94 Who Are Our Friends?
individuals to (1) construct a public or semi- public profile within a bounded
system, (2) articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection, and
(3) view and traverse their list of connections and those made by others within
the system” (p. 211). As such, their definition separates social networking sites (or,
as they are now commonly called, social media) from earlier computer- mediated
communication forms such as e- mail (which has no public profile), message forums
(which have no articulated list of connections), and instant messaging (which does
not allow viewing and traversal of connections. Today, many of these legacy systems
incorporate social media features; for example, Google’s e- mail and instant- messag-
ing services possess some degree of integration with the Google+ social media ser-
vice. Likewise, several social media platforms now permit users to deactivate some
or all of boyd and Ellison’s (2007) defining features for the sake of privacy. Whether
an individual user employs these features or not, it is the capability for these three
features that distinguishes social media.
Ironically, a challenge when examining scholarship on social media friendship
is that social media itself has generated ambiguity regarding what the word “friend”
means. Facebook, currently the most popular social media platform (Duggan &
Smith, 2013), uses the word “friend” to refer to any social connection, and some
other social media platforms do likewise. Although boyd and Ellison (2007) used
capitalization (“Friends”) to distinguish social media ties from traditional friends,
subsequent research generally has not adopted this convention. Consequently, it is
sometimes difficult to determine whether a study examines “friends” as tradition-
ally construed or “friends” as denoting any kind of social media tie.
This terminological confusion suggests two recommendations for researchers.
First, research reports should clarify explicitly the nature of the interpersonal rela-
tionships and technical connections under study. I confess that I have not always
done so in my own research (Ledbetter & Mazer, 2014), but after preparing this
review chapter, I will do so in future work, and I hope others will do likewise.
Second, it is worth considering not only how friendships are enacted via social
media but also how social media reconfigures cognitive schema and expectations
pertaining to friendship. Perhaps when a social media platform labels connections
as “friends,” participants are more likely to attach normative expectations for friend-
ship to the relationship (e.g., frequent contact; Sosik & Bazarova, 2014), even if
the relationship is not a friendship as traditionally understood. Such a proposi-
tion could be tested by an experiment manipulating the language referring to the
social media tie (e.g., “friend” versus “follower” or “connection”), and could clarify
whether, as Wang and Wellman (2010) suggested, “having hundreds of ‘friends’ on
one’s Facebook profile has become so commonplace that the word friend may have
expanded in meaning” (p. 1164).
When considering the types of relationships enacted via social media, much
scholarship has drawn on Granovetter’s (1973) description of strong and weak ties.
Strong ties exhibit frequent contact, a high level of interdependence, and emotional