Thesis Title: Subtitle

Social Networking Sites and Social Relationships

Research has emphasised the importance of SNS as part of a teenager’s (rather than an adults’) friendship practices (boyd 2008; Horst 2010). To date, the most comprehensive overview of young people’s use of social media is discussed in Ito’s (ed. 2010) volume Hanging Out, Messing Around and Geeking Out which covers the way young people use new media across a variety of different situations, including work, intimacy, creative production, families and friendship. This book highlights the ways young people’s media ecologies – the number of devices and the ways they are used – form complex webs that shape their daily lives. Using the term ‘media ecology’ to describe configurations of technology emphasises the “characteristics of an overall technical, social, cultural and place-based system in which the components are not decomposable or separable” (Horst et al. 2010: 31). The term ‘media ecologies’ is borrowed and broadened from its original used in communication studies (e.g. McLuhan 1964; Meyrowitz 1985), in which its use was focused on identifying media effects. The limitation of this approach has been previously highlighted, but the idea that media are intertwined and interrelated is used effectively to explore young people’s new media practices. Horst et al. (2010) found that peer practices and peer learning influenced young people’s use and uptake of technology. These edited collections emphasised the importance of peer influence in young people’s daily use of new media. Youth engagement in networked public is framed as helping youth develop social and other literacy tools, which are framed as being beneficial, and productive skills that prepare them for the labour market (Ito 2010). Like other scholarship that addresses youth and young people’s engagement with new media, the work contained in Ito’s (2010) volume situates engagement with new media and by extension, social networking sites as a process of becoming. This is unsurprising as young people are at a stage in their life course where developing social skills, practical skills, hobbies and identities are of particular importance. New media represent an avenue through which they can accomplish these tasks.

Like Papacharissi’s (2002) research examining personal webpages, boyd’s (2008) examination of young people’s use of social networking sites highlights the centrality of these sites in staying socially connected. Teens interviewed in the course of the research reported that using social networking sites is an important part of developing and maintaining connections with peers (boyd 2008). Furthermore boyd (2008) found that teenagers’ online practices mirrored, in many ways, previously documented behaviours in

other places where teens gather such a shopping malls and parking lots. Boyd (2008) argues that by providing tools for mediated interaction, social networking sites allow teens to extend their interactions beyond physical boundaries, creating a space to socialize beyond the social and cultural limitations typically placed on a teen’s movement. The key finding of boyd’s (2008) research is that social networking sites are incorporated into a teenager’s friendship practices, in the context of their everyday peer groups. Unlike Rosen’s (2007) argument, boyd’s (2008) research shows that existing peer groups and friendship practices play an important role in directing and shaping their use of social networking sites. Boyd (2008) found that for teenagers, social networking sites play an important role in establishing, reinforcing, complicating and sometimes damaging friendship-driven social bonds. Boyd (2008) contends that the past debates over teen participation in sites such as MySpace and Facebook are part of a longer history of intergenerational struggle over parental authority and youth cultures. Importantly, boyd (2008) highlights that for teens, social networking sites do not constitute an alternate or virtual world; rather SNS are simply another method to connect with peers that is seamlessly integrated into their daily lives. Generally, boyd (2008) found that teens are not doing anything new with social media and SNS; they are just simply using another way to communicate what they were already doing – flirting, sharing stories, and hanging out.
Similarly, Martinez (2010) also found that social networking sites were an important way of communicating, maintaining and solidifying friendship.
Horst (2010) asserts that by using Facebook and other social media, teens are regularly forced to list their connection as part of participation and that the dynamics surrounding the articulation of social relationships can directly affect friendship practices. This public articulation of social connections can serve several purposes. Firstly, as address books, SNS allow users to record all the people they know. Secondly, they let users customize privacy settings to control who accesses their content, who contacts them, and who they can see if they are online (Horst 2008). Finally, publically listing, and in essence, formalizing formerly implicit connections, helps construct a picture of an individual’s social identity and status (Donath and boyd 2004). In this respect, SNS are unique from previous social media as they display a user’s list of connections to anyone that can view that profile (Horst 2008). Previously, a ‘friend’ list for social media such as IM (instant messaging) clients were hidden and visible only to the user. SNS means that listing now has a public element creating a new tension when deciding to include or exclude, as there is no opportunity to differentiate between connections (Horst 2008). Finally, the acceptance or rejection of any friend requests received adds another layer of social
processing to engagement on SNS, requiring users to constantly negotiate what is appropriate (Horst 2008). As discussed in Gershon’s (2010) research, there is currently little consensus about what appropriate use of, and behaviour on, these sites looks like. Boyd (2008) argues that the teenage users who are growing older together with social media are creating new social norms together. According to Donath and boyd (2004), SNS users’ friend connections speak to their identity. Publicising these connections provides a way to contextualise one’s identity. Particularly with reference to MySpace, boyd (2006) argues that choosing one’s “Top 8” friends is a more explicit act of identity performance, privileging certain relationships over others. Boyd (2008) maintains that SNS are not altering the fundamental nature of friendship practices, but rather represent a new mode of communicating and articulating these practices and connections.

