My Friends on Facebook

Having a relationship with people over the internet is not new. From chat rooms to message boards to dating sites, people have used these mediums to construct a variety of social interactions that suit their needs. Being social online may appeal to those who don't necessarily want to engage in real physical contact or those who are trying to simulate contact with friends who are far away. The growing popularity of social network sites (SNS) e.g. Facebook, MySpace is symbolic of people's desires to personalize the abstract space that is the world wide web.

There are opportunities within these SNS's to express oneself and fashion an identity through various applications and features e.g. photo albums, group affiliations, song lists, to name a few for the benefit of one's targeted audience. In essence, this is your chance to tell a story about yourself and your life using customized details to connect to your imagined audience.

Being friends with people who did not live in the same city or even country used to mean that your modes of connecting with them were usually letter writing and/or long distance phone calls, but with the advent of SNS's we are able to take our communique to the next level: sharing info online gives us quicker gratification and, more importantly, a forum for interactive communication. On Facebook where we can comment on our friends photos or status, we are creating a sense of closeness and intimacy that is harder to conjure via just letters. When I am able to make a comment to my friend Brigit who lives in Sydney, Australia about something we've done in the past or read about current events in her life, I'm validating and continuing our friendship despite our living on separate continents. I can remain an active part of her life and vice versa even from afar. Or my friend, Clare, a South African who made her way to Williamsburg, Bklyn.

As members of a SNS community, we all, if only informally, agree to follow the presets and rules of posting, sharing, and participating within that community. We also understand that some of the terms and ideas that may mean something in the physical world takes on a different flavor in the virtual, a good example is the word "friend". In the real world, we all have a definitive understanding of what that means based on our past and current experiences, but in the world of Facebook, we have to make some adjustments of understanding on the idea of "friend". Not only are our best friends our friends on Facebook, but so are the friends of our friends whom we might have met just a few times or someone with whom you were friendly in college, but haven't seen in over ten years, and don't forget about the mother of a former student. These people can all be considered your friends in a virtual community.

You learn to be more flexible about these seemingly finite terms.