Communities and Social Media

Custom Communities: Choosing our Facebook ‘friends’ to meet our sense of belonging.

Written by Vanessa Bliss

Abstract

This paper discusses the prevalence of persistent relationships and the identified judgement of individual online personas, in a users’ creation of a customizable Facebook ‘friends’ list. It focuses on how our Facebook ‘friends’ reflect the concepts of ‘community’ and the social bonds that effects our sense of belonging. It examines how communication affordances of the social media site Facebook offers longevity of social connections, regardless of geographical proximity, by facilitating the connection and maintenance of online ‘friendships’ with relative ease through the delivery of person-to-network communications (Hampton, 2016; Chambers, 2013; Donath & Boyd, 2004). The definition of ‘friendship’ is discussed, aptly defined by Sandell (1998, p.147) as “the family of choice” and examined in the context of our Facebook ‘friends’. From here, this paper discusses choosing our community of ‘friends’ on Facebook, and how personality impressions are developed through the creation and broadcast nature of individual online personas, essentially making judgments regarding ‘friendship’ acceptance to meet our sense of belonging. It is here that this paper discusses how persistent relationships and the judgement of individual online personas develop into a customizable personal community, drawing on concepts of ‘community’ and ‘individualism’ to guide our friendship acceptance decision-making. Therefore, it is the position of this paper to argue that we select and shape our Facebook “friends” through persistent relationships and the judgement of individual online personas, to create a customizable, personal community that meets our sense of belonging.

Keyword tags: #community #belonging #Facebook #friends #friending #friendship #persona #persistence #relationships

Custom Communities: Choosing our Facebook ‘friends’ to meet our sense of belonging.

The term ‘community’ holds strong nostalgic connotations for the most of us. It generates feelings of friendship and trust and defines the social bonds that effect our sense of belonging (Hampton, 2016). This can also be said of online communities, referred to as ‘virtual communities’ (Rheingold, 1993; Chambers, 2013; Delanty, 2018) where people experience belonging through communicative, virtual forms. Such forms are the framework of social media sites like Facebook, that affords its users means of persistent connections, built on intimate, casual and sociable affiliations (Chambers, 2013).  In the Australian Yellow Social Media Report (2020), Facebook remains the most popular social media site (89%), with most of us using social media to stay in touch or catch up with friends and family (83%), finding or connecting with people with similar interests (31%), and meeting new friends (16%).  This then, fosters the notion of communication as ‘belonging’, as Facebook – and other such social media sites – seize upon online, in-house communicative affordances to typify the broadcasting of the individual online persona and make judgments regarding ‘friendship’ acceptance to meet our sense of belonging. Scott (2014) refers to judgments made after being exposed to individuals’ online personas as providing sufficient cues to personality, resulting in increased friendship acceptance. This, combined with the persistent nature of relationships that make up Facebook ‘communities’ – more specifically our Facebook ‘friends’ list –  have brought about a fundamental change to the traditional structure of ‘community’ (Hampton, 2016).  It is here then that this change represents our ability to self-select and shape our Facebook ‘friends’, to custom-make an online community that meets our sense of belonging, friendship and trust, taking on the form of what Chambers (2013) refers to as ‘personal community’. Therefore, it is the position of this paper to argue that we select and shape our Facebook ‘friends’ through persistent relationships and the judgement of individual online personas, to create a custom personal community that meets our sense of belonging.

Just as the term ‘community’ holds nostalgic connotations for many of us, our sense of belonging aligns to the psychological feeling of involvement, being valued and the need to ‘fit’ in (Liu et al., 2018). This is true of virtual communities too where the communication technologies of social media giant Facebook, enhance its role in ‘facilitat[ing] the expression of many forms of belonging’ (Delanty, 2018, p.221). This can be evidenced through a Facebook users’ online membership of interest groups and pages, direct messaging services, ‘Likes’ and comments, to the self-selection of one’s ‘friends’. With passive reminders of one’s connections (birthday reminders, third-party tagging, posts on News Feed), teamed with active communication, it has never been easier to satiate the need to belong (Tobin et al., 2014).

