Signals in Social Supernets
Judith Donath
MIT Media Lab
Social network sites (SNSs) provide a new way to organize and navigate an egocentric
social network. Are they a fad, brieﬂy popular but ultimately useless? Or are they the
harbingers of a new and more powerful social world, where the ability to maintain an
immense network—a social ‘‘supernet’’—fundamentally changes the scale of human
society? This article presents signaling theory as a conceptual framework with which to
assess the transformative potential of SNSs and to guide their design to make them into
more effective social tools. It shows how the costs associated with adding friends and
evaluating profiles affect the reliability of users’ self-presentation; examines strategies
such as information fashion and risk-taking; and shows how these costs and strategies
affect how the publicly-displayed social network aids the establishment of trust, identity,
and cooperation—the essential foundations for an expanded social world.
doi:10.1111/j.1083-6101.2007.00394.x
Grooming, Gossip, and Online Friending
Social ties provide many beneﬁts, including companionship, access to information,
and emotional and material support (Granovetter, 1983; Wellman, Garton, &
Haythornthwaite, 1997; Wellman & Gulia, 1999). Increasing the number of ties
increases access to these beneﬁts, although time and cognitive constraints preclude
indeﬁnite expansions of one’s personal network. Yet if maintaining ties were to
become more temporally efﬁcient and cognitively effective, it should be possible
to increase the scale of one’s social world—to create a ‘‘supernet’’ with many more
ties than is feasible without socially assistive tools. The question this article addresses
is whether social network sites (SNSs) are a technology that can bring this about.
In the wild, apes groom each other, picking through fur to remove parasitic bugs.
This behavior helps with hygiene and is relaxing and pleasant for the recipient.
Perhaps most importantly, it establishes social bonds: Apes who groom each other
are more likely to help each other and not ﬁght. Long grooming sessions are time
consuming, however. Since the ape must also spend many hours ﬁnding food,
sleeping, etc., it is clear that grooming can sustain only a limited number of relationships
(Dunbar, 1996).
Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication
Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 13 (2008) 231–251 ª 2008 International Communication Association 231
Can SNS assist to
expand social ties
indefinitely?
In Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language, Robin Dunbar (1996) argued
eloquently that in human societies, language, especially gossip, has taken over the
social function of grooming. Instead of removing lice from each other’s hair, people
check in with friends and colleagues, ask how they are doing, and exchange a few
words about common acquaintances, the news, or the local sports team (Dunbar,
1996, 2004). Language is much more efﬁcient than physical grooming, for one can
talk to several people at once. Language also helps people learn about cultural norms,
evaluate others’ behavior, and keep up with the news and shifting opinions of their
surrounding community. It makes reputation possible—individuals benefit from the
experience of others in determining who is nice, who does good work, and who
should be shunned for their dishonest ways. Using language to maintain ties and
manage trust, people can form and manage more complex and extensive social
networks.1
Communication technologies expand human social reach (Horrigan, Boase,
Rainie, & Wellman, 2006). Email makes communication more efﬁcient: Sending
a message to numerous recipients is as easy as sending it to one, and its asynchrony
means that there is little need to coordinate interaction. Contact management tools,
from paper Rolodexes to complex software systems, increase one’s ability to remember
large numbers of people (Whittaker, Jones & Terveen 2002).
While these technologies provide some of the support an expanded social world
needs, they alone are not sufﬁcient. People need to be able to keep track of everchanging
relationships (Dunbar, 1996; Nardi, Whittaker, Isaacs, Creech, Johnson, &
Hainsworth, 2002), to see people within the context of their social relationships
(Raub & Weesie, 1990), and, most fundamentally, to know whom to trust (Bacharach
& Gambetti, 2001; Good, 2000). Email and contact tools help maintain an expanded
collection of individual relationships. Are social network sites the solution for
placing these relationships into the greater social context?
A page on MySpace, ﬁlled with ﬂashing logos, obscure comments, poorly focused
yet revealing photos, and laced with twinkling animated gifs, may not look to the
casual observer like the harbinger of the next stage in human social evolution. But
perhaps it is. SNSs locate people in the context of their acquaintances, provide
a framework for maintaining an extensive array of friends and other contacts, and
allow for the public display of interpersonal commentary (boyd & Ellison, this issue).
