{1.5a2} social media decontextualizes our relationships by flattening our social network

• 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.
    • {1.5a1a} 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 {1.5a2a} context collapse.