Staying in touch or catching up with friends and family, finding and connecting with people with similar interests, and meeting new friends (Yellow, 2020), are some of the key reasons we use Facebook to meet our sense of belonging. The digital communication affordances of Facebook allow people to connect and maintain online ‘friendships’ with relative ease through the delivery of person-to-network communications (Hampton, 2016; Chambers, 2013; Donath and Boyd, 2004). In contrast, within a traditional community, people often abandon relationships due to the time and resources needed to maintain them over geographical distance in the form of person-to-person contact (Hampton, 2016). Instead, our Facebook ‘friends’ offer the affordance of persistence. Hampton (2016, p.111) explains, “[t]he low-cost, low-bandwidth, broadcast nature of person-to-network contact affords persistence, because contact can be maintained without substantively drawing from the time and resources required to maintain social ties through other forms of communication”. Not effected by transitional stages of life or geographical ties, persistent relationships in the form of our Facebook ‘friends’, offer nostalgic community connection and reconnection, stretching beyond the restrictions of space and time that reaffirms our feeling of being involved, congruence with other people and ultimately, sense of belonging (Hampton & Wellman, 2018; Delanty, 2018).

So, who are the people we select to form our Facebook ‘friends’ community? To answer this question, it is important to understand what a ‘friendship’ is. Most simplistically, Akkas and Bakirtas (2019, p. 1317) define friendship as “a voluntary association between one or many people”. Sandell (1998, p.147) goes further to describe it as “the family of choice”. In the context of our Facebook ‘friends’, friendships come in the form of requests; sometimes from friends, sometimes from people based on persistent relationships, and sometimes from strangers. We tend to accept friendship requests from ‘strong’ ties: very close friends and family members (Chambers, 2013). These strong connections offer intimacy, as well as emotional and physical support. These are people that we interact or communicate with regularly and often face-to-face as well as online. However, not all Facebook ‘friends’ offer the same level of friendship interaction. Friendships, past and future, are no longer subject to face-to-face acquaintance, with Facebook users requesting friendships with people who they think are like them (Akkas and Bakirtas, 2019) but do not know necessarily.  Chambers (2013, p.151) refers to these friendships as ‘thin’ or ‘weak’ ties of acquaintance, offering casual, informative and non-emotional exchanges. We know these friendships: that girl you went to preprimary with in 1989 and have not seen or spoken to since, or that friend of your husbands that you have never met. This also includes Facebook’s ‘friends of friends’ algorithum, aptly available to further our network of assorted ‘weak’ ties (like the husband’s friend mentioned above). This combination of diverse ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ Facebook ‘friends’ unites to resemble ‘the family of choice’. We accept, ignore or reject these requests of Facebook ‘friendship’ to shape a new kind of customisable community that is mediated by a highly personalized sense of belonging (Akkas and Bakirtas, 2019).

Arguably accepted and ingrained as a part of any community, people make judgments of individuals based on impressions gained from assessing particular, salient markers (Scott, 2014). We use these markers to guide our decision-making capabilities when choosing to communicate and interact with people within the community. In the context of choosing our community of ‘friends’ on Facebook, personality impressions are developed through the creation and broadcast nature of individual online personas, referred to as the Facebook profile (Facebook, 2021). It is within this space that users assemble their online identity by sharing personal information (such as home town, birth date, education etc.), wall posts and an overarching profile image. Research indicates that a physically attractive profile picture increases ‘friendship’ acceptance (Akkas & Bakirtas, 2019; Scott, 2014; Greitemeyer & Kunz, 2013), particularly so for members of the opposite sex if they are found to be attractive (Wang et al., 2010). Scott (2014, p.361) writes, “[p]erceived popularity [and] attractiveness… appear to be integrated in the interpretation of SNS personas, and the fact that popularity influenced approachability demonstrates that this group of traits could directly influence online behavior.” For a potential ‘friend’, the personal persona provides sufficient cues to assessing salient markers such as attractiveness and popularity (number of ‘friends’).  It also affords behavioural motive to accept or deny one’s request for ‘friendship’ based on the dynamics of the desired personalised community and one’s humanistic need to fit in and belong.

