danah boyd - "Friends, Friendsters, and Top 8: Writing community into being on social n... - 4 views
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Based on an internal understanding of the audience, participants override the term “Friend” to make room for a variety of different relationships so that they may properly show face.
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What differentiates social network sites [6] from other computer-mediated communication sites is the feature that allows participants to articulate and publicly display their relations to others in the system
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fake Profiles were developed to aid in this process.
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By tying Friendship to privacy settings, social network sites encourage people to choose Friends based on what they want to make visible.
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The process of removing a Friend on MySpace signals a shift in relationship status that is often not easily articulated in everyday life. There is no clear social script for ending a friendship
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Top Friends requires participants to expose backstage information. In a culture where it’s socially awkward to reject someone’s Friendship, ranking them provides endless drama and social awkwardness.
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This "four degrees" affordance takes a significantly different approach than Facebook, the dominant social network today. Do you think that part of the shift towards more private and restricted networks comes out of backlash from previous sites that allowed users to access thousands of profiles all at once?
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Good question - I wonder if anyone in class has experience using Friendster and could shed some light on this. I never used Friendster but would be interested to hear how it compared to Facebook and Myspace...
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I was briefly on frienster. The thing to keep in mind is that nobody had any experience on social networking when Friendster made inroads. If you recall, at the beginning, you could only browse profiles of people who were in your 'network'. The network was first defined by your university, then you could pick a city. It was not until much later that Facebook opened it up so you could search for people anywhere.
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Rather than having the context dictated by the environment itself, context emerged through Friends networks
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This completely inverts the norms in early public social sites where interests or activities defined a group
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properties that have been present in all mediated spaces persist, complicating many social behaviors on these sites. Four properties in particular play a key role: persistence, searchability, replicability, and invisible audiences
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Social network sites are not digital spaces disconnected from other social venues — it is a modeling of one aspect of participants’ social worlds and that model is evaluated in other social contexts
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In thinking about Friendship practices on social network sites, it is crucial to evaluate them on their own terms
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gateway friends
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meaning of Friendship
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They primarily found that Friendship stood for: content, offline facilitator, online community, trust, courtesy, declaration, or nothing.
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In short, it’s socially awkward to say no
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Even among 'older' (late 20s) myspace users, I remember the Top 8 being something that was talked about. It was acknowledged as silly to care, but people did look to see if they were Top 8, and thought carefully before removing someone from their Top 8...
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I remember when this was used as well but don't remember much drama associated with it. I guess 8 was enough for me at the time to get in my close friends! I wonder if something like this would go over well now that people do follow closely so many people
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I also suspect that a study of non-American practices would introduce entirely different dynamics.
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the boundaries between friends and acquaintances are quite blurry and it is unlikely that there will ever be consensus on a formula for what demarcates a friend.
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the Web site’s creators put an end to their collecting and deleted both accounts. This began the deletion of all Fakesters in what was eventually termed the Fakester Genocide
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Unless you’re always randomly rotating these people
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context collision when people from different facets of their lives joined the site.
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participants there write their community into being through the process of Friending