Making friends through social media

It is often talked about; social media changed a lot in social interaction between people. Some say society became less social because of the decrease of face-to-face interaction. Even the Dutch queen mentioned her concerns in her chrismas speech to the Dutch people in 2009. My question is, is it really impossible to make friends through social media?

Today I discovered, there are hundreds of youtube videos about how to reach the limit of 5000 friends on Facebook. Different strategies are explained and demonstrated. My conclusion; quantity is no problem. However, I would like to know; what about the quality? How dedicated are friends on Facebook. The next video shows an interview with Andrew Garfield who plays a part in the movie Social Network. He talks about Facebook as a platform for real connection and social interaction.

Also researchers think true relationships can be build through digital media. In 1992 Joseph Walther developed the theory of Social Information Processing. According to that theory communication through digital media is not necessarily impersonal. People are motivated to build social relationships and create their own ways to put social context to a conversation, even without physical presence. A simple example is the smileys we use to illustrate our state of mind in a digital conversation.

I thinks digital communication brings opportunities for building relationships. According to a very old theory form Berger & Calabrese (1975) getting to know each other is based on reducing uncertainty about each other. We are desperate to prevent miscommunication and, information about each other can take the uncertainty away. Social networks give the opportunity to collect information in a very passive way and this can speed up bonding between people. The next Youtube movie shows that Twitter actually is an application that brings social interaction to a whole different level.

Final conclusion; making real friends on social networks is possible and happening. According to a blogpost published on molblog. 32% of the dutch youth between 9 and 16 years old has online friendships and 66,9% of them considers a few of their online friends as real friends.