The term personal community relies heavily on the convergent concepts of ‘community’ and ‘individualism’ in the context of online friendships and community creation (Chambers, 2013). The self-selection of ‘friends’ and more individualized public of support found within our customized Facebook ‘friends’ community, emphasizes a more personal way of engaging socially within chosen and persistent ties. This can also include connecting to strangers, due to the visibility of our community of Facebook ‘friends’ to other users. Potential ‘friends’ are suggested to us through powerful ‘friends of friends’ algorithms which may make it easier to satisfy our sense of belonging but, at the same time, increases the chance of social rejection, including the act of removing a person from one’s ‘friends’ list (referred to as ‘defriending’) (Tobin et al., 2013). Through these actions we select and shape our custom personal communities through the accepting, ignoring and rejection of ‘friends’, which affords potential ‘friendship’ scalability.  However, for the most part, we tend to communicate and connect with a small, select group of intimate ‘friends’ (Policarpo, 2019), with users averaging 200 Facebook ‘friends’ (Akkas & Bakirtas, 2019).  Policarpo (2019, p.450) writes, “… when understood as opposed to an isolated ‘individual’, the ‘personal’ evokes the ‘social’, assuming that people and the ties they build are set in social types of belonging such as gender, ethnicity, class, spatial context and historical context (structural dimensions)”. This behaviour of personal customisation links to concepts of ‘community’ (collective interest, social commitment and notions of belonging) and notions of ‘individualism’ (identity formation, personal achievement and autonomy) highlighting a shift towards Facebook ‘friendship’ being regarded as a resource with significant social value, based on affiliation, trust and belonging (Chambers, 2013, p.147).  It is for these reasons that Facebook ‘friend’ collectors (users who gather ‘friends’ on a large scale) are viewed with mistrust (boyd, 2006), as they defy the collective perception of ‘community’, friendship, trust, and our sense of belonging to a custom, personal community.

To conclude, for the most of us, our sense of belonging inspires a psychological feeling of involvement, being valued and the feeling of congruency within the group. Staying in touch or catching up with friends and family, finding and connecting with people with similar interests, and meeting new friends, are some of the key reasons we use social media sites like Facebook, to find our sense of belonging. In contrast to friendships within a traditional community, our Facebook ‘friends’ offer the affordance of persistence. Not effected by transitional stages of life or geographical ties, persistent relationships in the form of our Facebook ‘friends’, offer nostalgic community connection and reconnection, stretching beyond the restrictions of space and time that reaffirms the feeling of being involved, congruent with other people and ultimately, sense of belonging.  Facebook ‘friendships’ come in the form of requests; sometimes from friends, sometimes from people based on persistent relationships, and sometimes from strangers. We accept friendship requests from very close friends and family members that offer strong connections. However, not all Facebook ‘friends’ offer the same level of friendship interaction. Friendships, past and future, are no longer subject to face-to-face acquaintance, with Facebook users requesting friendships with strangers who they think are like themselves.  Personality impressions of ‘friends’ are developed through the creation and broadcast nature of individual online personas. For a potential ‘friend’, the personal persona provides sufficient cues to assessing salient markers such as attractiveness and popularity (number of ‘friends’).  We accept, ignore or reject these requests of Facebook ‘friendship’ from persistent relationships and impressions made from personal online personas to shape a new kind of customisable community that is mediated by a highly personalized sense of belonging. For the most, however, we tend to communicate and connect online with a small, select group of intimate ‘friends’ (Policarpo, 2019). In doing so we select and shape a custom personal community through the acceptance of ‘friends’.  Therefore, these behaviours reaffirm that we select and shape our Facebook ‘friends’ through persistent relationships and the judgement of individual online personas, to create a custom personal community that meets our needs of friendship, trust and ultimately, sense of belonging.

