might be low, and therefore allow them to keep up with everything we produce and circulate. Other friends might decline to perform the extra friendship-labor we implicitly demand of them, but also not mind maintaining closeness across a more distanced engagement. Still other friends might be ok with the fact that, again and again, we still haven’t seen whatever super-awesome thing of unbelievable awesomeness they posted, even though they posted it on whatever platform a week ago. Regardless, the shift from a “push” model of friendship to a “pull” model is worth noting.

It’s important to note here that, though I talk about our roles as share-producers and as share-consumers, these roles are deeply interrelated. This is because social media is something we prosume , something we both produce and consume in a simultaneous bi-directional feedback loop not unlike the give-and-take of functional friendship. The shares we produce often contain the same content we consumed just moments earlier; even when we generate original content, chances are pretty good we’ll consume some of our friends’ shares while logged in to social media sites to produce our own shares. If any frictionless sharing functions are in play, our content consumption fuels a whole stream of newly-produced share content. Even if we’ve turned off frictionless sharing, and even if we don’t repost anything we consume, our content consumption still produces data through cookies and other online tracking devices, and this data in turn feeds back into the algorithms that shape and structure our social media experiences. Though how much deliberate effort we put into each role may vary, the reality of prosumption is that it’s essentially impossible to engage in either the production or the consumption of social media content without engaging in the other. (Make a mental note of this concept if you don’t already know it, because I’ll reference it again near the end.)

The Depersonalization of Friendship-Labor The second thing worth noting is that devolved friendship is also depersonalized friendship. Sure, we still send specific messages to specific friends through social media services, through other electronic media like email and text messages, and through non-electronic media; the personalized, hard-to-track shares that take place through email and text message communication (etc) may get called “ dark social ,” but they’re still social and we’re still engaged in producing them. We also still post things on each other’s individual Facebook walls, and we still send @replies on Twitter. Sometimes we share with specific friends within our generalized broadcasts, perhaps by tagging them in a Facebook status update or by slipping an @mention into the middle of a tweet. These things are not examples of depersonalized friendship. Frictionless sharing and generalized broadcasting, however, do represent depersonalized friendship, because we’re not sharing with any one or more of our friends in particular. Instead we’re sharing generally, with an unknown subset of people who will self-select from whatever potential audience we’ve allowed.

I talked a bit about this difference between “social” and “personal” sharing in an expanded version of my August post about the social music streaming service Spotify. To summarize, I signed up for a free trial of Spotify in order to update my essay, and found that being on Spotify isn’t at all what I’d expected. Given that Spotify is supposed to be “social,” and that near a half dozen people had been pushing me for weeks to start using it, I sort of expected that…you know…being on Spotify would involve experiences that felt like socializing. I imagined Spotify would be like a geographically distributed, digitally-enabled version of the old H3W porch (that’s Historic 3 Wadsworth ), where a certain group of my friends used to spend every Monday night listening to—and arguing about—music. Friends, conversations, shared songs, chaotic banter: personal, collective, reciprocal social interaction.

Being on Spotify, however, is not like being on the porch. When you show up on the porch, your friends talk to you. Though a good deal of conversation (and performance) is addressed to the generalized audience of the group, your friends speak to you individually as well [ii] . There will also be times when you, specifically, are called upon to address the group, even before Monday becomes Tuesday and the world’s most wonderfully esoteric word game begins. Even when you are not speaking your friends recognize that you are there, and you recognize that you are there. Everyone on the porch knows that everyone on the porch knows who’s on the porch. The group may be a generalized audience, but it is a specific and mutually recognized generalized audience.

When you show up on Spotify, however, your friends don’t automatically talk to you. They don’t automatically send you notes and songs either, the way I do with my friends via both email and snailmail. You can see when your friends are listening to something (if they scrobble, or have “Spotify Social” enabled), but you have no idea if any of them know you’re there and looking. Scrobbling might be “social,” but it’s not very personal by default.

Personal interaction doesn’t just happen on Spotify, and since I was hoping Spotify would be the New Porch, I initially found Spotify to be somewhat lonely-making. It’s the mutual awareness of presence that gives companionate silence its warmth, whether in person or across distance. The silence within Spotify’s many sounds, on the other hand, felt more like being on the outside looking in. This isn’t to say that Spotify can’t be social in a more personal way; once I started sending tracks to my friends, a few of them started sending tracks in return. But it took a lot more work to get to that point, which gets back to the devolution of friendship (as I explain below).

