Com125 Assignment7: Online community: where people build their relationships

The meaning of friendship

How can we define the term, friends? As we live in the society where people are able to connect to each other online, the meaning of friendship is getting blurry. In the past, about 10 years ago, friends mean a lot to each individuals, which indicates friends are people forming relationships with us doing physical activities. However, now in 2007, we can easily form a relationship based on the online network though a number of online blogs and an internet access across the world.

“When I see somebody with a large number of supposed friends, I suspect that they’re using the term ‘friend’ to mean ‘acquaintance,’ or that their motives in getting Friendster-recorded friends are not really about the relationships for the their own sake.” — Bob (danah boyd 2006: Friends, Friendsters, and Top 8: Writing community into being on social network sites)

When we go on our friends' web blogs, we see lists of friends, or celebrities who are linked to people's web blogs. We think that they are cool with bunch of friends' list. As an exmaple of Facebook, we can go on others' blogs and find out who they are, what univeristy they go to, and who they hang out with mostly and so forth. From what is represented on blogs, we think that we know a lot about someone and become a 'friend'. Through my friend's friend, and their friends' friends, we keep expanding our social relationships online for the sake of popularity. Are they really 'friends' or just 'colletors of acquaintances'?

Online Community: A place to maintain social relationships

A virtual community, e-community or online community is a group of people that primarily interact via communication media rather than face to face (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_community). The fact that people can interact with others and moreover, form social ties without face to face relationships, attracts online users to join the online communities. Because it is online community which is linked through Web browswer, it can be spread out so quickly. This is one of the attactions why online communities are becoming more popular. You can just go online and type friend's ID to add him/her as my 'friend'. Compared to offline community, online community is a lot simpler to contact to each other between friends. If someone leaves a message on my Facebook blog, I can simply reply to the message. Whereas, to communicate in offline communities, people should make a time and get together which involves time consuming.

Online communities offer more chances to get involved in relationship with friends than offline communities. Though I've been travelling and studying abroad for years, I could still keep in touch with friends from my old schools. A website called, 'www.iloveschool.co.kr' provides a place for people look for their friends and teachers from their elementary schools, middle schools and high schools. Once I join the website and add my schools and the completed year of the study, I can see friends/teachers who joined the website and message them. Sometimes, I can even talk to them online on webchats. So far, I've found a lot of friends and teachers from my high school through the website. Not only looking for friends online, but online communities keeps maintaining relationships with people by emailing and messaging to eachother no matter where they live. Therefore, online communites are now located in us playing as a webmessenger role for our social ties and relationships.


Reference:

danah boyd 2006: Friends, Friendsters, and Top 8: Writing community into being on social network sites

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_community