Complexity and Social Networks Blog

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10 August 2008

FFF? (Facebook friends forever?)

I recently picked up my oldest daughter from immersion Chinese camp in Vermont (an interesting statement in itself about global networks). It was striking to me that as soon as she got home, she got on Facebook to friend many of the kids she got to know in camp. This was quite a contrast to my own experiences in high school and college (fairly typical of my cohort), when intense, immersive social experiences for the Summer almost never yielded friendships that lasted beyond. I wonder what the long run effects of Facebook and related sites/technologies will be? Do they make friendships stickier? There are a few reasons why they might. First, the technology is designed (e.g., through "status updates") to remind you about your "friends." You will still see status updates pop up on someone you friended years later. Second, Facebook acts as a self-updating address book. For example, when all of the kids in my daughter's camp cohort go off to college, they will update their profiles accordingly. Facebook thus greatly facilitates search--search based on finding a particular friend, or finding friends in particular locations. E.g., will my daughter, years from now, move to some town, and notice that someone she went to camp with in high school is there, and resume that latent friendship? In my generation that would have been implausible; for the Facebook generation, I suspect it will be rather different.

This yields an interesting, researchable question for some reader out there. One could imagine a survey of people, say in their late 20's, asking how many were still friends with people they met in high school, as well as people they met during high school but not in high school. If one could do repeated cross sections over the next decade, the question is whether there is a sharp disjuncture at the point that Facebook became near universal.

Posted by David Lazer at August 10, 2008 8:24 AM

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