When I first started poking around on Spotify, I wasn’t at all sure what the behavioral and interactional norms were supposed to be. Clicking on my friends’ listening activity without talking to them felt a bit like rifling through somebody’s CD collection without permission after they’d stepped out to use the restroom—which I recognize some people don’t mind, but which to me feels like something of a transgression. One ‘Spotivangelist’ friend told me that I was being ridiculous, and that scrobbling (frictionless sharing of one’s listening activity) is “ donating your taste to a generalized other .” I wasn’t sure I agreed exactly, but I took that one friend’s statement as tacit, blanket permission to start checking out what any of my friends were listening to (without clicking into “private” mode beforehand, and then feeling guilty about it later).

I’ve been thinking since, however, on what it means to view our friends as “generalized others.” I may now feel like less of like “creepy stalker” when I click on a song in someone’s Spotify feed, but I don’t exactly feel ‘shared with’ either. Far as I know, I’ve never been SpotiVaguebooked (or SubSpotified ?); I have no reason to think anyone is speaking to me personally as they listen to music, or as they choose not to disable scrobbling (if they make that choice consciously at all). I may have been granted the opportunity to view something, but it doesn’t follow that what I’m viewing has anything to do with me unless I choose to make it about me. Devolved friendship means it’s not up to us to interact with our friends personally; instead it’s now up to our friends to make our generalized broadcasts personal.

Nathan Jurgenson ( @nathanjurgenson ) has suggested that my awkward feelings about interacting with individual friends as a ‘generalized other’ are a form of cyberasociality [pdf], but I’m not certain I agree with him. I think the key piece in my discomfort, in my inability to read frictionless sharing and generalized broadcasts as friendship-labor (or as “personal social interaction”) in and of themselves, is that these forms lack clear mutual acknowledgement. The problem is that they’re depersonalized, not that they’re digitally mediated. That said, for all the examples of interaction that is both digitally mediated & mutually acknowledged that I can list, I can’t come up with an analogous non-digital form of depersonalized friendship-labor. If depersonalized friendship-labor is in fact unique to digitally mediated interaction, I can’t dismiss ‘resistance to depersonalized friendship as cyberasociality’ as readily as I would like.

In any case, regardless of whether it brings more harms or benefits—and regardless of my (potentially cyberasocial) relationship to it—devolved friendship’s attendant depersonalization deserves attention. When we consider the lopsided rationalization of ‘sharing’ and ‘shared with,’ as well as the depersonalization of frictionless sharing and generalized broadcasting, what becomes clear is this: the social media deck is stacked in such a way as to make being ‘a self’ easier and more rewarding than being ‘a friend.’

Jenny Davis ( @Jup83 ) recently highlighted the incentivization to share with her concept of FOBM, or “fear of being missed.” FOMO, “fear of missing out,” is the anxiety we feel when we can’t keep up with consuming all the share-content our friends produce. Because it is now up to us to turn our friends’ generalized broadcasts into personal interaction, we can never know how many opportunities for connection slip by and are lost when we get behind in sifting through our streams. But again, that sifting takes a lot of work: as Davis says of her experience watching the second Presidential debate without access to Facebook or Twitter, “I wanted to see what everyone was saying, but I also knew that the vast majority of [even the smartest members of my network] would not be saying much of substance.” Davis’s comment is not a snarky remark about her friends, but rather an acknowledgement of the fact that even if she’d had access to Twitter during the debate, she’d have been sorting through a lot of dumb “binders full of women” jokes to get to more substantive conversations about, say, sexism in the workplace.