At the same time, SNSs are still primitive; it is too early in their development to
observe clear evidence that they have transformed society. The goal of this article is to
present a theoretical framework with which to a) assess the transformative potential
of SNSs and b) develop design guidelines for making them into more effective social
tools. The foundation for this analysis is signaling theory, which models why some
communications are reliably honest and others are not.
The argument begins with an introduction to signaling theory. The next section
uses this theory to examine how the fundamental structure of SNSs can bring greater
trust and reliability to online self-presentations, how speciﬁc site design decisions
enhance or weaken their trust-conferring ability, and how seemingly pointless or
232 Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 13 (2008) 231–251 ª 2008 International Communication Association
NEEDS!
Still evolving
irrational behaviors, such as online fashion and risk taking, actually signal social
information. The ﬁnal section examines the transformative possibilities of social
supernets—not only whether SNSs may bring them about, but if so, in what ways
they might change our society.
An emphasis of this article is on ways of achieving reliable information about
identity and afﬁliations. There are situations where ephemeral, hidden, or multiple
identities are desirable. However, minimal online identity has been easy to create,
while it is harder to establish more grounded identities in a ﬂuid and nuanced way. A
primary goal of this article is to understand how reliability is encouraged or enforced.
For designers of future systems such knowledge is a tool, not a blueprint. Depending
on the situation, they should choose the appropriate space between anonymous and
whimsical and veriﬁed and trustworthy identities and communication.
Signaling Theory
Whether face-to-face or online, much of what people want to know about other
people is not directly observable. We rely instead on signals, which are perceivable
features and actions that indicate the presence of those hidden qualities. We cannot
directly observe others’ beliefs, experiences, or what they really think of us; instead
we rely on signals such as facial expressions, consumption patterns, or the statements
they make on their proﬁles in order to infer these qualities.
Signaling theory seeks to explain what keeps communication honest (Donath, in
press; Maynard-Smith & Harper, 2003). In many social interactions, there are motivations
for deception. Some are overt and obvious: Parents want to know where their
teenager has been until two o’clock in the morning, and the teenager wants to avoid
getting in trouble. But everyday interactions are rife with subtly diverging goals and
small deceptions. People want to make the best possible impression, to appear
important, creative, and popular, while others want to know if they really possess
those qualities (DePaulo & Kashy, 1998). When the costs of being deceived are low,
people may not care if something is an exaggeration. However, when the costs are
high, they may demand a more reliable signal. An online discussion group may
require few proofs of identity and intention so long as the conversation is civil,
but if troublemakers inﬁltrate it, the group may revise its policy and, through means
such as moderation or becoming invitation-only, raise the cost of participation
(Donath, 1998).
Signaling theory, developed initially in economics (Spence, 1973a) and biology
(Zahavi, 1975), models the relationship between signals and qualities, showing why
certain signals are reliable and others are not. For a signal to be reliable, the costs of
deceptively producing the signal must outweigh the beneﬁts. The core of signaling
theory is its analysis of the types of signals and situations that bring this about.
One class of signals, termed assessment signals, is inherently reliable, because
producing the signal requires possessing the indicated quality. Lifting a 500-pound
weight is a reliable signal of strength; a weaker person simply cannot do it. ‘‘Strategic’’
Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 13 (2008) 231–251 ª 2008 International Communication Association 233
SEMIOTICS!!!
or ‘‘handicap’’ signals are assessment signals that indicate possession of a great deal
of some resource by wasting that resource (Maynard-Smith & Harper 2003; Zahavi,
1977). A moose’s antlers waste energy; a fast sports car wastes money. Here the term
‘‘waste’’ is descriptive rather than pejorative—the idea is that only someone who has
an excess of a given resource can afford to expend it for communicative display.
Zahavi (1977) emphasized that these costly signals are only reliable in the domain of
the cost. The owner of an expensive car may use it to signal both wealth and
attractiveness, but its high price only guarantees that the owner is wealthy; it is
an unreliable indicator of attractiveness.
