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Friendship 97frequently send messages—and sometimes VIP opportunities—to the fanswho are their Friends. Teens enjoy receiving these, value the occasionalcomment, and sometimes enjoy connecting with other fans by leavingcomments themselves. Such connections serve as a public display of tasteand identity (Donath and boyd 2004).Teens also use the Friending feature to build communities based onspecific affiliations. For example, Christo Sims (Rural and Urban Youth)interviewed a sixteen-year-old Haitian American girl from Brooklyn,New York, named Ono who accepts all Friend requests from people whoare Haitian “because I’m from Haiti, and I want to keep all the Haitianstogether.” By making these connections, Ono is able to inhabit a communityon MySpace that is dominated by Haitians from all over theworld. She may not build personal relationships with these people, butconnecting to them allows her to participate in a networked public ofpeople like her.While most teens who connect with strangers have no expectation ofbuilding a relationship out of this performed connection, there are teenswho happily add people to whom they are attracted in the hopes that oneof these connections might develop into something more. This practice isoften controversial, both in adult and youth worlds. Adults are concernedthat this opens the door for pedophiles pretending to be teens, eventhough the data show that deception is virtually nonexistent on the rareoccasions in which sexual solicitation occurs through these sites (Wolak etal. 2008). Also, many teens—especially girls—think talking to any strangeris risky, as it exposes them to unknown adults as well as to fellow teenswho may take an unwanted interest in them.There is little social cost to rejecting Friend requests from strangers—because these people are unknown, teens do not worry about offendingthem. Rejecting known individuals, on the other hand, is much morecomplicated. By and large, the social convention is to accept Friend requestsfrom all known peers, including all friends, acquaintances, and classmates,regardless of the quality of the relationship. Jennifer, a white seventeenyear-oldfrom a small town in Kansas, always accepts requests from peopleshe knows because “I’d feel mean if I didn’t.” She sees such requests as asign of niceness and an opening of potential friendship. Additionally, shethinks it is important to be nice because she would be mad if someonerejected her attempt to be nice.