Fear Of Being Missed, on the other hand, is the anxiety we feel when we can’t produce share-content ourselves. As Davis explains in the comments, FOBM “isn’t that others recognize and lament one’s absence, but rather, that one is skipped over or unseen .” If FOMO is the fear of being excluded and forgotten for failing to consume share-content, FOBM is the fear of being excluded and forgotten for failing to produce share-content. “Interaction begets interaction,” Davis explains. So assuming we want interaction with our friends, how do we go about getting it? On the one hand we can attempt to tackle FOMO, and knock ourselves out sorting through all of our friends’ share-content looking for individual instances of generalized friendship-labor that we can work to personalize. On the other hand, we can attempt to tackle FOBM–and skip the sorting, in favor of letting our friends respond to our own generalized friendship-labor. Obviously the vast majority of us take on both of these tasks, but the latter is a much more efficient way to harvest the attention and acknowledgment we crave.

It’s easy to share, to broadcast, to put our selves and our tastes and our identity performances out into the world for others to consume; what feedback and friendship we get in return comes in response to comparatively little effort and investment from us. It takes a lot more work, however, to do the consumption, to sift through everything all (or even just some) of our friends produce, to do the work of connecting to our friends’ generalized broadcasts so that we can convert their depersonalized shares into meaningful friendship-labor.

We may be prosumers of social media, but the reward structures of social media sites encourage us to place greater emphasis on our roles as share-producers —even though many of us probably spend more time consuming shared content than producing it. There’s a reason for this, of course; the content we produce (for free) is what fuels every last ‘Web 2.0’ machine, and its attendant self-centered sociality is the linchpin of the peculiarly Silicon Valley concept of “Social” (something Nathan Jurgenson and I discuss together in greater detail here ). It’s not super-rewarding to be one of ten people who “like” your friend’s shared link, but it can feel rewarding to get 10 “likes” on something you’ve shared—even if you have hundreds or thousands of ‘friends.’ Sharing is easy; dealing with all that shared content is hard.

Obviously there’s a whole lot more to friendship than sharing links, songs, and moving pictures (even if they’re pictures of spinning disco chickens , or of an epic sports catastrophe ). But I wonder sometimes if the shifts in expectation that accompany devolved friendship don’t migrate across platforms and contexts in ways we don’t always see or acknowledge. Social media affects how we see the world —and how we feel about being seen in the world —even when we’re not engaged directly with social media websites. It’s not a stretch, then, to imagine that the affordances of social media platforms might also affect how we see friendship and our obligations as friends most generally.

Whitney Erin Boesel does the majority of her generalized broadcasting —and a good deal of specific broadcasting, too —on Twitter: @phenatypical

Someecard image from http://www.someecards.com/birthday-cards/it-would-be-significantly-easier-to-wish Social media saturation image from http://contexts.org/articles/spring-2012/too-many-friends/ Photo of Antigone in wall heater by Whitney Erin Boesel. Used with permission. Social media production rates image from http://spectacularoptical.tumblr.com/post/33773042893 Too many friends image from http://cupidscharm.blogspot.com/2012/06/can-you-have-too-many-friends.html Friend collage image from http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/30/fashion/30FACEBOOK.html?pagewanted=all Enough friends image from http://avatar.hq-picture.com/too-many-friends-avatar-36446.html They are not you image from http://emiliesicons4friends.xanga.com/ Crowd at train station photo from http://lynan.wordpress.com/2012/07/14/what-does-it-feel-like-to-be-lonely/ Blurred people image from http://carlcj.tripod.com/GalleryII/ Boy lost in crowd image from http://www.richwainwright.com/blog/foreign-assignments/borders-barriers-israeli-separation-barrier/attachment/israel0023/ Still from Tideland from http://pj-shadow.blogspot.com/2010_12_01_archive.html

[i] Oh noes, I’m old. Crap. [ii] If you’re shy, or an introvert, or both: this actually matters.

Comments 14

7 stories to read this weekend — tech news and analysis — december 22, 2012.

[...] Social media and the devolution of friendship: As you sit with your family and friends this holiday week, it might be a good time to reevaluate and rethink online relationships and the meaning they carry.  I don’t necessarily agree with the writer, but don’t disagree with her either, for her observations do ring true. [...]

7 stories to read this weekend - Cleantech Reporter — December 22, 2012

Mein tag « daniel rehn – digitales & reales — december 25, 2012.

[...] mich? Check. Was schrieben die Kontakte in Übersee derweil? Oh, ein toller Essay über die “Devolution of Friendship” durch Social Media, aber wieder so lang. Okay, Zeit aufzustehen und das Menschenkostüm [...]