Another class of signals, termed conventional signals, is not inherently reliable
(Guilford & Dawkins, 1995; Maynard-Smith & Harper, 2003). Here the link between
signal and quality is arbitrary, a matter of social convention. Rare in the animal
world, conventional signals are very common in human communication. The selfdescriptions
in online proﬁles are mostly conventional signals—it is just as easy to
type 24 or 62 as it is to enter one’s actual age, or to put M rather than F as one’s
gender. Conventional signals are kept honest through the outside intervention of
laws and social mores. A siren on a car is a conventional signal of being an official
emergency responder. Anyone can buy one and use it to speed through traffic, but
society imposes costs on those who do so illegitimately. Putting one’s profile in
a social network site, linked to by one’s acquaintances, places it into a context subject
to the latter’s social mores, be they for factual truthfulness or identity play (Donath &
boyd, 2004).
However, costs may discourage deception but not be high enough to guarantee
honesty. The SNS LinkedIn requires that users provide the email address of the
person with whom they wish to connect; this makes deceptively claiming to know
someone costlier, but it certainly does not prevent all contact by strangers, especially
for those with published email addresses.
To ensure that people link only with those they truly know, one design approach
is to increase the amount of knowledge about the other that potential linkers need to
provide. Sconex, a social network site for high school students, requires that potential
users answer questions about the school with which they claim afﬁliation. ‘‘What
color are the third ﬂoor lockers?’’ and ‘‘which of the following is a history teacher?’’
are easy for actual students to answer, but harder for outsiders. Another approach is
to sanction members who attempt to connect with others who do not know them.
aSmallWorld revokes the networking privileges of people whose connection requests
are rejected.
Still, humans are ingenious. Given sufﬁcient motivation, very few signals are
impossible to fake, no matter how costly and closely tied to the signaled quality
(Donath, in press). Once tanned skin became a signal of status and luxury, humans
invented tanning beds and spray-on skin coloring. Once having many friends on
social network sites became a signal of status and popularity, users invented fake
friends and software for automating connections (boyd, 2006; Slotnick, 2007). The
costs and beneﬁts that motivate people to act in certain ways are in continuous ﬂux.
234 Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 13 (2008) 231–251 ª 2008 International Communication Association
Assessing quality
Signified
Trust and Identity in Large Mobile Societies
It can be quite beneﬁcial to an individual to claim to have expert knowledge, high status,
or sought after connections, whether or not these claims are true. Small, tightly-knit
communities handle this problem by limiting interaction to known individuals. In this
way,they remain safe from unpleasantsurprisesbutalso closed offfrom new people and
ideas. In contrast, a very open society in which people interact with numerous strangers,
such as today’s online world, has the advantage of novelty and being accessible to newcomers,
but is also vulnerable to deception (Enquist & Leimar, 1993). Can SNSs provide
a means for extending trust and assessing reliability in large-scale, mobile communities?
Are particular implementations better suited for doing so than others?
Dunbar (1996) argued that while new communication technologies could
increase the ﬂow of information, they would be unable to change basic social structure
and scale. He claimed that people would need to fall back on face-to-face
interaction in order to establish trust, rather than relying on what he call the ‘‘mere
ciphers’’ people encounter in the mediated domain (Dunbar, 1996, p. 204).
In challenging the assertion that new technologies will not signiﬁcantly change
human sociability, a key issue is what happens to trust in the mediated world.
Dunbar’s impression of a world where shadowy ‘‘ciphers’’ disappear at will to avoid
punishment for their misdeeds and where social order routinely breaks down is not
entirely undeserved. Tales of deception ﬁll the online world; there are many decaying
conversation spaces where angry ranters and ﬂoods of spam have driven out once
lively discussions (Donath, 1998). What role can the publicly-displayed social network
play in establishing identity and trust?
