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{1.2a2a} social media decontextualizes our relationships by flattening our social network

topics:

Social media does not model social networks.
- Social media flattens our social networks by applying the same type of access, importance, and labels to varying types of relationships.
Platforms have become more flexible in this area by offering features like “close friends”, lists, user groups, more robust privacy settings.
- We’re still ultimately required to negotiate our positions in multiple group at once.
- Facebook, for example, sees Grandma as being the same type of “profile” as people I went to middle school with.
  - This isn’t how we perform relationships in real life, or even the way we think about connecting with others.
  - It would be awesome to even have a simple drop-down menu that lets you assign a certain type of relationship to another profile.
  - {1.2a1a} social media removes agency in our identity performance
    - This is part of how social media decontextualizes the self.
- Maybe it’s social, but not relational.
As boyd, danah described Friendster:
- “Friendster flattened multiple local social contexts into a single performance space.”
This flattening is what causes {1.2a2} context collapse.

created: 2024-09-07-20-19 ✻ modified: 2025-08-24-13-24 ✻ tags:

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