10. Social Ties: Networking Together

Case Studies

Supporting examples

In his chapter “Social Ties: Networking Together,” Benkler aims to answer fundamental questions about how the Internet is changing patterns of social interaction and organization. He takes on the overly optimistic views about the Internet—“Oh my god the Internet bringing us all closer together in every way!”—and the overly pessimistic ones—“We’re all just alienated from one another, spending all our time absorbed in screens.” The result is a set of impressively balanced, well-reasoned conclusions that claim that the Internet is enabling better, “thicker” relationships with people we already knew while simultaneously expanding the possibilities to manage better loose or weak relationships (357).

Unfortunately for his work, the timing of Benkler’s writing—early to mid-2005—meant that he just missed the boom of so-called “social networking” sites. Their only mention is in a reference to another researcher’s work on the development of weak social ties in the first-wave network Friendster. The two most popular social networks that exist today—-MySpace and Facebook—-are nowhere to be seen. Their glaring absence from the text is unfortunate, not only because of their incredible cultural prominence and relevance to the chapter’s subject material, but also because the social behavior that occurs on both sites clearly reinforces Benkler’s own conclusions.

MySpace and Facebook don’t share much in common except for their fundamental structure: a user pieces together a profile and then makes connections with others who have done the same. The similarities pretty much end there. MySpace is an open network with over 30 million unique monthly users that includes colors, streaming music, and blogs. Facebook, roughly a third the size of MySpace, is a collection of mini-networks at colleges, high schools, and now corporations that is focused less on self-expression and more on efficient information exchange. In both instances, users are spending around 15 minutes surfing the site a day, making MySpace the second most popular site on the Internet in terms of traffic and Facebook the seventh.

What is fascinating about both sites is that users sign up and immediately look to connect with friends from the “real” world. Peers from school, relatives, and coworkers are the first people that a MySpace or Facebook user “friends.” It is only as an individual’s usage continues that the net of who gets called a “friend” expands to acquaintances—the friend of a friend you met briefly at a party on Friday night or someone who you share a class with, but don’t really know. The third type of connection that occurs is random friending—connections made not because of any affiliation in “real” life at all. This third type of friend connection happens much more frequently on MySpace than on Facebook, most likely because it is an open network that doesn’t take root in “real” life communities like college campuses.

On both Myspace and Facebook, users are engaging in social activity that goes past simple chat rooms or one-on-one messaging and instead allows for personal expression and information transmission to a larger extent than previously possible. Benkler’s claim that networks provide for increased communication and information transfer between individuals who already know one another (like friends and relatives) is directly reflected on social networking sites. Up-to-the-minute information is available on your friend’s love life, her new interests, photos from last night’s concert, and now (only on Facebook) where she might be located in real time. Facebook and MySpace add another way to share information and communicate with people in general, but the first people to really benefit are most often close friends.

Similarly, the networks open up a new space for creating, preserving, and potentially strengthening what Benkler calls “weak ties,” a term first formulated by sociologists writing on social capital. In layman’s terms, these weak ties are the people that you know, but are not necessarily close friends with. They are the names that you would recognize in everyday conversation, but they are not the people you would call or email to spend time with unless you had some formal reason to meet with them.

With the creation of social networks like MySpace and Facebook, information on the weak ties in an individual’s life is collected in one place and thereby made more accessible when the need comes to “take advantage” of them. When one looks for a new job or moves to a new city, weak ties can become very useful to gain the much-needed social footing to make the transition. Preserving weak relationships—not to mention contact, job, and location information—has been extremely difficult until the emergence of networks like MySpace and Facebook.

A final advantage of networks that Benkler does not emphasize in his chapter but is increasingly clear with the advent of MySpace and Facebook is the opportunity to connect with individuals who share similar interests as you. Fans of music groups, supporters of political campaigns, and collectors of the arcane are empowered to find one another and associate more easily. Social networks go a step further than the “regular” web in encouraging the spread of interest associations. Whereas in the past, individuals had to search for a group related to one of their interests, a group leader can now search for people interested in the topic and ask them to join. The opportunity to create an association is now bi-directional instead of unidirectional.

It is impossible not to take note of the importance of the spread of social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook. Even though they are radically altering the social landscape for the tens of millions of users who return to them daily, their growth seems to follow pre-existing patterns of the effect of the Internet on social relationships in general. It is a testament to Benkler’s analysis that the emergence of social networking sites has confirmed his own earlier conclusions about the effects of networks on social connectivity.