Similarly, Gershon (2010) explores how new media impact the ways people dissolve romantic relationships. While emphasising that new media does not essentially alter the fundamental nature of romantic relationships, Gershon does highlight how users must develop a new repertoire of communication when it concerns new media and romantic relationships. Gershon (2010) examines the ways people experience and articulate romantic relationships through social networking sites. Gershon’s focus was on the experience of mediated breakups, not connections. Her research highlights the numerous differences in idiom of practice surrounding SNS, texting and IM-ing. Gershon (2010) continually highlights the way an individual’s interpretation of the medium that delivers the message, frames the meaning of the message itself. Complications arise when the parties involved do not interpret the medium in the same way. Although Gershon’s research focuses primarily on interviewing university students, she acknowledges the wide variation in the use of technology and the meanings given to it. In previous quantitative research, these differences have not been represented, perhaps due to some of the inherent limitations of the method. Instead of establishing themes based on results, Gershon groups her chapters around significant events or dilemmas. She then catalogues the different ways people use technology to respond to and communicate about these events. Generally, Gershon finds that there are no commonly held understandings concerning the etiquette of using technology to breakup (amongst other things). Gershon’s research strongly indicates that collective social norms are still in their infancy. In doing this, Gershon uses concepts such as ‘interpretive flexibility’ to highlight the agency of users and the way in which users’ practices can alter technological artefacts (Wajcman 2008).

Gershon (2010) argues that individual media ideologies – the personal ideas about what
each media means - structure how and when, and what values individuals assign to certain types of communication. Thus, Gershon (2010) argues that the important information lies not in the message, but in the second-order information that the medium through which it is delivered contains.

Additional research regarding friendship and SNS is limited, notable exceptions are Barkardjieva (2014) and Bucher (2012b) who both take a theoretical approach to examining the impact of SNS on friendship. Barkardjieva (2014) argues that as a result of SNS friendship has been McDonaldized (Ritzer 1993) as the features of SNS make friendship efficient, calculable, predictable and more easily controlled. Like the business Ritzer (1993) describes, Barkardjieva (2014) argues that the media industry has followed the same self-service paradigm. What this means is that

“The patient work of taming and the uniqueness of the figure of the friend…have been swept aside and replaced by a brief sequence of clicks and a multiplicity of post-stamp images staring and smiling at us from the computer screen” (Bakardjieva 2014: 371).

Barkardjieva (2014) argues that Facebook’s architecture operates in such a way as to make users’ behaviour predictable. It does this by offering users a more confined and guided experience than previous sites such as MySpace which gave users much more creative flexibility. However, as Barkardjieva (20014) acknowledges users do find ways to work within highly rationalised systems such as Facebook.

Approaches like Barkardjieva’s (2014) treat friendship as a pre-exiting social category. However, Bucher (2012b) argues that friendship online is fundamentally driven, as it is technologically and commercially driven in a ways that offline friendships are not. This, Bucher contends means that friendships online have different configurations to their offline counterparts and cannot be treated as pre-exiting social categories as the social-technical processes of SNS activate friendship in unique ways. However, the argument that relationships are activated online does not account for the ways in which friendships long been and continue to be mediated via a variety of social-technical processes. Just because friendships are mediated by a particular technology does not mean that they do not also exist as prior social relationships.