Reconfiguring Friendships: Social relationships and the Internet

Abstract

Debate on the social role of the Internet has centred on whether its use will tend to isolate or connect individuals, undermining or reinforcing social ties. This study moves away from this focus on more or less connectivity to explore the degree to which people use the Internet to make new friends and, thereby, reconfigure their social networks. The analysis identifies those who create new ties through the Internet and investigates under what conditions these online ties migrate to face to face settings. The analysis is based on data from the 2005 Oxford Internet Survey (OxIS), a national probability sample survey of individuals aged 14 and over in Britain. The findings indicate that about 20 per cent of Internet users have met new friends online, and about half of these individuals go on to meet one or more of these virtual friends in person. Sociodemographic characteristics, such as being single, shape patterns of Internet use, and are related to the greater propensity of some individuals to make online social relationships. However, experience with the Internet and the ways people choose to use the Internet, such as for chatting or communicating more generally, are most directly associated with who makes new connections over the Internet and who does not. These findings suggest that the Internet plays an important role in reconfiguring the social networks of many users. Also, multivariate analyses indicate that the dynamics of online friendships are driven more by the idiosyncratic digital choices made by users of the Internet than by any mechanistic social or technological determinism.

Keywords:

• Social relationships
• Internet use
• friends
• reconfiguration of social networks

Acknowledgements

An earlier version of this paper was presented to the 56th Annual Meeting of the International Communication Association, Dresden, Germany, 20 June 2006.

We thank Gustavo Mesch and several anonymous reviewers for their comments.

Notes

1 An evolving list of social networking sites is available at: http://socialsoftware. weblogsinc.com/2005/02/14/home-of-the-social-networking-services-meta-list/ (last accessed 5 November 2006).

2 See the World Internet Project website at:<http://www.worldinternetproject.net/> (last accessed 5 November 2006).

3 This work on CMC draws heavily from earlier research on the social psychology of telecommunications, most often focused on audio and video teleconferencing, which developed concepts such as social presence and notions of filtered cues (Short et al. 1976).

4 Several studies have shown the importance of homophily, i.e. similarity, for the development of meaningful and long-lasting relationships both online and offline (McPherson et al. 2002; Mesch 2005).

5 A full description of the sampling strategy is described in Dutton et al. (2005, pp. 58–59). This report is available online at: http://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/research/oxis/oxis2005_report.pdf

6 The following Internet activities did not load on any of the six factors identified: gambling, reading blogs, looking up religious sites, looking up sexual sites, making or receiving phone calls, listening to radio stations, looking up the family tree, looking for product information, buying products online, chatting, surfing or browsing.