Friending is the act of adding someone to a list of "friends" on a social networking service.[1][2] The notion does not necessarily involve the concept of friendship.[footnotes 1] It is also distinct from the idea of a "fan"—as employed on the WWW sites of businesses, bands, artists, and others—since it is more than a one-way relationship. A "fan" only receives things. A "friend" can communicate back to the person friending.[2] The act of "friending" someone usually grants that person special privileges (on the service) with respect to oneself.[4] On Facebook, for example, one's "friends" have the privilege of viewing and posting to one's "timeline".[2]
Following is a similar concept on other social network services, such as Twitter and Instagram, where a person (follower) chooses to add content from a person or page to their newsfeed. Unlike friending, following is not necessarily mutual, and a person can unfollow (stop following) or block another user at any time without affecting that user's following status.[5][6][7]
The first scholarly definition and examination of friending and defriending (the act of removing someone from one's friend list, also called unfriending) was David Fono and Kate Raynes-Goldie's "Hyperfriendship and beyond: Friends and Social Norms on LiveJournal" from 2005,[8] which identified the use of the term as both a noun and a verb by users of early social network site and blogging platform LiveJournal, which was originally launched in 1999.
- ^ Abram & Pearlman 2012, p. 91.
- ^ a b c Drucker, Gumpert & Cohen 2010, p. 73.
- ^ Oxford 2010.
- ^ Palfrey & Gasser 2010, p. 25.
- ^ "What is 'following' and what does it mean on social media?". Bigcommerce. 29 July 2021.
- ^ "unfollow - definition of unfollow in English". Oxford Dictionary. Archived from the original on March 20, 2017. Retrieved 19 March 2017.
- ^ Lee, Yu-Hao; Yuan, Chien Wen (April 2020). "The Privacy Calculus of "Friending" Across Multiple Social Media Platforms". Social Media + Society. 6 (2): 205630512092847. doi:10.1177/2056305120928478. ISSN 2056-3051.
- ^ Fono & Raynes-Goldie 2005.
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