[LINK] "'Mutual Friends' as Culture"

[rfmcdonald]

Savage Minds' Adam Fish has an interesting post describing how he makes use of social networking sites like Facebook.

I ‘friend’ and ‘follow’ on Facebook and Twitter many of my informants working in the multidisciplinary world of social entrepreneurship. It can be helpful in a number of ways. Personal profile pages on social media sites form databases for the usual information that takes up the first 10 minutes of an interview and from which class assessments can be made (education, current city, hometown city, religion, politics, etc). This is a good resource for anthropologists interested in links between social capital and digital culture, but I want to explore how Facebook’s ‘mutual friends’ groupings are data sets for anthropologists.

So I do this regular ritual on Facebook. I find someone doing something innovative in regards to new media business and philanthropy and immediately request their Facebook friendship and follow them on Twitter. My informants, they tell me, do the same thing. (I got the idea from them). I post links of enlightening new media blogs and sociotechical events that would interest my ‘friends’ of scholars, business people, and activists. I do this to save my links and to give a realtime display of my research questions and investigations. (I started doing this to mimic the practices of my informant friends.) They are doing this, I am doing this, and everyone is up-to-date on what interests each other on that particular day. This practice creates a space of intellectual affinity and reflexive transparency. For an anthropological study of voracious polymaths who value innovation and discovery such as new media social entrepreneurs it is essential to stay abreast and also contribute to their intellectual curiosity.

I do this other thing too. I click on the Facebook page of one of my key informants and see the mutual friends we have. With this one key informant, we have 60 mutual friends. There are journalists, documentarians, engineers, marketers, designers, academics, philosophers, and technologists in this web of ‘mutual friends.’ John Postill encouraged us to ask if this is a public, a network, a community, a culture, or a business consortium? In an era of transnationality and affinity cultures such static categories have questionable validity. Artificial categories of ‘mutual friend’ provided by dynamic social media sites might be useful to think with when pondering the boundaries and dimensions of informant’s ‘culture’. What the FB ‘mutual friends’ is is a specific group of people with shared values and practices regarding the theory and use of social media. This praxis is updated and refreshed by the minute, debated and experimented with everyday, and forming actual world actions and communities throughout the year.

This increasing shift away from establishing links with actual friends to acquiring more functional online "friends" for specific reasons, Fish goes on to suggest, may well threaten the longevity of online social networks by making them less meeting places to which one's attached and more interchangeable sites of no particular important.

Thoughts?