Friend Friend Friend

Boyd make a number of really great points, and I know many of you have taken this topic to heart and really analyzed and delved into what friendship online means or doesn't mean (sarah and Kristen's posts stick out in my mind that I read last week)

However, I think many people are verrrryyy opinionated on the definition of friend. Much like some of you defined an online personality as having to be a mirror reflection of your real like personhood...but if there is one thing I have learned, it is that the internet changes the game. It changes the meaning of identity and forces us to reflect on our conception of such, and it also forces us to reinterpret the meaning of a "friend". New social networking sites have forced us to do so.

Many people are going to make the argument that all of these people are not my friends, they dont serve me any emotional support in a time of crisis, they don't pick up the phone to see how my job interview went, they don't know every member of my family and 20 years of stories that go with it...

But I'm not sure if we can look at online "friends" the same way we do real life friends. After all Boyd says that "friendship itself is culturally dependent and people use the term friendship in different cultural communities...'the contexts within friendships develop influence the forms which friendships take." I mean there it is...the context they develop(ONLINE) influence the forms they take(poking, messaging, picture sharing) What is different about these friendships online is that they do not require one to one communication and sharing. But the same things still go on, a friend will know another friends status, mood, appearance, interests, and happenings(via photos) because they look at their page. Totally and completely a different form of friendship, but it developed online so we cannot expect it to be the same of RL friendships.