SNS users represent themselves with a proﬁle, which includes a self-description,
comments from other users, and the technology’s deﬁning feature, a list of links to
chosen other members. The self-description can include pictures, afﬁliations, career
goals, and other personal details. Alone, these are conventional signals, easily faked;
even references to favorite obscure books and other displays of esoteric knowledge
may have simply been copied from another’s page. Yet the links to other members
implies that they have vetted this description as true—although it is important to
note that ‘‘true’’ means ‘‘true to the mores of our community,’’ which can range from
strict adherence to known facts to highly imaginative role-playing (boyd & Heer,
2006; Donath & boyd, 2004; Lenhart & Madden, 2007b).
The list of acquaintances provides social context. One expects people to be
similar to their friends (McPherson, Smith-Lovin, & Cook, 2001). An aggressive,
rebellious proﬁle linked to similar ones reinforces the writer’s claims, but if linked to
many mild and conservative proﬁles, the viewer may interpret it as a ﬁctionalized
performance or question the circumstances that led to these seemingly anomalous
connections. The network context can clarify ambiguous presentation, moderate an
extreme performance, and conﬁrm an ambitious one.
SNSs can provide a richer social context for people one knows only superﬁcially.
Seeing who other people know and how they treat and are treated by others provides
Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 13 (2008) 231–251 ª 2008 International Communication Association 235
Agree
Provide more
signals
By comparing to
others
Who link with
important cues for understanding them (Holland & Skinner, 1987). A person one
meets in isolation can make difﬁcult-to-verify claims in an effort at impression
management (Goffman, 1959). A person one meets in the social context of friends
or colleagues, however, is tethered to the identity developed among them.
Trust is belief that the other is trustworthy. This belief is inferred from cues and
signals; trustworthiness itself is not directly perceivable (Bacharach & Gambetti,
2001). People trust new information and acquaintances that come to them via people
they trust. Thus, one’s display of connections signals one’s trustworthiness (Donath
& boyd, 2004). One of the most valuable contributions of SNSs is their potential to
add trust to weak ties. Trusted weak ties are very useful sources of information,
combining the heterogeneity that such ties generally have with the believability that
comes with trust (Levin & Cross, 2004). Furthermore, SNSs can actually increase
trustworthiness, by placing people within a context that can enforce social mores.
SNSs make people aware that their friends and colleagues are looking at their
self-presentation.
SNSs have these functions only if users care about being, even implicitly, trusted
recommenders. When people indiscriminately add connections, others who trusted
their judgment can suffer and will eventually cease trusting them as a source for
useful vouching. Site design inﬂuences this: Sites designed to make adding connections
as easy as possible, emphasizing indiscriminate network growth, create networks
that do little to increase trust or trustworthiness.
Site Design Affects Reliability
Variation in the design of SNSs promotes the development of different cultures
(Donath & boyd, 2004; Lampe, Ellison, & Steinﬁeld, 2007; Lenhart & Madden,
2007b). On a site where creating a link involves little cost, users may amass thousands
of ‘‘friends,’’ but an observer has no way of knowing which, if any, of these links
represent a relationship between people who care about or even know each other
(boyd, 2006; Fono & Raynes-Goldie, 2007). On Orkut, for instance, one simply clicks
on a proﬁle to request a connection, and being connected provides no special access
or information.
On sites with higher costs for creating a link, the observer has reason to believe
that the links represent genuine relationships. Members of aSmallWorld are careful
to request connections only with others whom they are sure wish to be linked to
them, since they can be banished for having a few link requests declined (Price,
2006). On LiveJournal, making the link is easy: It is one of the few sites in which
this can be done unilaterally. However, linking is generally done to give someone
access to part of one’s journal, and linked members’ posts appear on one’s own
space. This makes ‘‘friend’’ a relatively signiﬁcant signal, as friending someone both
reduces one’s privacy and publicly connects one with that person’s writing (Fono &
Raynes-Goldie, 2007).
The meaning of these links is also personally subjective. For some people, listing
someone as a ‘‘friend’’ on a social network site is an indication of personal and
236 Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 13 (2008) 231–251 ª 2008 International Communication Association
Links become 
Contexts
The Opposite
is also true
Easy to create
Little info to
share
Require relativel
Large effort 
To create link 
And to share info
Type of sites

Purposes of sites
positive acquaintance. Others are far more casual, willing to add friends indiscriminately
(boyd, 2006). This has ramiﬁcations for the reliability of the proﬁle itself.
