Social networks complement real-world friendships, experts say

By Philipp Laage Sep 15, 2011, 3:16 GMT

Berlin - On Facebook everyone is a friend, at least that's what people call each other, but can a 14-year-old understand and cope with this?

The experts says yes. Social networks play an important role in forming friendships among young people by making common experiences visible to everyone participating. Outside the internet no-one sends a request to friend someone. But at social networking sites such as Facebook people work hard at collecting friends.

But to think that young people cannot differentiate between the two is a prejudice, said Professor Jaap Denissen of Humboldt University in Berlin. 'Fourteen-year-olds can do it much better that we think they can because they have grown up with the internet.'

The notion that youths communicate primarily with strangers is as outdated as the belief that a high level of internet consumption cause social isolation, said psychologist Denissen. People who use the internet a lot are in their 'real lives' more social than those who aren't heavy users of the internet.

The basic needs of young people haven't changed: 'They form cliques and fit themselves into scenes and they do that as well in social networks.'

Jan-Hinrik Schmidt, a social network researcher at the Hans Bredow Institute in Hamburg, said young people today have a much larger stage than in the past.

'Parties, vacations, concerts - all of these are permanently stored in photographs and other multimedia,' Schmidt said. Friends can continuously comment on the goings-on. 'Networks such as Facebook become the collective consciousness of a clique.'

Social networks deliver a social confirmation that the group belongs together. Young people used to sign each other's backpacks to openly signal that they belonged together, Schmidt said. This is much easier to achieve using Facebook, but the motivation is the same.

'The photo album from a vacation taken together should express the friendship between the people involved and show that they do cool things together,' he added.

Juliane Stopfer, a psychologist at the university of Mainz, sees a practical use beyond keeping the memories of shared experiences.

'We can maintain contacts with friends who live far away, as well as strengthen these ties or rediscover them,' said Stopfer. 'We learn through things like photos from a family vacation that there are sides of people who are near to us that were previously concealed.'

Puberty, however, means change. A 15-year-old girl might write 'best friends forever' on a girlfriend's wall, but in reality, friendships do go awry, said Schmidt. Some things published in the internet stay around for a long time. 'How we will deal with these things is still open,' he said.