1GyAp2x

100 danah boydso I deleted them and then I had three hundred and I really knew them.”Deleting strangers, like rejecting their initial Friend requests, is viewed ashaving no social repercussions.The Friends feature forces teens to navigate their social lives in new ways.Although youth are in a process of actively negotiating the underlyingsocial practices and norms for displaying friendship online, we haveobserved an emerging consensus about socially appropriate behavior thatlargely mirrors what is socially appropriate in offline contexts. The processof adding and deleting Friends is a core element of participation on socialnetwork sites. It allows teens to negotiate who can gain access to theircontent, but it also means that teens have to manage the social implicationsof their decisions. Because the peer groups that teens connect withon social network sites are the same as those they socialize with in everydaylife, decisions about whom to accept and whom to reject online directlyaffect their offline connections. By facing decisions about how to circumscribetheir Friends lists, teens are forced to consider their relationships,the dynamics of their peer group, and the ways in which their decisionsmay affect others. These processes make social status and friendship moreexplicit and public, providing a broader set of contexts for observing theseinformal forms of social-evaluation learning. It makes peer negotiationsvisible in new ways, leading to heightened stakes as well as opportunitiesto observe and learn about social norms from their peers.Friendship HierarchiesA Friend connection alone says nothing about its strength. By acceptingall acquaintances as Friends, teens can avoid offending peers who mightbelieve there to be a stronger connection. Yet an additional featureon MySpace—“Top Friends” (formerly “Top 8”)—complicates matters byforcing teens to indicate whom they are closest with among their Friends.While MySpace designed this feature to allow participants to showcasetheir actual close friends, many teens highlight that this feature is thecrux of what makes MySpace filled with social drama. These practicesof displaying friendship hierarchies online are controversial and morefraught than the simple articulation of Friend connections.Rhetoric such as “best friends forever” (“BFF”) is common among children,especially young girls (Thompson, Grace, and Cohen 2001, 62). This