“Nobody has 257 Friends” Strategies of Friending, Disclosure and Privacy on Facebook

摘要

In the present article, we discuss norms of friendship and privacy on social network sitesby examining strategies of privacy among users, arguing that tacit norms of friendship arenow more easily observed. The article is based on a quantitative survey among 1710 Internetusers in Denmark, among them 970 Facebook users, subsequent focus group meetings with20 respondents and finally access to their profiles for a period of twelve months. In linewith the research literature on social network sites, our study shows that users’ “friends”consist of a variety of strong, weak and even latent ties and thus supports notions such associal divergence and networked publics, suggested by danah boyd. Regarding privacy is-sues, we distinguish between level of access to information on participants’ profiles and theway participants perform on their profiles, the level of intimacy. As to the first level mostrespondents seem to emphasize whom they friend, while they do not distinguish amongfriends once they are in; everybody is treated equally. As to the second level, our researchdeviates from findings suggesting that in particular young people are rather unaware ofrisks, as we can identify what we call a “cautious sensible” strategy in all age groups thatallows users to be cautious without being too self-restrictive. Regarding the status updates,we identify a schism between saying and doing, as our respondents tend to downgrade smalltalk in the focus groups, whereas their profiles reveal that they in fact do engage in smalltalk. We understand this seeming paradox in a generic and linguistic perspective, using thenotions of phatic and indexical communication, respectively, in an analysis of the statusupdates on the profiles.