Keliy Anderson Staley and Matt Williams
Russellville, Arkansas, 2013
met via Hampshire College
© Tanja Hollander

A Friend Is Someone
Who (Kinda) Knows You

Social media allows people to connect at any point of their lives, no matter when or how physically far, and no matter how well or how little we know one another.

New tools make it easy to share words, photos, or videos instantly with one person, with all of our connections, or even with the whole world.

But has social media really improved relationships?

Turns out that a lot of people, from researchers to artists, are exploring this question in fascinating projects.

Tanja Hollander’s Meet-Up Project

In 2011, Tanja Hollander starting thinking about all her Facebook friends. She asked herself, “Am I really friends with all these people?” She decided to take a road trip and visit them—all 626 of them—to find out.

She photographs each one at home and carefully logs her photographs on her site, Are You Really My Friend?

Nate Larson
Baltimore, Maryland, 2012
met on email
© Tanja Hollander

Interestingly, Hollander hadn’t met some of these people in person before she started her project. Now, two years into the project, she’s seen and photographed about half of them.

Hollander shares her “Oh, I see” moments from the project so far:

“I have learned about human kindness and compassion. I continue to be surprised by the number of people, especially (the real life) total strangers, who have opened their homes to me—offering me a place to stay, sharing their lives, their stories, their food, and their families while allowing my camera to document it all.”

Hollander would probably argue that social media has changed her relationships—but that’s because she has pursued each friendship by meeting her virtual friends face-to-face.

The Geolocation Project

With mobile phones, it’s simple to post up-to-the-minute ideas and photos, connecting with friends at any time from anywhere.

Through their project Geolocation, photographers Nate Larson and Marni Shindelman are investigating where people are when they tweet. The photographers track the geographic tags on tweets to uncover the location and then photograph the setting. They post the photo with its tweet.

[Side note: Nate Larson is one of the friends Tanja Hollander photographed. See above.]

Location for this tweet: “He dnt kno y im hurt but its all over his twitter!! Y do I still carry hope?”
© Nate Larson and Marni Shindelman

Unless specifically directed otherwise, tweets are broadcast to all of a writer’s followers. If a hashtag like #HowToKeepARelationshipWithMe is added to the tweet, anyone accessing the hashtag can also see the message. Surely relationships get redefined when multiple eyes are on the same message.

Larson, who wondered if the setting for a tweet mattered as much as the words, described the project to Wired this way:

 “It’s all about exploring the consequences of how people are relating to each other differently.”

The photos from the Geolocation project showed that, unlike plots in great literature, setting often has little to do with friends’ virtual conversations in 140 characters or less.

But there are exceptions, like the hotel photo below, where the setting adds much more meaning to the tweet!

Location for the tweet: “Tell me I’m not making a mistake. Tell me you’re worth the wait.” © Nate Larson and Marni Shindelman

Through the Geolocation project, I discovered more about where people are when they interact with their friends, but I really wondered:

Did these writers ever share their ideas verbally with their friends or only virtually with the world?

Communication Studies Weigh In

Interesting research reveals different viewpoints about how social media is impacting friendship.

• A University of Oxford study revealed that people maintain a small number of close friends with whom they focus their communication. No matter how many friends or followers you have on social media, the number of close friends you have remains constant.

• In contrast, Jessica Vitak‘s study found that those who rely on Facebook for communication and those who live far from friends “not only see the site as a repository to store contacts, but as an interactive forum that improves the quality of relationships, and specifically benefits weaker and more distant ties.”

• In her research on Facebook friendships, Bree McEwan found “the way we choose to communicate with our friends through this medium is what impacts the relationship.” People who post individual messages to friends promote stronger relationships, while those who post broadcast messages to their community tend to have shallower relationships with their online friends.

What Is Friendship?

All these projects make me wonder:

Has social media simply given a revised definition to the word friendship?

Is friendship just knowing someone from somewhere and at sometime?

Or, does friendship have to be a deeper relationship?

Shelby Sapusek, who specializes in social media strategies for businesses, argues:

“I believe that no friendship is real unless I have had the chance to meet the person.”

All this really got me thinking about friendship. It’s true that many of my social media friends are people I have some connection to, but rarely see or talk with one-on-one. Some I’ve never met. And I’m not sure that my relationships have improved due to social media, even if I know what my friends’ children and their dinners look like.

My “Oh, I see” moment:  I’m still perfectly happy to call them all my friends.

Location for the tweet: “Sooooo can someone text me to keep me company?”
© Nate Larson and Marni Shindelman

Comment on this post below, or inspire insight with your own OIC Moment here.