Friends and Protocols

I ask this question based on my future interest in social networking with kids, and not as a result of this site, but ... I've been thinking about how the friend invites work and whether it is better to just accept everyone who asks to be your friend or to narrow down your choices and maybe reject a few.

On one hand, the wider your network of friends, the better chances you have for making strong connections with others. And the more potential you have for experiencing new things and new ideas.

On the other hand, if you accept everyone who offers to be your friend (as I often do), then why not just make everyone in the social network a friend? Why keep the circle small? What makes the friend network so special at that point?

I am thinking of how to explain this all to 11-year-olds, and what it means if someone asks you to be their "friend" in a social network and you don't want them. Do you reject them? Ignore them? Explain why? And how would they feel? (Obviously, this becomes an incredibly important learning moment in the classroom)

If you have used social networking in the classroom, could you share how you approached this?

Thanks
Kevin

Tags: friends, networking, social

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Permalink Reply by Kevin H. on April 18, 2007 at 9:08am

Good question about who can ask for friends here. You would think we would need some sort of profile in order to judge whether or not we want them as part of our circle of connectiveness.
And it is interesting about your students -- this is what I was originally referring to: is it a way to connect with others on a true collaborative level or just a scrapbook of people that allows us to tally up how popular we are at a given moment in time?
No answers here, but I am thankful for the conversation.
Kevin

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Permalink Reply by Chris Phillips on October 17, 2008 at 1:30pm

Regardless of what we do in the classroom, kids are using social networking at home and are using friends. It seems like what a friend is in this context has already been defined by use. Technically, it defines access, but people also use it as a popularity meter. I don't know that we need to find a right way to explain this to kids, we just need to explain it the way it already is - a list of people allowed access to specific parts of your profile\. When a student wonders why someone won't friend them they need to understand that they are being denied access to private information, and that doesn't necessarily mean that they are disliked, just as they would be selective in which friends they tell secrets to.