What is a social networking friend?

Social Networking seemed to start with trying to get as many 'friends' as possible with such activities as 'whore trains' a bit like collecting as many business cards as possible at an event without ever bothering to follow them up. Now with Facebook reaching its 5th Birthday its a good time to see what effect social networking has had on our attitude to friends or should that be the word 'friend'?

Human beings are social creatures, research shows that having quality relationships increases our likelihood of being happy so our relationships are crucial to our happiness and satisfaction, if not to our very existence. The thing that this fad for collecting friends missed is it is not the person it is the relationship, the link or in Granovetter's terms the strength of the tie¹ that makes the difference.

We can describe:

• a friend: as a person we know well and regard with affection and trust
• an associate: as a person who provides cooperation or assistance
• an acquaintance: as a person with whom you are acquainted

Granovetter defined relationships by the "strength" of the interpersonal tie as a combination of the amount of time, the emotional intensity, the mutual confiding and the reciprocal services.

• strong tie: social contact characterised by frequent contact, emotional closeness and a history of reciprocal favours.
  
• weak tie: social relationships characterised by infrequent contact, an absence of emotional closeness and no history of reciprocal favours
• absent tie: both the lack of any relationship and ties without substance, such as "nodding" relationships between neighbours, or the relationship with a frequent vendor one would buy from

So a “strong” tie would be a good friend or close family member, someone with whom you interact a lot. A “weak” tie is an acquaintanceship, someone with whom you are familiar with but not too close. An “absent” tie would be someone who you know but don’t really have any kind of relationship with.

Furthermore, the fact that two people may know each other by name does not necessarily qualify the existence of a weak tie. If their interaction is negligible the tie may be absent.

So where has social networking taken us? It is the weak or absent ties that are the ones we need to nurture on a social networking service because our close friends and family tend to move in the same circles that we do and we do not need to communicate with them this way.

The benefit is specifically, more novel information flows to individuals through weak rather than strong ties as the information they receive overlaps considerably with what we already know. Acquaintances, by contrast, know people that we do not, and thus receive more novel information.

¹ Granovetter, M. S. (1973). "The Strength of Weak Ties", ''American Journal of Sociology'' 78 (6), pp 1360 - 1380

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