Viewers may trust the self-created content of a proﬁle if they believe that its links are
to people who know that user well, while links that they believe have only minimal
connection add little credence.
SNSs are designed for different audiences. LinkedIn is for professionals. It has no
photographs, the proﬁles are resume´s of education and work, and the comments are
in the form of testimonials from co-workers. Identity is ﬁrmly tied to one’s professional
self, and there is limited ability to explore other people’s networks.
MySpace, popular with young people, has a very different atmosphere. Its proﬁles
feature photographs, music, and embedded programs, and users can explore the
network far beyond their own acquaintances (although they can choose to make
their proﬁle visible only to direct connections). This open interface makes it a rich
environment for the jokes, links, and software that function as information fashions
(discussed below).
Identity in MySpace is ﬂuid. Some proﬁles are real people, presenting themselves
much as they would ofﬂine. Some are commercial entities, such as bands, charitable
organizations, or celebrities; still others are ﬁctional personas, made for creative
experimentation or as fronts for spam. No single design is ideal for all sites. What
is important is that designers be ﬂuent in not only the fonts and colors that make up
the graphical design of the site, but in the social costs and beneﬁts that shape its
emerging culture.
Types of Relationships
Social network research classiﬁes ties as strong or weak, heterogeneous or homogeneous
(Granovetter, 1973, 1983; Wellman, Garton, & Haythornthwaite, 1997). While
the speciﬁcs of any individual relationship are more complex, broadly characterizing
them is useful for understanding the technology that can best support them. Current
research suggests that both strong and weak ties are sustained on SNSs (boyd, 2006;
Ellison, Steinﬁeld, & Lampe, 2007; Horrigan et al., 2006; Lenhart & Madden, 2007a).
Strong ties are close conﬁdants, people relied upon in an emergency and with
whom one is likely to share multiple interests. A close-knit network of strong ties can
supply extensive support. Being a member of such a group requires a large commitment
of time and attention; there is frequent contact among the members of the
group, often together. Close networks of strong ties tend to be homogeneous and
insular, reinforcing beliefs rather than introducing new ideas.
Weak ties are more distant acquaintances, people known in a speciﬁc context and
towards whom one feels less responsibility. A sparsely connected network of weak
but heterogeneous ties provides access to a great variety of ideas and experiences.
SNSs make establishing and sustaining large numbers of such ties more efﬁcient.
The combination of these types of ties arguably makes social supernets viable:
The stronger ties bring reliability to the proﬁle, and a large set of weaker ties expands
the scale and scope of the network. This raises important questions about how the
Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 13 (2008) 231–251 ª 2008 International Communication Association 237
Not always
Twitter
Facebook group
balance of personal networks may change. Will SNSs shift people’s social world from
one focused on a few important relationships to one consisting of an immense
number of weak relationships? What would this mean for social support, information
ﬁnding, and simply how people spend time?
The list of connections on a proﬁle does not differentiate between close friends
known in person for years and people known only through cursory glances at their
proﬁles. The signiﬁcance of these ‘‘unnuanced’’ links is thus ambiguous. However,
precisely deﬁning relationships is not necessarily the solution. In the face-to-face
world, people are circumspect about explicitly deﬁning the parameters of their
friendships. This is often a matter of saving face—of not embarrassing someone
by pointing out the limits of one’s affection for him or her. Links that specify the
type of relationship provide information to the viewer, but also increase social
discomfort (boyd, 2006; Fono & Raynes-Goldie, 2007). Indeed, simply publishing
lists of friends on a social network site goes against some of people’s fundamental
social training about making these boundaries public.
One solution is to look at interactions rather than explicit articulations. Public
comments and other communication also signal the strength and context of a relationship
and do so with greater nuance. Returning to a friend’s page, day after day,
to say hello is a way of engaging in ‘‘social grooming.’’ The cost in time is a signal of
the resources one is willing to commit to this relationship, and references to
mutual friends and external events are indices of shared experience. The length,
frequency, and content of these comments form a conversational proﬁle of each
relationship.
