Facebook Friends:
The New Notion of Friendship
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Emotional support is one form of social capital. For example, people who struggle to lose weight or fight addictions often prevail because they are part of a group that helps them with these battles, such as Weight Watchers or Alcoholics Anonymous. We call this kind of emotional support bonding social capital.
This resource easily accrues online because of our accessibility to people who can help us with a variety of issues even though we may not know them personally. In contrast, our core ties, those people with whom we have very close relationships, may or may not be in a position to provide solutions to some problems we face (or we may not want them to know about these in some cases).29 Interestingly, through the course of giving and receiving bonding social capital, we may come to develop core ties, or at least significant ties (somewhat close connections, but less so than core ties), with others in the community.
Online communities can also provide other kinds of support. This is particularly true of those that increase the accessibility of so-called weak ties. This term refers to contacts with people where your relationship is based on superficial experiences or very few connections. For instance, you have a strong tie with your best friend. Perhaps you and she went to high school together and so you have a history of shared experiences and friendships from your past. You then attended college classes together and again you were able to share experiences. You also joined the same sorority so you are bound by your relationship in the context of the organization. In this relationship, there are at least three connection streams between you and your friend that extend over several years and multiple shared experiences—we’d say this is a fairly strong tie.
In contrast, you likely have weak ties among your Facebook friends, many of whom are just casual acquaintances or even friends of a friend whom you’ve never met. Weak ties may also be more prevalent when someone is connected to several otherwise dispersed networks of people. In other words, rather than being central in a few tightly connected networks, the person serves as a node in several relatively unconnected networks.30
However, we can assure you that weak ties also have value. They may provide bridging social capital, the value we get from others who provide access to places, people, or ideas we might not be able to get to on our own.
In fact, many of the connections we make on SNS are not active ties at all. Rather, they are latent ties: pre-existing connections that we’ve discarded.31 Maintained social capital refers to the value we get from maintaining relationships with latent ties. You’ve probably heard your parents say they’ve reconnected with old high school friends on Facebook (“I can’t believe how bald he is now!”). This is a perfect example of latent ties—as we move through life, some people stay in our lives, but others lose relevance as we develop and change. SNS are valuable connectors for latent ties because they represent a low-involvement, low-effort channel to maintain these bonds. In fact, researchers discovered that college students use Facebook as a way to preserve their network of latent ties.32 Some of your high school friends may have chosen the same university you did. Others went elsewhere. With sites such as Facebook, you are easily able to stay in touch with these friends, despite the shift in lifestyle and geographic location. Those connections may come in handy if you visit an unfamiliar place or need to find a job.
Note: earlier we talked about weak and strong ties in communities. Latent ties are not necessarily weak ties. Your BFF in the sixth grade was once a strong tie, but she might now be a latent one. Before the social media era, it’s likely you would have just lost track of her unless you both happened to hobble into your 25th class reunion. Now, you can keep your old connections on the radar screen, even if you don’t necessarily talk or write to them on a regular basis. SNS enable members to maintain relationships across tie types.
I reviewed 'friends' on Facebook (rather a strange exercise actually, having never thought to do so) and taking some time to identify weak and strong ties I can give the rough estimate that among my 587 friends I identified about 20 as 'strong ties' and when i say strong I mean, my family members who I see and speak to regularly, and my best frends both those I see but also those who have remained close friends through social media over the decade or two since we were actually in university together etc. So even though there's been long time periods of not being face to face we actually have stayed tight, and it is because of Facebook. Without it, I mean, who writes letters? who even writes emails? Not for social purposes, at least not to do with keeping in touch. From strong ties I excluded people I know very well through my childhood in a small community where you know and are known by about 800 people. Yes, I stop and talk to them and yes I know more than I'd like to about their personal lives, but they are not deep ties. They are the real world version of weak ties.
What I am realizing is that Facebook did not enhance or improve or deepen relationships with my 'strong tie' people for the most part. People who are in my actual everyday life, it's just a platform to write letters back and forth if we're not using text, and more recently I'll use messenger video a lot to speak to close tie friends in other cities. Or rather, people who are NOW much closer ties because of facebook. So although Facebook didn't make me closer to my family and tight network it has greatly enhanced my relationships with the coworkers, school friends and even ex boyfriends, who without it (and in the pre internet world) would surely be lost to memories and a few blurry film camera pics in a shoebox. Pre-covid it kept those potential close or no longer close ties due to proximity and time in my consciousness, and walked us through eahcother's lives as they went along. These people stayed part of my life because they came up on my messenger feed. NOW with Covid, those past or potential close ties that were previously just maintained, some feel like close ties again, as we actively use the platform to connect (mostly video chatting, sometimes some chat bk and forth on messenger). They never became fully 'weak ties' due to Facebook. Covid has me utilizing the maintenance work Facebook did in order to actually make real contact. I won't text anyone I only do video chat. I can't bear not seeing people's faces anymore, I don't want to communicate in any way besides video, it's the closest I can get to feeling normal.
