Social perception of Facebook friendship among Greek students

Abstract

Making friends is the basic concept upon which Facebook(Fb) isconceived. Fb operationalizes friendship more by simple acts of contact reinforcement (e.g., “add”, “like”, “comment”) and under the rubric “friend” allows diverse kinds of friendships (from real close friends to complete strangers). These new ways and practices of relating raisemainly issues of how friendship in Fb is perceived from users’ subjective point of view and according to their personal experience within the Fb context. Thisstudy focuses on users social perception of Fbfriendship.Participants were Greek students (N= 166); they provided their demographics and responded to questions onFbintensity use, Fb friends total number and their estimate of real friends in Fb. They also listedwords or thoughts to the question “how would you presentFbfriendship to someone who has never heard about it?”Content analysis of responses yielded7 themes (no response included).Fbfriendship was predominantly perceived as a means of “aggregating social capital” and “socializing”, frequently as “phoney” and less frequent as a way of “developing [real]friendships”, another mode of “flirting” and a “dangerous” way of connecting with people. Correspondence Analysis performed on the themes, taking into account gender, number of friends and proportion of real to total Fbfriends,indicated that although the social perception of Fbfriendship is permeated by disbelief and apprehension, making Fbfriends is also perceivedas a tool for the maintenance and expansion of one’s social capital and the promotion of desirable social identities.

Keywords

• Facebook
• friendship
• social perception
• intensity of Facebook use
• online friends
• offline friends