Tufekci, Z. (2010). Who acquires friends through social media and why? "Rich get richer" versus "seek and ye shall find". International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media. Retrieved June 17, 2010.
“Who gains new friends from social media” (p. 170)? This question has remained at the center of academic and popular intrigue; arousing robust sentiments with its refusal to extinguish. “Today’s Internet is used by hundreds of millions of ordinary people who do not resemble the mostly-white, mostly male, tech-savvy netizens of the early days” (p. 171). To this end, “National data has shown that while there is no gender digital divide, there continues to be a significant divide between African-American and White households in terms of Internet access and computer ownership” (p. 176).
In this progressive age of new media, it have become essential “to understand the factors that enable, or inhibit the formation of close social ties through online connections” (p. 177). Narrowing the broad concentration of the abovementioned question, Tufekci presents a more direct focus in which he posits the question: “what is the impact of the person’s belief about the possibility of online friendship on actual relationship formation through social media” (p. 171)? “Addressing this inquiry subjectively, the author takes the point of view of the user, and examines predictors of acquiring new friends through social media use” (p. 170).
The obtained data enabled Tufekci to conclude that “new online friendships came by those who both believed it to be possible, and invested time in social media; with the results showing that these beliefs led to a roughly fifty-two percent higher probability of acquiring friends online, compared to those who did not believe in this possibility” (p. 176). These findings “suggest that online friendship might partially be a self-seeking prophecy” (p. 176); lending support to the ““seek and ye shall find” model, which assumes that, for a variety of reasons, people conclude that online sociality is real or “faux”” (p. 171). “It is also possible that causality runs in the other direction: people may have decided that online friendship was not achievable after trying and failing to acquire new friends online” (p. 176).
“An interesting result appeared with regards to race, and particularly African-Americans; in which the data revealed that black respondents were far more prone to acquiring friends online” (p. 176). “The odds of having met a new friend through social media use were independent of almost all demographic variables, except being an African-American” (p. 175). Offering a potential explanation for this outcome, Horrigan (2009) as cited by Tufekci asserts that, “African-Americans are more likely to access the Internet through mobile media, which suggests that a more intrinsic connection may exist between Internet use and sociality” (p. 176).
This assumption was briefly discussed in one of our very first reading assignments for COM 6270. This article, A Whole-Hearted Effort to Get It Half Right: Predicting the Future of Communication Technology Scholarship by Craig R. Scott (2009) provides six future directions for communication and technology research. In his second prediction, Scott contends that “Presence/virtuality studies are needed as wireless/mobile communication continues to grow because one of the social dynamics implicated in wireless/mobile communication concerns the ever-expanding sense of presence and virtuality that become relevant as communicators interact in various locales and experience various degrees of physical, social, and psychological presence with others” (p. 754).
As previously mentioned, Tufekci’s findings have indicated that African-Americans; who more frequently access the Internet through mobile media, are more likely to attain friends online. This assumption fits into the reasoning behind Scott’s prediction because mobile media facilitates Internet use anywhere and at anytime. Scott’s argues the relevance of this issue is derived from the personalized flexibility which mobile media permits to incorporate aspects of the virtual into the physical. The proliferation of mobile media has led to a conceptual transformation concerning the validity of online friendships/relationships; in that mobile media’s on the spot Internet access has legitimized the interactive sociality of virtual communication.
COM 6270 Reading:
Scott, C. R. (2009). A whole-hearted effort to get it half right: Predicting the future of communication technology scholarship. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 14(3), 753-757.
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