Students' Facebook ‘friends’: public and private spheres

Abstract

Friendship is highly significant during the university years. Facebook, widely used by students, is designed to facilitate communication with different groups of ‘friends’. This exploratory study involved interviewing a sample of student users of Facebook: it focuses on the extent to which older adults, especially parents, are accepted as Facebook friends, and the attitudes towards such friendships and potential friendships and what these reveal about notions of privacy. Parents were rarely reported to be Facebook friends, and there was a view that in general they would not be welcomed. The reasons were related to embarrassment, social norms, and worries about mothers. Underlying these were various notions of the private and the public. Students did not appear to conceive of there being two distinct realms: indeed, the ‘public’ appeared to be the individual's private social world. A level of sophistication is apparent, with nuanced understandings of concepts, suggesting that social networking sites such as Facebook are associated with new ways of construing some of the notions surrounding the traditional public/private dichotomy. Notions of what is private and what is public are fuzzy, with no clear-cut public/private dichotomy. Computer-mediated communication appears to make this fuzziness more apparent than has hitherto been the case.

Keywords:

• friends
• students
• parents
• social networking sites

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the students who kindly agreed to give up their time to be interviewed about their use of Facebook. We would also like to thank Jamie West for advice on Facebook.

Notes

1. For Lange (2007), publicly private behaviour involves the identities of video makers being revealed, while privately public behaviour involves sharing some content with many viewers but limiting access about producers’ identities.

2. Interviewees were asked what they considered their ethnic background to be, but in order to preserve their anonymity these were replaced with the broader categories used in the British census.

3. A characteristic feature of real-life close friends was that a lot of time was spent with the person concerned: ‘Close friends are people I have known for a long time and generally have shared experiences with and general memories, and I have love for them, I guess’ (Oliver) and ‘Someone that I feel comfortable talking to about a fairly wide range of subjects and someone that I see often enough to feel like I have kept in touch with whatever is going on in their life’ (William).

4. The term ‘random’ was used by interviewees with different meanings. A ‘random’ person could be someone that interviewees did not know who got in touch, or someone who was outside their normal social circle.