References

Akkas, C. & Bakirtas, H. (2019). Would you like to be my Facebook friend? Sexuality & Culture, 24, 1315-1336. http://doi.org/10.1007/s12119-019-09684-6

boyd, d. (2006). Friends, friendsters, and top 8: Writing community into being on social                network sites. First Monday, 11(12),   http://firstmonday.org/article/view/1418/1336

Chambers, D. (2013). Virtual communities and online social capital. In Social media and personal relationships: online intimacies and networked friendship, 142-      161.Palgrave Macmillian UK.             http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/curtin/detail.action?docID=1138349

Delanty, G. (2018). Virtual community: belonging as communication. In Community: 3rd            edition (3rd ed., 200-224). Routledge.       https://doi.org.dbgw.lis.curtin.edu.au/10.4324/9781315158259

Donath, J., & boyd, d. (2004). Public displays of connection. BT Technology Journal,       22(4), 71-82. https://search-proquest-     com.dbgw.lis.curtin.edu.au/docview/215202769?pq-origsite=primo

Facebook. (2021). Your profile and settings. https://www.facebook.com/help/239070709801747/?helpref=hc_fnav

Greitemeyer, T. & Kunz, I. (2013) Name-Valence and Physical Attractiveness in Facebook: Their Compensatory Effects on Friendship Acceptance. I, 153(3), 257-    260.  https://www-tandfonline-                com.dbgw.lis.curtin.edu.au/doi/full/10.1080/00224545.2012.741629?scroll=top&              needAccess=true

Hampton, K. N. (2016). Persistent and Pervasive Community: New Communication         Technologies and the Future of Community. American Behavioral Scientist,   60(1), 101–124. https://doi.org/10.1177/0002764215601714

Hampton, K. N., & Wellman, B. (2018). Lost and Saved . . . Again: The Moral Panic        about the Loss of Community Takes Hold of Social Media. Contemporary     Sociology, 47(6), 643–651. https://doi.org/10.1177/0094306118805415

Liu, Q., Shao, Z. & Fan, W. (2018). The impact of users’ sense of belonging on social      media habit formation: empirical evidence from social networking and   microblogging websites in China. International Journal of Information           Management, 43(2018), 209-223. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijinfomgt.2018.08.005

Policarpo, V. (2019) The personal life of Facebook: managing friendships with social       media. Families, Relationships and Societies, 8(3), 445–461.                          https://doi.org/10.1332/204674318X15313160549810

Sandell, J. (1998). I’ll be there for you: friends and the fantasy of alternative     families. American Studies, 39(2), 141-155. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40642973

Tobin, S.J., Vanman, E.J., Verreynne, M. & Saeri, A.K. (2014). Threats to belonging on   Facebook: lurking and ostracism. Social Influence, 10(1), 31-42.           https://doi.org/10.1080/15534510.2014.893924

Wang, S.S., Moon, S., Kwon, K.H., Evans, C.A., & Stefanone, M.A. (2010). Face off:      Implications of visual cues on initiating friendships on Facebook. Computers in      Human Behavior, 26(2), 226–234. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2009.10.001

7 thoughts on “Custom Communities: Choosing our Facebook ‘friends’ to meet our sense of belonging.

  1. Hi Vanessa,

    I agree with you that nowadays most of us are using social media to stay connected with friends, family and other people with similar interests or likings. It can be done so easily without restriction of space and time.

    You also rightly pointed out that we tend to connect with a small, selected group of 200 Facebook “friends”. I think it is our human nature that we socialise more with people with common interests and have the “sense of belonging”. Thus, contributing to the evolution of virtual communities.

    Best regards,
    Elaine

  2. Hi Vanessa,

    I still don’t know if I would consider my Facebook ‘friends’ as a community. Yes they are custom picked but over time my engagement with each of them has varied and I have ‘friends’ on Facebook that I have not had much to do within a very long time but simply have not gotten around to deleting from Facebook. So would I consider them part of my community? I agree, as you point out, that some ties we have are strong and other’s weak and our choice in accepting or rejecting a friend’s request means we are customising our online community but what about those that just accept every request and have thousands of ‘friends’, can this be a community? For me, it’s the engagement within the ‘friends’ list with a small close group of friends that I would consider my community and the larger Facebook ‘friends’ list that I would consider a network.

