Zoe Schaefer

Lora Strey

Comp 101

2 November 2014

Friends, or Followers?

            “What does friend mean now?” is an article written by Joseph P. Khan about the ever-changing meaning of the word “friend”. In the article he discusses the way social media has changed the word “friend” in today’s society. Khan discusses the difference between close friends, (real friendship) versus “Virtual Friendship” (380). What are the observable differences of a “virtual friendship” as Khan would say, and a real, true friendship (380)? To answer these questions I turned to the one place that I knew would have the answers. The internet.  

            Turns out each social media site approaches the topic of friendship a little differently. For example, a “friend” on Facebook is anybody who you can message and view all of their content (ex. pictures, videos, news feed etc). Facebooks friends also have status’s that appear on your newsfeed. This is a fairly clear layout which depicts friends as people who have a mutual interest in one another. Another example exists on older sites such as Myspace which used a “top friends” list in order to set out a very clear image of whom you were close with but provided no benefits in regards to sending/receiving messages. However, many social media sites use the term “followers” which provides a distancing from users.

            A Follower is someone who is interested in what you have to share with the World Wide Web. Whether that be an image, a seven second video or a status update, followers are there to like, up or share it. The amount of followers does not appropriately display the amount of friends a person might have. For instance, a girl could have 4k followers on Instagram but that of course doesn’t mean she has four thousand friends and is actively involved in every one of her followers’ lives.

A second question I had regarding friends and social media was, ‘in what way can you display your friendship over social media?” Over nearly every form of social media out there you can tag photos to indicate you are with a person. Tagged photos are one way to track people’s closer friendships. For example, I have many pictures tagged of myself with Callie F on many social networking sites, this may lead a person to believe that we have maintained a close friendship within the past year. One other way which is specific to Facebook is that you can manage groups that are specific (ex. church, fantasy football league, family, etc.).Twitter also gives you the availability to tag people in photos.  More often than not you will communicate openly with people through replies and retweets. Of course you can retweet random Twitter pages however, people often stick to people they are close to in daily life. 

Those are only a few examples of how social media has reformed the meaning of the word friend. Whether it be good or bad, our world has opened up to a variety of meaning for the word friend. There's something to think about next time you tag your #bestie in your latest #selfie on Instagram, 

Works Cited

Khan, Joseph P. "What Does Friend Mean Now." Bedford/St Martin's, n.d. Web. 02 Nov. 2014.