Microsoft's danah boyd on friendship

Posted by: Stephen Baker on April 13

I stopped by Microsoft Research in Cambridge (Mass) last week to ask danah boyd (she uses lower case) about friendship. boyd, who just got her phd in Information from Berkeley, has done loads of ethnographic research on young people on social networks. I first came across her when I came upon her provocative paper on the cultural gap between kids on Facebook and others on MySpace. Also, here’s a more recent piece on Friendship.

When I walked in, she was still stewing over an article in the Economist, which speculated about natural limits in our capacity to maintain friendships. It cited research by the primate biologist Robin Dunbar, who put the number at 150.

Her complaint? There are different kinds of friendship, and that article—just like many people’s Facebook pages—lumped them all together. Consider three major groupings, which in the old days we might have called “friends,” “associates,” and “acquaintances.” We have strong ties with the first group. “These are people we might lend money to,” said boyd. We might also confide in them, tell them secrets.

The second group might include colleagues at work, or others we interact with socially or professionally. To make sense of our social networks (and to figure out, for example, which ads might appeal to us), automatic systems must distinguish between these two groups. But boyd says it’s hard. “You see your mother less frequently than a colleague. but it’s not that she’s trusted less, she says.

The third group, acquaintances, are the famous weak links. (Mark Granovetter carried out famous studies of such connections in the ’70s.) We’ve always had weak links. They tended to fade away as the years passed. But now, on the Internet, they return and endure. In traditional society, we have time honored ways of culling weak links. (We haven’t gotten a Christmas card from them in two weeks? Cross them off the list.) But now they stick around.

Can advertisers or employers learn anything about us by studying our relations with our weak links? Do they even recognize them as weak links? "One of the reasons it's been so hard to monetize social networks," says Jennifer Chayes, the theoretical mathematician and chief of Microsoft's Cambridge lab, who works down the hall from boyd, "is that we don't distinguish different kinds of friendships."

In the early days, sociologists (like Granovetter) relied heavily on surveys. But now they have loads of new data on friendships. We have what boyd calls "articulated links." These are buddy lists, contact lists, email address books. Their often a hodgepodge of strong and medium links. They can also study our behavior: Who we communicate with, and how. Lots of data, but loads of confusion.

boyd and others are piling through these signals. Time is one important variable. If I communicate with you at 2 a.m. on Saturday, it hints that our relations go beyond work (though we might be hurrying to patch together a $700 billion stimulus package). Another variable is the medium we use to communicate. (Think about yourself: Are there friends you only phone, email, text, or IM, wall messages, or various combos? Are there patterns there that say something about the nature of your relations? For me, a phone call of more than a minute or two on the weekend is almost always with a strong tie.)

There are features on certain sites and phone networks such MySpace's Top Eight. This would appear to be a clear signal of strong ties. But boyd, who talks to young people about such things, finds loads of complexity. They say things like, "Mike might be really upset if I don't include him." Others might not want to include true friends who aren't accepted in other groups.

danah and I talked about lots of other things, but I think I'll put them into other blog posts.

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