Thesis Title: Subtitle

Peripheral Friendships on Facebook

Facebook, as previously discussed is a social space for friendships to flourish. It helps participants maintain connections across space and time. In addition to these positive functions it can also highlight gaps and silences in relationships that would not have otherwise been visible. For example, Facebook can highlight the tension between

instrumentality and affect when it comes to decide who is permitted in the parochial domain. This was particularly well articulated by Andrea who explained that there are some people she “would like to defriend but can’t” as Facebook reinforces the interconnected nature of her social circle, which is like a “complicated family tree”. Thus some friendships that are not based on affect are kept.

In addition to highlighting tensions between instrumentality and affect, Facebook can also highlight gaps and silences in communication. Due to its ubiquity, for friends who are not on Facebook the ease and frequency of communication may be lessened. Even for those people who are on Facebook, the visible nature of interaction may in fact highlight previously unnoticed silences. Bird explains that she finds that Facebook makes the gaps in some of her friendships more noticeable than they otherwise might be.

…for example one of my best friends in germany, since i've added her on fb i feel as if it's more apparent that we don't communicate as much as we used to. but it was the same with email, just not as "visible". i don't know…also people can see you're active posting status updates, commenting on others' posts etc. and might wonder why you're not getting in touch with them when you obviously have the time to be hanging around on Facebook. but maybe i'm just paranoid.

The architecture of Facebook also plays a part in this as it makes peripheral friendships visible by condensing diffuse and often disconnected relationships in a parochial sphere. In the offline world, the number of acquaintances or casual friendships we collect over the course of our life are not usually visible, as they are scattered across space, place and time. As Facebook provides a way to collect these diffuse connections in one place, so the number of connections and how one interacts with them becomes starkly visible.

Participants were aware that the ‘friends’ figure presented by Facebook was not an accurate representation of their close friendships. Paula (F, 31), who argues that the amount of friendships that can be maintained at a given time is inherently limited, best articulates this.

It's just not possible to have 200 close friends; but this distinction also applies to real life, not just fb: there are some people you have these conversations with: "hi, how are you?" "fine, thanks, you”; but that's fair enough. So on fb you have all your classmates from your primary and secondary school – you can't have meaningful

conversations with these people every day, but you don't want to lose contact with them.

For Paula, the quantity of ‘friends’ on Facebook does not cheapen her close relationships. This is contrary to what is argued by Rosen (2007), Turkle (2011), and Buffardi and Campbell (2008) who maintain that SNS are best for maintaining shallow, and not intimate relationships. Instead, she sees Facebook as a mirror of her offline world, which contains people with whom she shares varying degrees of intimacy. Facebook allows Paula to sustain the less important friendships, which are in their own way still important to her.

This is similar to Sage’s understanding of Facebook. Facebook for her also contains different ‘levels’ of friendship. As with Paula, this helps Sage connect more with the people she values, but unlike Bird, Facebook has little impact on her close friendships.

I think because of the way that I value friendships or because of the way that I define my friendships with people, Facebook for me is a convenient interface to connect more frequently than I otherwise would with those people that are important to me. Because there's obviously different levels of friendship as well, it's a really good way to maintain connections with people that are not going to be lifelong friends, but you're friends with them or I should say you're in contact with them at this point in your life for a certain reason. It's a very convenient way to do that. But with my true friends – my best mate is not on Facebook and doesn't need to be. It has no impact at all on our friendship.

Accounts from older participants such as Kate (F, 48) highlight how friendship can be lost over time as people move away, get busy or change. With Facebook Kate has found a way to draw these peripheral, and previously lost friendships back into her social world.

No, some of them I hadn't seen for 30 years. It was really interesting and now I feel

– it's not – we're not – they haven't I suppose reignited a friendship, but we keep in touch now…one of my friends is about to be a grandmother, so there's updates about that, so that's all still – so you're not ringing all the time saying how's it going, pushing them, because you don't necessarily know the children, but I know the woman who's becoming a grandmother. So to keep in contact has been good.
Kathryn (F 40) also states that Facebook has enabled her to reconnect with people from her past, “friends from years back”. Without Facebook she would not be able to keep in touch with these people as she explains, “I don't even know their current addresses.”

While these friendships may not represent significant, close or intimate friendships they do highlight one of the more interesting features of Facebook in that it allows its users to keep a catalogue of their past friendships. As Cooley (1962) highlights, friendships represent an important source of self-knowledge. We understand ourselves as reflected through others. Friends are important in reflexively constructing the self (Pahl 2000). As Giddens (1992) highlights, the late modern experience is one of decreased certainty.

There are less immutable categories by which individuals can construct a stable sense of self. Instead, Giddens (1992) argues, personal relationships, particularly romantic relationships, are a way for individuals to reflexively create a sense of self. Friendships are also an important voluntary affective relationship through which the self can be constructed. So, Facebook with its ability to contain past and present friends allows us to access a full complement of reflections of ourselves over the life course. This provides a reflection of where we are in the narrative of our lives by positioning ourselves among our relationships at a point from which we can imagine and situate our future selves (Taylor 1992).

