Facebook: Social Networking from Abstract to Concrete

For this assignment, I decided to do evaluate Facebook, which is an online community in itself, consisting of a number of smaller communities within, and both extremely strong as well as extremely weak ties. The complexity of Facebook as a network makes it very interesting to investigate.
The first major SNA attribute is the common ground shared by members on Facebook, especially during its earlier years. When Facebook was first created, it was a social network only for students at the Ivy League universities, which eventually expanded to the rest of the colleges and universities. In this way, Facebook users shared the common ground of being college students pursuing further education. This differentiates them not only from people beyond college age or children, but also their same-age peers who were unable or chose not to go to college or university. As is said by Etzioni & Etzioni, 1999, “Second, a community requires a measure of commitment to a set of shared values, mores, meanings and a shared historical identity – in short, a culture.” This commitment to secondary education and the university culture clearly translates to CMC networking through Facebook. Facebook has since expanded high school, work groups, and eventually even regions, making it as available, although not as customizable, as Myspace, resulting in a backlash from users who valued its common ground appeal. The individual networks on Facebook, such as a specific university or work company, or even special interest groups or clubs on the network, provide even further common ground appeal, as these groups are more exclusive and would only include, for example, members of the Cornell community.
Another major SNA attribute is reciprocity on Facebook, the way in which Facebook interactions and relationships reinforce one another, or promote bonding. When members network, or “friend” each other on the site, they are able to view the friends of all of their friends as well, possibly connecting to people they had met or had a history with but had not spoken to in a while. This feature makes social networks more visible, and different groups of friends emerge obviously, by having pictures tagged together to sharing the same mutual friends to belonging to the same groups. This provides the opportunity for the weakest of the weak links as well as the strongest of the strong links to emerge. Facebook links, as a result of Facebook’s essential mission of friend requesting and privacy, is to allow FtF relationships to carry over to the online network. This means that people that we have met once, as well as our best friends, can have a relationship with us on the online network. Clearly, better friends emerge as more involved online, as they are offline, and it is not common for weak ties in real life to become friends on Facebook, and have no further activity after the finalization of the friend request. I don’t see Facebook as a place to meet new people, but instead where everyone that one has a relationship with can come together in the same place.
In conclusion, Facebook’s main effect, in my opinion, simply makes social networks in real life more “visible”, making the normally abstract idea of a social network an actually concrete system, and as a result Facebook users are more socially aware, perhaps even too socially aware.