It is important to keep in mind that the interpretation of any signal is subtle and
subjective. The time spent on ‘‘social grooming’’ may be a ‘‘signal of need’’—its
purpose being not to indicate how much free time one has, but rather the importance
one places on the relationship. With signals of need, one pays a cost in resource
a to indicate the seriousness of one’s desire to signal quality b—in this case, the
importance of the relationship (Godfray, 1991). Devoting a lot of time to a relationship
can thus indicate its importance. It can also simply mean that one has a lot of
extra time (Spence, 1973b). Thus an unemployed acquaintance may spend many
hours a day keeping up with online correspondents, while a close but busy friend
may seldom do so. Excess time may itself be an important thing to signal. A very busy
individual may have little time to help friends move or go on a trip, whereas a less
close one with more time may be more available. Interpreting the signiﬁcance of time
spent on a relationship beneﬁts from knowing both the actual time spent and how it
compares with the time that person spent corresponding with others.
Gathering such information can be quite time consuming. ‘‘Receiver costs’’ are
an important component in communication dynamics: If a reliable signal is very
costly to assess, receivers may choose to rely on one that is less reliable but easier to
obtain (Guilford & Dawkins, 1991). A key design goal is thus to enable signals that
are reliable yet not costly to assess.
238 Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 13 (2008) 231–251 ª 2008 International Communication Association
Do SNSs weaken or strengthen
relationships?
Need some 
qualitative 
approaches
Understanding signals

Understanding contexts
Reducing Receiver Costs
Many reliable signals take time to evaluate. In the wild, a female frog assesses the
desirability of potential mates by listening to their call. However, the longer she
spends making this assessment, the more likely she is to be eaten by a predatory
snake. If many snakes are present, females may make assessments based on shorter
though less reliable calls (Grafe, 1997). In the human world, re´sume´s of job applicants
are quickly scanned at establishments such as fast food restaurants; the costs of
occasionally hiring an unqualiﬁed worker are less than those of meticulously checking
each applicant’s background. An employer hiring for a highly paid and responsible
position will spend far more time verifying applicants’ claims of experience and
expertise, since the cost of making a poor choice is higher.
In an SNS, users assess the desirability of potential friends by perusing their
proﬁles. On a site such as MySpace, choosing whom to friend is signiﬁcant: Only
listed friends can view private proﬁles and comment on each others’ pages. While
some users limit their connections to people they already know, others would like to
be open to potentially interesting new people. MySpace users receive numerous
friend requests, from people with shared interests who wish to strike up an online
correspondence, bands who wish to add people to their fan base, people trying to
acquire as many links as possible, and ﬁctional characters enacted on the site. How to
choose which to accept?
Deceptive spammers complicate this problem. Some pose as legitimate users to
convince others to accept their friend requests and then ﬁll the accepting user’s
message-board with advertising. The consequences of mistakenly accepting a spam
agent as ‘‘friend’’ are both social (one’s comments section ﬁlls with advertising and
one may appear as a spammer to others) and ﬁnancial (people falling for advertised
scams lose money). SNS spam is a new phenomenon, although email spam has been
around for many years. While in-depth studies of reactions to the former are not yet
available, predictions can be made based on studies of the latter. When spam is
prevalent, sorting through one’s mail becomes increasingly time consuming; people
become less enthusiastic about receiving messages and may become disillusioned
with the entire experience (Fallows, 2003; Pavlov, Melville, & Plice, 2005). In SNSs,
spam is likely to change the social atmosphere, causing people to becoming more
suspicious, more likely to keep their proﬁles private, and less likely to accept any
connections from strangers.
Spammers persist as long as their beneﬁts exceed their costs. Their widespread
presence is evidence that they can prosper in the current environment. Discouraging
them requires reducing their beneﬁts (few people respond to them) or raising their
costs (by imposing penalties or making it more difﬁcult to achieve the deception)
(Goodman & Rounthwaite, 2004). Making assessment easier makes spam more
costly, by forcing spammers to put greater effort into mimicking legitimate users.