    Great paper Vanessa, you have got me thinking, as has this entire unit.

    Please feel free to read my paper on the music fandom community:
    https://networkconference.netstudies.org/2021/2021/04/26/the-rise-to-fame-the-power-of-music-fandom-communities-using-social-network-sites-to-promote-musicians/

    1. Hi Carolyn,
      Thank you for your comment.
      I believe at the point of accepting the friendships with those within your community that you now feel disconnected from, you believed they would have contributed to your sense of belonging at that time. As within any community, our level of connection comes and goes however, Facebook ‘friends’ allow these relationships to remain persistent. These people you may consider deleting from your list may no longer fit within the parameters of your personal community, but you still have the choice to customise this community to your own liking.
      As for those that have thousands of ‘friends’, this is how they satiate their need to belong. For the most of us, this is not how we view a community but to others, this is what suits them. This suitability may include relationships that afford the flow of information or useful linkages as in a network, but I believe it is their shared identity around a topic that makes them a community.

  3. Hi Vanessa,
    Your paper was a captivating read as it introduced me to the concept of customisable personal communities, as I generally think about joining an established community instead of creating a community. In your paper you mention that “users who gather ‘friends’ on a large scale are viewed with mistrust”, although I wonder if this observation holds truth on other social networking sites. For example, on Instagram users generally aspire to gain large followings because Instagram ‘followers’ often signify credibility and acceptance. What do you think?
    Similarly, you discuss the notion of communication as ‘belonging’ which has got me thinking about users who passively engage and participate. Wouldn’t these Facebook users then be more susceptible to ostracism because of unilateral communication? I think that Facebook negatively effects my sense of belonging as friendships often feel superficial and one-sided which often leaves me feeling out of place. However, I feel that my sense of belonging becomes stronger in face-to-face situations due to my empathy towards others, with both strong ties and weak ties.
    I’d be interested to hear your opinion!

    1. Hi Karla,
      You make a very interesting point about the gathering of ‘friends’ in great numbers across platforms. I had not really considered it before but the main difference would be that those that have a large following on Instagram haven’t personally chosen their community by accepting, denying or ignoring the requests for friendship like they would on Facebook. They have ‘followers’ by which most of these relationships are often one-side and not reciprocated.
      I agree with your comment about face-to-face friendships. I too, find more belonging from these situations however, probably more so with my strong ties.
      Those that passively engage on Facebook, I think would find the platform does not meet their sense of belonging and may choose to seldom use it. I recently read a paper by Tobin et al (2014) that found that a lack of information sharing and feedback on Facebook can threaten belonging needs. People that prefer to “lurk” on Facebook, may too find face-to-face community more satisfying to their needs.
      Thank you for your comment Karla.

  4. Hi Katherine! I’m glad you enjoyed my paper. I enjoyed writing it because it is a topic that a lot of us do question.
    To your questions: Facebook ‘friendships’ that are created and maintained solely on the platform, can come about through a shared interest and/or assessing personality through what salient markers are available online (mostly the attractiveness of your profile picture, number of ‘friends’ and even your gender (Akkas & Bakirtas, 2019)). We are talking about ‘friendships’ with strangers essentially, and as offline friendships require person-to-person interactions, so too do Facebook ‘friendships’ if they are to develop into meaningful relationships that transcend the weak ties of person-to-network communication. I do believe these ‘friendships’ can survive because Facebook ‘friendships’ are afforded the power of persistence, but question their ability to thrive. This would depend upon the level of satisfaction that the relationship provides in meeting our sense of belonging. If the relationship suits our personal community parameters, our online interactions could play a supplementary role in concreting friendships offline too.

  5. Hi Vanessa – I enjoyed reading your paper! I was wondering what your thoughts are on the depth of friendships that are created and maintained on Facebook? Do you think that friendships can survive (and thrive) purely through the interactions you have on the platform or do you think it plays a role as a supplementary tool in these relationships that then continue in real life?

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