Tim McCormick — December 26, 2012

> "We produce 'sharing' at a rate far greater than we can consume it, > and we flood the marketplace for attention."

social-media systems themselves mediate this disparity, though, by controlling the "reach" of shared media. For example, in February, Facebook stated that the average reach, or exposure, for personal posts was 12% (see http://techcrunch.com/2012/02/29/facebook-post-reach-16-friends/). Similar reach figures have been reported for Twitter.

A user who expects his friends to have seen all his posts just doesn't understand how it works.

So in this sense there is not really a disproportion in sharing and being shared with -- the system handles that. What needs to be examined more, I think is the mechanics and implications of this opaque filtering: how and why it's done and how and why people accept it.

thought dump, december 2012 edition « a few things — December 27, 2012

[...] to leave a few times, but it’s fun to have. In moderation. However, i’ve found several interesting articles about some problems with the shift to digital [...]

Does Facebook Encourage Lazy Friendships? | The Penn Ave Post — December 31, 2012

[...] on December 31, 2012 by Andrew Sullivan As a result of social media, Whitney Erin Boesel fears "we now expect our friends to do a greater portion of the work of being friends with [...]

Notable readings of the day 01/01/2013 « "What Are You Sinking About?" — January 1, 2013

[...] Social Media and the Devolution of Friendship: Full Essay (Pts I & II) » Cyborgology [...]

Why Craigslist Is Not The Revolution » Cyborgology — January 8, 2013

[...] as Facebook makes “sharing” much easier and less time-consuming than “being shared with,” present-day Craigslist (and the affordances of digital technologies generally) makes posting ads [...]

Are we really being more social? « TheAntiSofa — January 9, 2013

[...] Whitney Erin Boesel, Social Media and the Devolution of Friendship: Full Essay (Pts I & II) [...]

Οδυσσέας & "κόκκινο χάπι" κόντρα στο κομμάτιασμα της ζωής μας από Facebook & Twitter | Communication Effect — February 13, 2013

[...] εντυπωσιασμό, άλλα όμως διαθέτουν στοιχεία όπως τούτο εδώ: εξηγεί το μηχανισμό μέσα από τον οποίο το [...]

Freundschaft in Zeiten von Social Media | Schule und Social Media — May 27, 2013

[...] Whitney Erin Boesel beschreibt in einem lesenswerten Essay ein Phänomen, das sie »Devolution« der Freundschaft nennt. Devolution bezeichnet für sie zunächst die Übergabe von Arbeitsschritten an die Empfänger einer Dienstleistung: Vom Einchecken am Flughafen über die Wundpflege bis zum Kassiervorgang im Supermarkt werden immer mehr Arbeitsschritte verschoben. Dasselbe passiere bei Freundschaften. Ein wesentlicher Aspekt freundschaftlicher Kommunikation besteht darin, einander zu erzählen, was man ohne den Freund/die Freundin erlebt hat: Lärmige Nachbarn, Streit mit anderem Freund, Beförderung bei der Arbeit, Städtetrip nach Paris, neues Hobby: Schrebergarten, tolles Rezept ausprobiert. Solche Inhalte kommunizieren nun aber viele Menschen auf sozialen Netzwerken: Die lärmigen Nachbarn erhalten einen Witz auf Twitter, der Streit mit dem Freund wird in einer kryptischen Facebook-Nachricht angedeutet, die Beförderung überall freudig verkündet und mit Likes bedacht, der Städtetrip nach Paris, der Schrebergarten und die Kochkünste fotografiert und gepostet. [...]

Social Media and the Devolution of Friendship | senk9@wp — October 22, 2013

[…] Social Media and the Devolution of Friendship: Full Essay (Pts I & II) » Cyborgology […]

Death and Mediation » Cyborgology — December 30, 2013

[…] I’ve mentioned previously, I’m not great about keeping up with all of my digital communication media (though I am ever […]

Friendship Redefined? - Everyday Gyaan — February 8, 2014

[…] be such an integral part of my life. The level of sharing and authenticity is amazing. Then I read this article and I wonder if we need to redefine […]

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How Social Media Affected the Concept of Friendship? Essay Example

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This essay is based on the topic pertaining to Social media and how it has changed the friendship concept in various age groups. Any website that allows interaction socially is known as Social media. Due to the emergence of technology and internet, it can be seen that Social media has rapidly expanded across the globe. More teenagers and adults are registering for Social media websites like Myspace, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn etc. to communicate with their family, friends and even strangers. The world has transformed due to the emergence of Social media and its popularity. This has affected the concept of Friendship as well among various age groups. Currently, Social media plays a supporting role in changing the life of the person but at the same it can negatively impact a person by creating conflicts. Although there are few negative consequences linked with Social media, its positive contribution to communication across the globe has made the world a better and stronger place to live in.

