People prone to suicide ideation are likely to be members of more community groups than the control group. That may be the result of spending longer online and of a desire to want to interact. But a key indicator seems to be that these people are much less likely to be members of friendship triangles. In other words, they have fewer friends who also friends of each other. This low density of friendship triangles appears to be a crucial.
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Roughly two thirds of social media users say that staying in touch with current friends and family members is a major reason they use these sites, while half say that connecting with old friends they’ve lost touch with is a major reason behind their use of these technologies.
Other factors play a much smaller role—14% of users say that connecting around a shared hobby or interest is a major reason they use social media, and 9% say that making new friends is equally important. Reading comments by public figures and finding potential romantic partners are cited as major factors by just 5% and 3% of social media users, respectively.
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We refer to these different patterns of making and losing friends as “friendship modes” and identified four distinct variations: bounded, serial, evolving and ruptured.
In a bounded friendship mode, people have made most of their important friends in a particular context or at a particular stage in the life-course, very often during late teens and early twenties when they are single and friendships revolve around ‘going out’, or a bit later, when they settle with partners, and friends are formed around children and family life.
…In a serial friendship mode people’s friendship repertoires are almost completely replaced at each new life-course stage or event; there is little continuity and friends from earlier stages fade while new friendships are made to replace them.
…An evolving friendship mode includes elements of both bounded and serial patterns. New friends are added to the personal community at key life-course transitions, but some friendships are also retained from earlier stages.
…In a ruptured friendship mode there is an almost complete replacement of the friendship repertoire following a dramatic change in circumstances (serious illness, difficult divorce, coming out as gay)
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Because they place a high value on emotional satisfaction, older adults often spend more time with familiar individuals with whom they have had rewarding relationships. This selective narrowing of social interaction maximizes positive emotional experiences and minimizes emotional risks as individuals become older. According to this theory, older adults systematically hone their social networks so that available social partners satisfy their emotional needs.
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People are more likely to share information from their strong ties, but because of their abundance, weak ties are primarily responsible for the majority of information spread on Facebook… a majority of influence can be generated by weak ties, even if strong ties are individually more influential.
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And remember, it is not just that there are different “types” of users. Or that people have different kinds of social skills and competencies. For it would be one thing to understand the user experience of different kinds of people, and to design products and services to best suit them. No, there is more: social interactions have dynamics. Pundits need fans. Socialites need wallflowers. Inviters need guests.
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an internal Facebook study of private messages, chats, wall posts, “Likes” and comments on status updates determined that users directly communicate with an average of only four people per week, and six per month.
— Q&A: Facebook Researcher Paul Adams Says Real Influence Is in Our Inner Circles
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One common mistake is to design for all relationship types. Something designed for close friends to interact will look very different from something designed for friends of friends to interact, which will look different again from something designed for strangers to interact. To be successful, choose the relationship type that’s most important for you and design for that.
— Grouped: How small groups of friends are the key to influence on the social web
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As more relationships are catalyzed online than offline, a great sorting is taking place: mixed E/I (extrovert/introvert) groups are separating into purer groups dominated by one type
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We have abandoned the idea, still popular in the 1990s, that – to put it in a somewhat sketchy way – Internet users spend their nights chatting with strangers over the Web, and thus they automatically neglect their friends and loved ones. This was known as the displacement hypothesis. Since the beginning of the 2000s we know that the actual social consequence of the Web isn’t social isolation, but rather a dramatic reconfiguration of the balance between strong and weak ties, between bonding and bridging.
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the interpersonal patterns associated with internet use are the continuations of a shift in the nature of personal networks that began well before the advent of the internet. This shift toward “networked individualism” involves the transition from spatially proximate and densely-knit communities in which people belong to more spatially dispersed and sparsely-knit personal networks in which people maneuver.
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Although the average Facebook user is only communicating directly with four of their 130 friends in any given week, they are consuming content from a much larger number of those people.
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In research with teens across multiple regions, similar patterns emerged. People’s real world social networks consisted of 4-6 groups of up to 10 people. People explained it was painful to try and mix these groups. Even online, most status updates have an intended audience but they usually go out to everybody.
