PRE-FACEBOOK

As a growing social network, Facebook is spreading worldwide with already approximately 19 million people logging in each day to check others’ profiles. We have created with each other what Clive Thompson of New York Times calls “ambient intimacy,” which can be described as “the ultimate expression of a generation of celebrity-addled youths who believe their every utterance is fascinating and ought to be shared with the world” (CITE) Everything can be shared on Facebook, and no one seems to mind because everyone cares about even the most trivial details of life such as what you ate for lunch. We do not seem to remember how life was life pre-Facebook—the relationships we shared with our friends and lovers or even strangers that we could not have stumbled upon if it were not for the convenience of Facebook. The question now is: how have intimate relationships changed through the emergence of Facebook and how it affects the people involved.
Before Facebook, people did not have the luxury of keeping in contact with another person without verbally communicating with them. We did not have constant status updates or recently uploaded pictures to keep us in the loop. Our impressions, whether first, second, or last were made personally. With Facebook, we have the help of a whole profile dedicated to what type of friends people have, the pictures that they are tagged in, or comments made from their friends. Joseph B. Walther et al. examines the relationship between physical attractiveness and Facebook, claiming that if an average person is in a picture with a person that is unattractive they are seen as more attractive, but if an average person is in a picture with a person that is attractive they are seen as less attractive. This demonstrates the affect Facebook has on the perception of beauty when presented in a photo. Without Facebook, we are more likely to make impressions based on face to face interactions rather than photos on a profile page. Though there still may be judgments made on physical beauty, it is not based on a 2D photo.
This leads us to the idea of a virtual versus physical world and how this may determine the types of relationships we have with others. Walther and Parks (2002) claim that social networking sites, such as Facebook, facilitate mixed mode relationships. They define mixed mode relationships as “those which move from an electronic context to a face-to-face setting or vice-versa…in the case of social networking systems we may see many relationships that hover between the virtual and physical quite frequently” (CITE). A “friend” on Facebook can mean something completely different than a friend in reality. Personally, I can relate to having friends on Facebook that I have never met before or are just acquaintances, whom I do not consider my friends. However, being Facebook friends with someone now means that you virtually share some sort of cyber relationship with another person that can be seen as a friendship. Because of this phenomena, the process on forming relationships with others is altered by the constant usage of social networking sites, like Facebook. This can be explained by Nick Yee and Jeremey Bailenson who call this the Proteus Effect—“when thousands of users interact, most of whom have chosen attractive avatars, the virtual community may become more friendly and intimate. This may impact the likelihood of relationship formation online” (CITE).
In our report we conducted surveys and face-to-face interviews in order to better understand the effects of Facebook on forming and maintaining relationships.