For example, once close ties, uni friend Catto has begun again, we are messenger chatting on the regular. She's in Spain with her new boyfriend partying and eating sushi and doing bumps and I'm here in the haunted farmhouse which I fear I will never escape. She's been looking at my art and leaving me to talk to her boyfriend from Spain while she dissapears to the bathroom who apologizes for his receding hairline. Quite adorable, also have never heard anyone do that ever. But the reason we can reconnect like this is that all along I've followed her trips around the world, her art, her different nights out, the different boyfriends,what she was thinking about, the fact she was still living in artsy lofts and running (why run if you are thin naturally? That's insane) and taking pictures of her salads. Meanwhile I know she's followed my own online narrative. It's been over a decade but she's seen different progressive politics movements I've engaged in by my constant spamming, the music I was listening to, some photos, a lot of long diatribes, and the whole story of the pregnancy and birth of my son, even the trip to Jamaica that preceded it. I may have removed those pictures but everyone who saw them has an understanding at the basic level of where I was and what I was doing/ who I was with in Jamaica when I got pregnant etc. There's a kind of intimacy that was particularly available on facebook before the scandal that brought Zuckerberg to Congressional Hearing over it's Privacy Practices. I feel like that REALLY put the brakes on people's open posts about themselves personally. Everything got very quiet. No one really talks like they did about anything at all, it's always connected to an item. I'm guessing now that people mostly went into private messaging and also jumped ship to Instagram (even though it's Facebook really). Again, people were still connected, just less open, it didn't ruin facebook, in a way it was better after that because there was more actual content, links and information. I ended up joining a million groups and all I see is astrology groups and that's fine by me. It's soothing.
Not only did Facebook not enhance my strong tie relationships that exist in the actual real world of physical real space, it was detrimental. I don't enjoy looking at my mother's comments on people's things. It feels like I'm eavesdropping or reading diaries or letters. I don't speak to my sister now, since Covid she's going insane and says that I am, so that has been just a tool to express our anger by blocking one another on everything. My dad doesn't use Facebook he has some kind of anxiety about computers and the internet. Atleast he has stopped sending me email forwards. Everyone else stopped those ....10 years ago? I also found that I argued with friends (close ones) about the fact that i can see their little green light is ON on messenger and it literally says 'active now' and they are ignoring my messages. I can SEE they haven't checked them on purpose. Most people know how to remove their little green light, I certainly have been showing them how inadvertantly by getting annoyed about being ignored. I can't bear being ignored on any level but particularly right now. I'm dying from lonliness half the time, not Covid. Social media interactions with strong ties living near me made me feel MORE alone because people close to me, literally and emotionally, were there and not with me. It just made their absence feel personal, and abandoning. I knew my son's godmother for example was in Courtenay for the past three years and had every opportunity to come here and see him and she did not. And i KNOW where she was and what she was doing because of Facebook.
Interacting online lately with close ties lately, it makes those strong ties painful and it frays them. Especially because every real world relationship seems to be fraying in my life and the lives I see around me. There's a very real strain on people and we aren't handling it well as a species. I think we should give a hat tip to Facebook for that too. Nobody has any patience or social skills anymore? Everyone near us is a target of our fear and frusteration? People far away are easy to romanticize? We want to escape where we are and who we're with because we feel trapped?
I have to include Covid in the analysis. It's now particularly, and ironically since Facebook has played a role in our inability to organize effective, cohesive and lasting social movements to mitigate environmental disaster for one, I'm glad that I have facebook because people have reached out to me and vice versa, and those people are worth examining as far as what they mean to me and why. It's a funny mix, during the first month of the pandemic I would get messenger calls during the night from dudes on my FB who were friends or more likely aquaintances and suddenly felt the urge to give me a call. One or two stuck and are close ties now. So really, Facebook acted to reunite me with a couple of guys from the past, both sort of never fully acted on, and then it also separated me from them and inserted the new strong tie relationship with a precarious and frusterating feeling, the real world presence of one another is sort of the foundation of what a relationship like that has to be about. Sex is not interesting or fun on the internet, that is a lesson of Covid, but it is true of Facebook messenger and how else would I have discovered that if not for covid. Certainly would not have been necessary because at this point I would be in Spain and not have to video chat and reconnect with my university best friend on messenger anyway and would be surrounded by handsome admirers instead of starting out the window waiting for nobody or projecting everything from my glittery fantasty land mind onto a random dude who clearly cannot live up to my own beautiful mind. Love in the time of Facebook has become love in the time of covid and Facebook, and it has felt lifesaving as it's brought more people I love closer to me again. Yet, the closeness is for the first time feeling panicky and desperate in it's distance. As time goes on the feeling of the relationships with strong to weak ties and our relationships to Facebook and other platforms we are relying on so heavily are changing. Everything happens fast in technology. And it's clear from the literature the whole thing has been designed as a marketing tool, or at least quickly after it's popularity rose it became that, which may also end up being ironic as the platform is not lighthearted anymore because nothing is and the messenger video platform (or insta) as helpful it's been to both reconnect with previous strong ties, strengthen previously weak ties, and to maintain contact with strong ties, our inability to reach out and touch someone is somehow increasingly noticable and at times almost physically painful
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