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94 danah boydfriendship practices is through the forced—and often public—articulationof social connections. From instant-messaging “buddy lists” to the publiclisting of “Friends” on social network sites, teens are regularly forced tolist their connections as part of social media participation. The dynamicssurrounding this can directly affect friendship practices.The articulation of connections in social media serves three purposes.First, these lists operate as an address book, allowing participants tokeep a record of all the people they know. Second, they allow participantsto leverage privacy settings to control who can access their content,who can contact them, and who can see if they are online or not. Finally,the public display of connections that takes place in social networksites can represent an individual’s social identity and status (Donath andboyd 2004).The practice of creating an “address book” is common across manygenres of social media. With email address books and mobile phone contactslists, the collection of relations is simply meant as a reference tool tohelp the participant remember another person’s email address or phonenumber. Because these are never made visible nor are people required toapprove of address book inclusion, address books are little more than areference tool.With IM, buddy lists are both references and the initial site of interaction.Buddy lists display a person’s contacts as well as a variety of presenceinformation about online and idle status as well as “away messages” thatconvey additional personal and contextual information (Baron 2008;Grinter, Palen, and Eldridge 2006). Social network sites take this onestep further by displaying the list of connections on a person’s profile ina way that is visible to anyone who can view that profile. On social networksites, “Friends” end up serving as a part of a person’s self-representationon the site as well as the foundation of access control to certain features(e.g., commenting) and content (e.g., blog posts). Teens use Friends toenact their identity (Livingstone 2008) and imagine the social context(boyd 2006).“Friends” in the context of social media are not necessarily the same as“friends” in the everyday sense (boyd 2006). 4 Social network sites use theterm “Friends” to label all articulated relationships, regardless of intensityor connection type (e.g., family or colleagues). Different challenges areinvolved in choosing whom to select as Friends. Because Friends are