danah boyd

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6699791.stm
danah boyd wrote the article Friends, friendsters, and Top 8: Writing Community into being on social network in which she discusses the multiple uses of Facebook. Boyd talks about how "friendships" on Facebook and how teens define their different forms of friendships. She lists 13 different reasons for accepting friendships some of which include: they're your actual friends; acquaintances, family members, or colleagues; having lots of friends makes you look popular; your list of friends reveals who you are; and it’s easier to say yes than no. Now I realize that many people don't want to reject anyone on Facebook because of the guilt left behind the rejection. I'm not so sensitive I guess. I don't care if I reject someone because if I don't know them, more than likely I won't feel bad about rejecting them. This is not my main concern, however.
My argument for this blog is how I think a lot of people accept friendships for the popularity of it all. If you have 1,000 friends and someone else only has 200, then you automatically look "cooler" than that other person, in some teens' eyes. However, how popular are you if you take into account that the person with only 200 friends probably knows all 200 of them and the one who has 1,000 friends probably only knows about 20% of those friends. Now I consider the person who knows more of their "friends" to be the more popular one. I found an article about a guy who is older than the normal teeny-bopper age group that has Facebook. The article talks about a couple of older users who know that the teens don't really want them spying on their profiles, such as a father having access to his son's profile. This is interesting because the teens who are faced with this decision of whether or not to reject a professor or parent get put in an awkward position. Does guilt go as far as parents and teachers or just other teens? The article made a comment about "not knowing the people you add as friends, you just add them and then don't have to say anything to them. Just adding them makes yourself look more popular- its what all the cool kids are doing." This just goes to show that popularity over true friendships mean more to some teens on Facebook. I think this is sad, but at the same time, having 1,000 "friends" on Facebook just gives you more options of people to hang out with, get advice from, and so on. In the end, it all comes down to how much you cherish your relationships with your online "friends" versus how popular you want to be perceived as by others.