What are Facebook friends? We need new language for the digital networked society

Online communities, social networks and social media have created new ways for us to connect, but in a world where you can have 500 friends on Facebook, does our language fail us? What I've been struggling with is how words like ‘friends’ and ‘acquaintances’ are anchored in a world before the digital networked society and simply don't explain what's happening around us today.

Friendship implies intimacy, ‘close friends’ imply an inner circle and ‘acquaintances’ suggests a one-size-fits-all barrier: people you’ve met but don’t really connect with. The meanings are important because each word conveys a set of expectations for both the person being described and the person describing.

But those meanings are anchored in a world where contact is limited, and distance or time decay relationships that are not supported. Twenty years ago annual festivals like Christmas or birthdays provided that moment of reconnection, there were Christmas card lists people could ‘fall off’, and the challenge of changing address could inadvertently become a breaking point in those fragile social networks.

The internet changed the rules. First through email, then online address books, then messenger and personal home pages, it created a structure where relationships could be maintained regardless of distance, time and frequency of contact. This ‘strength of weak ties’ is one of the most powerful sea-changes in society enabled by the internet, and in today’s world of blogs, social networks and social media, the models is accelerating and touching more and more of us.

And that’s why we need new language. In the black and white world of ‘friends’ and ‘acquaintances’ friendship was a binary on/off function. In the digital networked society, it’s a spectrum of strengths as people drift towards the core or periphery of eachother’s lives. Schoolfriends reconnected with after 20 years are no longer the exception, maintaining ties with relatives on the other side of the planet should not feel unusual, having bonds with people in social networks who are effectively anonymous or pseudonymous is hardly unusual, and collecting connections with people as you travel through life should feel comfortable.

Language lets us down. We need a new vocabulary that can describe the complex, richer structures of relationships enabled through the internet. We need words and meanings that describe new types of transience in relationships and new types of communities. We need language that can convey the intensity of connections in a chat forum, the following of people whose blogs we share, the sense of preparedness to reconnect with those we rarely contact, the feelings we have about letting go of people who were once in our inner circle, and language to describe the people we are just discovering. Social structures are evolving faster than the language that describes them. When language fails to convey meaning, the scope for misunderstanding grows. As online social networks cement themselves in the cultural mainstream we need language that can do the same.

Comments

[หาเพื่อน]

I like facebook bc simple and easy + clean :)

[Danny Meadows-Klue]

So what we’re looking at is a continuum. As people drift from the core of someone’s social world to the periphery, their status gradually changes, but the opportunity for reconnection stays open. In the offline world there was a threshold that once someone crossed they’d be unlikely to ‘get back on the Christmas card list’ but in the digital networked society that threshold moves to the outer reaches of the periphery. The early online social networks like FaceBook and MySpace enable a blurring of boundaries between people we know through work and through our personal lives, all of which is part of a culture of greater transparency enabled by the web.

[Sara Williams]

I can't stand the idea of having my whole life on FaceBook. Some people just want to be far too public. There's a big risk putting up everything on the web because anyone (ANYONE!) could read it. Identity fraud is just a tiny part of the consequences.

[Ricardo]

Yeah; it's kinda weird. Most of the folks who are on my friends list I never see yet feel close to them. Actually some I've never met and never will I guess. But isn't there a difference between people we know only online and people we knew offline?