Friendship and Social Media 95intimacy, with immediate family, close friends, and romantic partners serving as
archetypes of strong ties. In contrast, weak ties experience less contact, interdepen-
dence, and intimacy. Although they do not provide the same sense of belonging and
personal meaning as strong ties, Granovetter contended that weak ties nevertheless
serve a vital societal function. Weak ties not only provide a person with access to a
more diverse set of resources than those available among strong ties but they also
network society together in ways that facilitate collective coordination and action.
Much research has devoted attention to understanding the extent to which social
media facilitates weak ties (e.g., Ellison, Steinfield, & Lampe, 2007), and evidence
indicates social media facilitates strong ties as well (Ledbetter, 2014a; Sosik &
Bazarova, 2014).
A related question concerns whether users employ social media to maintain
friendships formed offline or to initiate new friendships. Several sources have indi-
cated that the former occurs much more frequently than the latter (e.g., Ellison et al.,
2007; Pempek, Yermolayeva, & Calvert, 2009), although prior social media contact
may enhance initial face- to- face meetings, such as in the case of incoming college
freshmen (DeAndrea, Ellison, LaRose, Steinfield, & Fiore, 2012). Given Facebook’s
heavy market penetration (Duggan & Smith, 2013), it is perhaps unsurprising that
the desire to connect with friends met offline motivates site use (Quan- Haase &
Young, 2010), as might the desire to rekindle lapsed friendships (Wang & Wellman,
2010). Thus, an emerging body of scholarship considers friendship processes facili-
tated by social media. In the subsequent section, I review research on four such pro-
cesses that have received substantial attention in the extant literature.
Social Media and Friendship Processes
Considering social media friendship raises a fundamental and more general theo-
retical question: How, exactly, does a communication medium alter the messages
and meanings communicated via that medium (Ledbetter, 2014b)? Although
answering that question lies beyond the scope of this chapter, it is worth noting
that, for some friendship processes, the answer may be that the medium does not
meaningfully change messages or their interpretation at all. That a friendship pro-
cess occurs online does not mean the online context most strongly characterizes
the interaction; rather, the act of self- disclosure, uncertainty reduction, relational
affirmation, and so forth may be of greater theoretical importance and practical
consequence. In other words, we ought not discard the other chapters of this book
simply because friends take their conversation to social media, unless theoretically
grounded research demonstrates that the communication medium is a difference
that makes a difference.
Toward that end, the most productive and heuristic lines of research on social
media friendship have elaborated theoretical mechanisms by which online channels