• to add journals to their reading list.
• to facilitate relationships (both offline and exclusively online).
• to indicate trust.
• as a courtesy.
• as a declaration of some sort of relationship.
• for entertainment, friend collecting, as a game etc.

As a result of all these differing meanings for different people, the act of Friending or defriending could mean a lot to someone, while another person wouldn’t even give it a second thought. One person could defriend a friend because they were bored of reading their journal, while their now defriended friend might take the action as a commentary about their relationship. Throw in the fact that LJ Friending is essentially a way of controlling privacy (so it’s functional AND meaningful) and you have a recipe for DRAMA!

Now think about Facebook. This all sounds familiar, doesn’t it? Well in analysing my fieldwork last year I’m realising that even though the meanings of Friending on Facebook and LJ are both ambiguous, the way people react to that ambiguity is different.Now think about Facebook. This all sounds familiar, doesn’t it? Well in analysing my fieldwork last year I’m realising that even though the meanings of Friending on Facebook and LJ are both ambiguous, the way people react to that ambiguity is different. On LiveJournal, people acted on the angst caused by the Friending feature by writing angry posts or comments about when they were defriended, for example, to which the defriender would usually angrily reply, and then all the friends of both parties would reply and everyone else could watch and be amused. This dynamic gave birth to the very hilarious ljdrama.org, which sarcastically chronicled the latest disputes over who defriended who and why. (There’s still an awesome archive of everyone’s favourite LJ drama moments here.)

Yet there isn’t an fbdrama.org. How often do you actually see serious flamewar style drama playing out on someone’s wall? Hardly ever, right? So even though Friending on Facebook and Livejournal both cause angst because of the differing meanings it has for different people – we’ve all wondered why a certain person has added or removed us, or if we should accept a Friend request from someone we don’t really like – on Facebook, no one really seems to act on that angst so it never evolves into drama. Most of the angsty situations I’ve seen involve people telling their close friends that they’re unsure about adding someone, but I’ve never seen anyone actually confront a sketchy Friend requester or someone who has defriended them.

So, I wanna throw this out to everyone, especially people who are participating in my ethnography (you know who you are;) ). Do you think my observations are correct? If so, why do you think it’s the case? Your answers will influence what I write in my thesis, but do let me know if you don’t want me to quote you.

My initial hypothesis is that engaging in drama on Facebook would have social repercussions that wouldn’t happen to the same degree on LiveJournal. The stakes are higher on Facebook because you use your real name and personal info, and usually have most of the people you know from all aspects of your life as Friends. Messing with the people you only know online on Livejournal is a much lower risk than messing with someone who you work with or shares mutual friends. What do you think?

this is stuff i’d observed before, and it mimics the findings of the survey fono and i did for our livejournal friending paper a few years ago. but something clicked when i read rhiannon’s email. before, i was obsessed the kinds of social consequences result from the design of social software (ie LJ DRAMA) but now i’m realising what’s really fascinating about social software might actually be obfuscated by the use of the “social” descriptor. is social software really social before it is anything else? we all go to the movies together and share an experience with everyone else in the theatre, but does that make it a social experience? do we just use the term social because the technology involves interacting with other people, but really, we’re moving towards something else?

danah boyd and others have written about autistic or socially-inept social software, referring to the fact that social networking sites force users to interact with each other in ways that would seem socially inept in any other situation. for example, forcing binaries on your relationships with others – are we friends, yes or no? in her 2004 piece on the subject, boyd argued that this sort of design was problematic for users (forcing people to act as if they had mental disorders, even!) and needed to be overcome by listening to users and trying to mimic the fluid and multiple way in which people actually interact.

im beginning to think that what we’re doing on these sites isnt really about replicating offline relationships and interactions as the original designers of social networks had in mind. i mean, if thats just what it was, why do we need to do it both online and off? i’m thinking that social networking sites are scratching another itch of ours. i’m not sure what, but i think it has something more to do with communication flows and distribution channels and less with other things we associate with socializing, such as building trust or providing support. think about twitter, for example. one would assume people would use it to say where they are so their friends could join them. but it seems that people are using it more like a microblog, to tell the world what theyre doing for the sake of it, rather than with the purpose of meeting up. think, too, about how much of the literature about social networking is about identity management, construction and articulation, especially for teens on myspace. sure, identity construction is an element of socializing in the conventional sense, but is it the defining element or activity? i’d say no, and i think that indicates that social networks are really about something other than, or beyond, what we understand as social. and i dont think we know what that something is yet.

all this leads me to wonder:

are friending and networking just metaphors we used so we could use an existing and familiar concept to explain this new and unfamiliar way of interacting and communicating?

do we finally understand what it is that we are actually doing on social networks enough now that we can go beyond an old metaphor?