Popular Social media websites like Twitter and Facebook have enhance the communication among individuals. These websites serves as an essential tool for keeping these individuals socially active, no matter which age group they belongs to. Social media has really transformed the way people do friendship and communicate with each other. There are positive aspects as well as negative aspect linked to this concept. Social media helps millions of people to stay in touch and is the entertainment’s ultimate source. People sometimes become tired with hearing about the good or bad days of people and don’t have time to interact with each other face to face. So, people sometimes get burned out on friends. Social media changes this concept as it helps keep the friendship strong as you can hear about the good or bad experience of your friends through their status. Instead of interacting in person with friends to know about their experiences, we can learn about our friend’s life by looking at their profile and status. Everyone adore their friends and to hear about their life’s details like what they ate, how wonderful they look, why they are having a bad day etc. sometimes create an overload of information. Too many updates going on in the lives of our friends can be overwhelming in a busy day. Sometimes we get irritated by repeatedly hearing about our friend’s daily routine and it turns off the idea of frequently hanging out with them. Social media limits this as it gives the option to know about the daily routine of friends without having to meet them and listen to their story. This is very useful for adults who have work and a hectic schedule so they don’t get enough time to meet face to face with their friends. They can know about their friend’s daily routine with the help of Facebook or Twitter.

Facebook and Twitter are the two common websites which help to keep in contact with friends. Instant communication and messaging on wall of each other make your friends feel you are in touch with them even not spending time hanging out.  When people hang out too much they don’t have too much to talk and it takes the feeling away of ‘getting caught up’. So instead of seeing each other frequently it’s better to communicate online. Another way friendship have changed the friendship concept in all age groups is the introduction of virtual games. Online games are fun and every age group play online on Facebook. So, this is another sort of interaction with friends with the help of Social media as the friends keep on sending request of various games to join.

One of the things which are great about friendship is that it helps see the world from the point of view of them. It gives a wonderful chance for expanding your knowledge and conversation regarding the perception of the world. But Twitter and Facebook takes this concept away especially when there is a link posted which requires a real conversation to understand that point of view. Although social media is changing the concept of friendship rapidly but it restricts the friendship to a virtual world only. Liking a post doesn’t mean that you are actually conversation. The worse thing in liking a status is that if you don’t give your point of view it sounds blunt and crude because you don’t have the area to explain properly. So, virtual communication is very different from real conversation. If different opinions in friendship are discussed its good but they should be done in a manner reasonable.

To sum up, Social networking has supported communication vastly and have transformed the way people do friendship. Different age groups are impacted in friendship on Social media. Adults are mostly busy in work so they don’t get proper time to interact with friends face to face. Facebook helps them to interact with friends and get to know about their daily updates. Talking about teens and children, they are mostly involved in online gaming, chatting so they are the once mostly impacted by Facebook negatively. Due to increase in Social media there is less interaction of children and teenagers with real environment. They are lost in their own virtual world and this is a negative impact on their lives. There needs to be a balance of communication with friends i.e. one has to meet and go out with their friends also. Not like being online and chatting them all the time. In the end, real life communication and seeing the friend in person can never be replaced with Social media. It has limited real life interaction and thus people are lost in a virtual world and there are virtual friends being made through social media.

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Home — Essay Samples — Sociology — Friendship — The Meaning of Friendship

The Meaning of Friendship

• Categories: Friendship

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Words: 735 |

Published: Mar 20, 2024

Words: 735 | Pages: 2 | 4 min read

Table of contents

Defining friendship, the significance of friendship, the evolution of friendship, cultivating and nurturing friendships, the role of friendship in society.

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