My Facebook “friends” aren’t my friends
Comments(4) This is the first in a three-part blog series based on my final-year undergraduate dissertation.
I’ve got 167 “friends” on Facebook. According to my research, that’s pretty normal - actually it’s slightly below average. We all know, though, that of those 167 people, only a handful are “friends” according to the old fashioned meaning of the word - people who you enjoy hanging out with, people whose name you remember, etc. It’s true that online social networks are probably flattening social hierarchies somewhat by allowing us to easily maintain some level of contact with a much larger number of people than we would otherwise, but to think that they blow away 10,000 years of sociocultural evolution is hard to believe.
This gross over-simplification of social structure into a binary “friend” or “not friend” has two major implications. Firstly, it has major implications for privacy and impression management - if you added your mum as a “friend” (and it would seem rude not to), she’s just as likely to see those photos of you stupidly drunk at a party as your mates are. Or your boss, for that matter. Real friends tend to exist in a certain contexts - social boundaries that are rarely crossed, and for good reason.
Secondly, the news you’re presented with in the News Feed is flooded with all the latest gossip from the school-friends you added out of curiosity to see what they became. Sure, you could manually construct a friends list with only your closest friends in and only view their updates, but who can be bothered with that? Before they were removed, the feedback buttons and filtering preferences (where you could opt to have more photos, for example) promised to give you some influence over what appears in your News Feed, but my research showed that very few users had even noticed them, let alone used them regularly. There also seemed to be a great deal of uncertainty about what they were supposed to do or if they were actually having an effect.
By grossly oversimplifying relationships, ignoring social context and failing to give the user any way to effectively monitor and filter news from friends, online social networks are missing their golden opportunity to bring people closer to those they care about. In my next blog post, I’ll look at whether this situation can be improved by adding a little more realism to the social model.
For survey and interview results regarding the number of friends people have on Facebook, their level of interest in the News Feed and usage of the filtering facilities, please refer to my dissertation (PDF, 3.5Mb).