When Facebook friends drift too far to the periphery they are often defriended. Sometimes, as with Andrea, this is due to too much difference. Similarity of tastes, or ties based on geographical proximity, are no longer enough to sustain an affective bond. As previously mentioned, the criterion Andrea usually uses to curate her friends on Facebook is based on affect and a desire to sustain an offline connection in addition to being friends on Facebook. Occasionally her friends just become too different, necessitating defriending. For example, a former flatmate of Andrea from her time in London had taken up female bodybuilding. The ex-flatmate likes to post pictures where she is “posed and orange”. For Andrea, that was a step too far. Similar to Andrea, Paula also only defriends people if they are too far on the periphery of her connections. This boundary is more relaxed than one might suspect with Paula only defriending people she believes she will never see again, or has no interest in seeing again. These peripheral people, Paula believes, will be unlikely to notice if she is no longer friends with them, as there is very little mutual affection or interest tying them together.

I think there's a kind of protocol, how it's rude to "unfriend" someone or not accept someone's friend request, so you feel bad for doing it. I try to unfriend only those people whom I really don't need to have there, who won't even notice (like someone whom i met once and won't probably meet again).

Peripheral connections are not necessarily doomed to defriending and disconnection echoing Aristotelian ideas of friendship based on a similarity of mind and temperament (Pahl 2000). Similarity, or homophily, was central in the creation of friendship for Aristotle and for those who extend on his idea such as Socrates, Plato and Cicero. For these thinkers, friendship was only possible between people who were equal in every respect. While such high levels of similarity are not necessarily so important in contemporary understandings of friendships, we can even see an understanding of friendships between unequal parties developed by Plutarch. Similarity is still an important consideration. For example, in Facebook, acknowledgement of similarity and shared history can be enough to sustain a peripheral friendship. Otherwise, a connection might be discarded if left latent for too long. Irene (F, 30) describes a peripheral friendship that would seemingly be easy to let go. However, Facebook reminds her, through her friend’s post, that they share similar values and beliefs, thus the friendship is sustained.

The interesting thing with Facebook is the reason that I meet people – I'm thinking of one girl in particular – the reason that I meet people determines whether I keep them as friends on Facebook and they don't get that cull. So there's this girl that I never – I very rarely ever, ever, ever contact. But what she's into is stuff that I'm interested in, so when she does post, I'm interested in what she posts about. But she's not a friend really. I met her in Barcelona and we – she's a cool chick. If we were in the same place – but I've been to Sydney. She lives in Sydney. I didn't catch up with her. But if something happened, I'd be totally cool with catching up with her.

Irene is careful to make a distinction between people that she knows on Facebook and friends. Irene describes the acquaintance she met in Barcelona as “not a friend really” as the relationship has never had the time or space to develop past the initial affective connection. Nonetheless, Facebook enables this connection, which might otherwise have been lost, to remain persistent and retain the possibility of a future friendship. This echoes Zoe’s accounts of affective, but peripheral connections on Facebook. Like Irene,

Facebook reminds Zoe of their connection and offers of possibility of reactivating it in the future.

But it's the weird thing about Facebook. If I haven't talked to someone say in a year, face-to-face, or like in a phone call, but mainly face-to-face, but I've talked to them on Facebook on and off, and then I run into them, I'll still kind of feel like I haven't seen them for a year… I do have a couple who are kind of decent people. I haven't seen them in ages and we do have really like to chat now and then on Facebook. But I still don't feel like I've really seen them in ages. But it's more about, if you were to reconnect in the future, the opportunity is there to do that.

Previously, these connections would have been lost, but instead they are kept minimally active through the parochial space that Facebook facilitates. Zoe further elaborates that this helps manage her friendships as her life gets busier, but is careful to note that this does not mean that Facebook can substitute for quality connections.

I wouldn't say that they would make the friendships like more quality. But through periods of absence or people like where it's that age where we are getting really busy. We do have fiancés and stuff. So we don't go out that often and we're not hanging out with friends that often. We work full-time. In a band. So practice weeknights. It's like – you know and it would be so easy to just fall out of touch with like a lot of people. But because they're on Facebook, because they're your friends, you're having all these little day to day connections that don't really make you feel too overly closer to someone.

This discourse is reflected by Pahl (2000) who argues that friendship takes energy and time, which is increasingly scarce in modern life. It is this time and space that is increasingly swallowed up by the complexities of modern life such as serial monogamy, long commutes to work, more demanding work conditions as well as increasingly stressful parenting and caring (Pahl 2000). Homophilic bonds mean that we are most likely to form connections with those similar to ourselves. Those with whom we are friends may also find themselves in similarly stressful and time poor situations, which may impair our ability to form close friendships. This is similar to the situation described by Zoe. She finds that her friends, like herself, lead busy lives. What Facebook offers is a way to maintain connections, which might otherwise be discarded as too demanding.