One of the clearest signs of the depth to which online social networks have enmeshed themselves into our culture is demonstrated in the acceptance of the verb “to friend.” danah boyd tackles the practice of “friending” in these networks (MySpace in particular) in her piece “Friends, friendsters, and top 8: Writing community into being on social network sites” for First Monday. Beyond describing the development of “friending” from Friendster to MySpace, boyd also makes the critical point that the public display of “friends” on social networks – and the implicit choices such a process involves – in fact has little to do with what we traditionally call friendship.

“While Friending is a social act, the actual collection of Friends and the display of Top Friends provides space for people to engage in identity performance. As Judith Donath and I argued in ‘Public Displays of Connection,’ people display social connections to reveal information about who they are.”

Rather than “friends” resulting from an active performance of identity in a social context, in the world of online social networks, identity has become increasingly reliant on the active performance of social context itself. A Star Wars fan will reify his connection to the community of other Star Wars fans by becoming “friends” with the likes of Darth Vader or Luke Skywalker. While this example is quite concrete, the practice, as danah explains, operates more subtly as a performance of identity for the user’s audience – an audience, which it is important to note, is also made up of his/her “friends.” For a high school student, the choice to have the prom queen versus the geek (as two familiar characters in the popular American vision of education) in his/her “top 8” becomes the explicit and public navigation of an otherwise rarely articulated social universe.

danah also makes sure to note the importance in seeing online and offline interaction as two entirely separate beasts:

“Jenny Sundén (2003) argues that, in order to exist online, we must write ourselves into being. From the flow of text in chatrooms to the creation of Profiles, people are regularly projecting themselves into the Internet so that others may view their presence and interact directly with them. Social network sites take this to the next level because participants there write their community into being through the process of Friending. In doing so, they help define themselves and the context in which they are operating.”

Unlike our interactions offline, online subjectivity is the direct product of archived cultural production. Within a public and self-determined environment, “friendship” – and indeed identity – becomes a very different concept. We write ourselves into being and into an ever expanding cultural database from which others will attempt determine the minutiae of our being; and in such a world, context becomes everything. danah’s analysis hits these crucial points that are often missed in analyses of online social networks. It it becoming ever more clear that the conceptual and cultural preeminence of singular autonomy has begun to distintegrate within the reified context of these networks. We interact in an increasingly peer-to-peer environment, and as a network of peer-to-peer subjectivities.