Friending is the act of adding someone to a list of "friends" on asocial networking service.[1][2] The notion does not necessarily involve the concept offriendship.[footnotes 1] It is also distinct from the idea of a "fan"—as employed on the WWW sites of businesses, bands, artists, and others—since it is more than a one-way relationship. A "fan" only receives things. A "friend" can communicate back to the person friending.[2] The act of "friending" someone usually grants that person special privileges (on the service) with respect to oneself.[4] OnFacebook, for example, one's "friends" have the privilege of viewing and posting to one's "timeline".[2]
Following is a similar concept on othersocial network services, such asTwitter andInstagram, where a person (follower) chooses to add content from a person or page to theirnewsfeed. Unlike friending, following is not necessarily mutual, and a person canunfollow (stop following) or block another user at any time without affecting that user's following status.[5][6][7]
The first scholarly definition and examination of friending and defriending (the act of removing someone from one's friend list, also called unfriending) was David Fono andKate Raynes-Goldie's "Hyperfriendship and beyond: Friends and Social Norms on LiveJournal" from 2005,[8] which identified the use of the term as both a noun and a verb by users of early social network site and blogging platformLiveJournal, which was originally launched in 1999.
The addition of people to a friend list without regard to whether one actually is their friend is sometimes known asfriend whoring.[9] Matt Jones ofDopplr went so far as to coin the expression "friendingconsidered harmful" to describe the problem of focusing upon the friending of more and more people at the expense of actually making any use of a social network.[10]
Friend collecting is the adding of hundreds or thousands of friends/followers, a not uncommon order of magnitude on some social sites. As a result, many teen users feel pressured to heavily curate their posts, posting only carefully posed and editedphotographs with well-thought-out captions. SomeInstagram users will create a second account, known as aFinsta (short for "Fake Instagram"). A Finsta is typically private, and the owner only allows close friends to follow it. Since the follower count is kept down, the posts can be morecandid and silly in nature.[11] Users may also create multiple accounts based on their interests. Someone with a personal social media account might be a photographer and maintain a separate account for that.
There is risk associated with following large numbers of people: scholars say that social anxiety could be an effect of managing a large social media network, as users can feel jealous and have a "fear of missing out".[12]
Unfriending is the act of removing someone from a friends list. On Facebook, this means the action is unilateral, meaning, the friendship is terminated on both sides. The act of unfriending is often used when one user was flirting and made the other uncomfortable.[13]
Unfollowing is a little different. When a user unfollows someone on Instagram or Twitter, it continues a one-sided relationship. Often, the unfollowed user doesn't realize they were unfollowed, so they continue the following.
There are distinct groups of "friends" that one can friend on a social networking service. The notion of a social network friend does not necessarily embody the concept offriendship. Although terminology has not yet evolved to distinguish the different types of social networking friends,[9] they can be broken into the following three categories.
Within these categories "friends" can be made up of strong ties, weak existing ties, weak latent ties, andparasocial ties.[7] Strong ties can be made up of close family members and friends where self-disclosure, intimacy and frequent content occur.[7] Weak existing ties can be made up of acquaintances, co-workers and distance relatives with whom the user has inconsistent contact.[7] Weak latent ties can be made up of people within a similar geographical location or profession that can be used as a potential future bridge to other connections.[7] Parasocial ties can be made up of celebrities, public figures and media personas.[7]
Human nature is to reciprocate a friending, marking someone as a friend who has marked oneself as a friend.[10][4] This is a social norm for social networking services.[4] However, this leads to mixing up who is an actual friend, and who is acontact. Tagging someone as a "contact" who has marked one as a "friend" can be perceived as impolite.[10] Other concerns about this issue are treated inSherry Turkle'sAlone Together which analyses many behavioral dynamics in social media friendships. Turkle defines herself as "cautiously optimistic", but expresses concern that distance communications may undermine genuine face-to-face spoken discourses, lessening people's expectations of one another.[14]
One social networking service,FriendFeed, allows one to friend someone as a "fake" friend. The person "fake" friended receives the usual notifications for friending, but that person's updates are not received.[10] Gavin Bell, author ofBuilding Social Web Applications, describes this mechanism as "ludicrous".[10]
Results from a 2007 survey theCenter for the Digital Future stated that only 23% of internet users have at least one virtual friend whom they have only met online.Ideally the number of virtual friends is directly proportional to the use of the Internet, but the same survey showed 20% of heavy-users (more than 3 hours/day) who claimed an average of 8.7% online friends, reported at least one relationship that started virtually and migrated to in-person contact.
This results and other concerning issues are included in the bookNetworked: The New Social Operating System[15] co-written by Lee Rainie andBarry Wellman in 2012.
The act of "friending" someone on a social networking service has particular ethical implications forjudges in the United States. Judicial codes of conducts in the various states generally incorporate some form of provision that judges should avoid even theappearance of impropriety. Whether this regulates and even prohibits judges "friending" attorneys that appear before them, and law enforcement personnel, has been the subject of some analysis by the judicial ethics panels of the various states. They haven't all agreed on the guidance that they have given to judges:[16]
A minority opinion of the committee asserted that there is a substantive difference between "friending" on a social networking service and actual friendship, and that the general public, being aware of the norms of social networking services, was capable of drawing this distinction and would not reasonably conclude either a special degree of influence or a violation of the code of judicial conduct. This minority opinion was outnumbered twice in 2009, both in the Judicial Ethics Advisory and in theFlorida Supreme Court Judicial Ethics Advisory committee.[16]