friends and Friends

[tamaranth]

Dr Will Reader, a researcher at Sheffield Hallam University, has been conducting research into the new types of friendships being fostered online ... he said that the huge contact lists of some members of Facebook and MySpace belied their real social status. "Although the number of friends people have on these sites can be massive, the number of close friends is approximately the same as in the face-to-face real world contact."

Well, d'uh. I'd be more interested if he'd explored how real-world and internet friends sets overlap, and how differently they behave, and how the same friendship can work differently online and offline. (How many of you read the LJs of people you can't stand in real life?)

Comments

[ladymoonray.livejournal.com]

From the reading I've been doing on this lately (which is a lot, given that I'm reviewing an article on computer mediated communication), the overlap question has been sadly neglected. The researchers who wrote the article I'm working on continued to treat relationships that began on-line, as on-line relationships, even though they noted that they tended to move to, or be supplemented by, other forms of contact. Which seems rather silly to me, if they're trying to talk about reduced social cues. Good criticism of the article, though :)

[moral-vacuum.livejournal.com]

I use LJ to organise my social life and to maintain regular conversation with lots of people. It has occasionally been a means for meeting new people, but unless horrendously geographically distant they tend to be absorbed into the RL side of things. There are only a small number of people I haven't met on my FL, and that's purely down to not yet having had the opportunity. I also have fewer RL close friends than the study suggests I should have.

[hairyears.livejournal.com]

LJ's pretty much excluded from the studies. More, I think, because there's no big commercial interest than due it its reatively small size.

Still, it's a bit grating to read the same conclusions about the same networking-but-not-terribly-social sites; you'd think there's be a bit more effort at comparative study.

[jezza1956.myopenid.com (from livejournal.com)]

As you know, LJ is just somewhere I appear occasionally to see whta some of my old pals are up to, but pretty much all my RL friends are people I have met via Cix.