[T]he term friend need not require that members actually be friends in real life (which would generally be the case when one of the members is a business or other entity); it simply implies a connection in the social network. (Kendall and Zhou, 2010: 2)
The disconnect between how members usually understand friendship and the ways in which Facebook “understands” friendship becomes obvious in the quote above. According to Facebook, a user can be “friends” with a Facebook page, a song, a movie, a business, and so on. While it might seem strange to consider a movie a friend, this conception of friendship derives from the network model of the Web in which users and movies are considered “nodes” in the network and the relationship that exists between them an “edge” or, indeed, a friend. Indeed, “the terms ‘user’ and ‘friend’ depend on the frame of reference” (Chen et al. 2014). It is exactly the diferent and sometimes conflicting frames of reference that are of interest in this book. A core contention is that media platforms and their underlying software and infrastructures contain an important frame of reference for understanding sociality and connectivity today. If we accept that software can have a frame of reference, a way of seeing and organizing the world, then what does it mean to be a friend on Facebook or, more precisely, what are friends for, if seen from the perspective of the platform?
Facebook friendships are, above all, computable. In an age of algorithmic media, the term algorithmic, used as an adjective, suggests that even friendships are now subject to “mechanisms that introduce and privilege quantification, proceduralization, and automation” (Gillespie, 2016a: 27). Measuring the performance of individuals and organizations is nothing new, though. As sociologists Espeland and Sauder (2007) suggest, social measurements and rankings have become a key driver for modern societies during the past couple of decades. According to philosopher Ian Hacking, “society became statistical” through the “enumeration of people and their habits” (1990: 1). Hacking connects the emergence of a statistical society to the idea of “making up people,” meaning that classifications used to describe people influence the forms of experience that are possible for them, but also how the efects on people, in turn, change the classifications:
Programmed Sociality
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