Daniel Jonsson
Jonathan Bergius
Friendship on Facebook
Abstract
Facebook is an online-based social network where the initiation of friendship within the network is one of the most central occurrences for the interaction chain, most likely the users have a relation pre-initiation. Friendship on Facebook is initiated through friend requests to other users. In this report, the importance of friend request as potentially influencing the offline- as well as the online-relationship is explored. A central problem for the report is the motives of initiation of friendship on Facebook. The research questions are answered and analyzed through a survey and a focus group. A number of factors are central to our analysis, they include: privacy, presentation and relationship-related factors. The present study shows that relationship-related factors are the most common motives for sending, accepting and denying friend requests. Privacy is also a motive, but to a less extent. Presentation-related motives are an uncommon motive for initiating friendship on Facebook.