On SNSs, there are many cues and signals about an individual’s identity. Some,
such as the self-description featured in the proﬁle, are easily perceived, but are
composed of conventional signals and easily faked. Others, such as the network
Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 13 (2008) 231–251 ª 2008 International Communication Association 239
Cost of choice
and communication patterns of everyone connected to the individual, are more
reliable, yet tracing the network and uncovering evidence that many of the ‘‘friends’’
are fakes, or noting that the comments were added en masse, is time consuming. It is
easier just to peruse the (unreliable) proﬁle.
Making the reliable cues more accessible would improve the receiver’s assessing
ability, while reducing the cost. Among the most promising cues to highlight are
clustering coefﬁcients, degree of bi-directionality in communication, and media
sharing practices (Zinman & Donath, 2007). While hard to assess by perusing individual
proﬁles, such information could be compactly visualized to provide an intuitive
data portrait of potential connections. Network depictions such as Comment
Flow (Offenhuber & Donath, 2007), which animates the ﬂow of communication in
a SNS, can make individuals’ overall communication patterns easy to see (Figure 1).
Figure 1 Comment Flow shows public communication patterns within a social network site.
Boxes on the lines linking connected members represent comments, moving from sender to
recipient.
240 Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 13 (2008) 231–251 ª 2008 International Communication Association
Designs such as Comment Flow that visualize the history of a proﬁle and its
interactions can give weight to longevity, show with whom someone has consistently
interacted, and indicate a person’s role within his or her network. By making it easy
to see these telling but otherwise difﬁcult to perceive cues, such designs can bring
social legibility to a site.
Beyond their effect on spam, designs such as Comment Flow can potentially
change the dynamics of a site. They may change behavior by making people more
aware of the cues they are revealing; such awareness can turn unconscious cues into
conscious signals, as people learn to manipulate the impressions they wish to give off.
These designs may also create a new level of network legibility, making network
structure and activity into an everyday part of impression formation.
These changing dynamics can be both good and bad. People may become more
self-conscious about the sort of network they display and manipulate relationships in
order to show a socially preferred pattern. In today’s relatively primitive designs, the
network feature most prominently depicted is size, which encourages people to add
connections to create the largest network (boyd, 2006). A more nuanced depiction
may encourage other mores, such as making greater effort to create a dense network
by introducing compatible acquaintances to each other.
How someone exists within the social world is one of the key things people wish
to know about each other, although in everyday existence it is only inferred indirectly.
Does he have a dense and homogeneous network or a large and heterogeneous
one? Does she frequently or sporadically maintain contact with more distant friends?
One of the most intriguing possibilities of future social network technologies is that
these social features can become part of one’s visible persona.
Signaling Status and Invulnerability
The costs in a communication system have many functions. The previous section
considered costs related to spam—the problem of the costs it imposes on users and
how new designs may reduce it by making it more costly to the spammers. This
section looks at some signaling functions of costs—how the wastefulness of some
seemingly irrational behaviors is actually a cost that ensures the reliability of a communicative
signal.
Amotz Zahavi (1977) developed costly signaling theory in order to explain the
presence of so much seemingly irrational wastefulness in nature. Why do moose
carry such enormous and metabolically expensive horns? Why do some gazelles
jump up and down when they see a predator, wasting time and energy instead of
running off as fast as they can? Zahavy’s insight was that this wastefulness ensures the
honesty of their signals of ﬁtness and speed: Only animals with an excess of the
signaled resource can afford to waste it on expensive communicative displays.
Similarly, observers have been puzzled or concerned by seemingly irrational
behavior on SNSs. Users may spend considerable time updating their pages, adding
new pictures and music; the comments they send each other are often in the form of
Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 13 (2008) 231–251 ª 2008 International Communication Association 241
So it can be cues for understanding various social
aspects of human beings. Such as intercultural,
interpersonal, gender, organizational communication
patterns and relationships
jokes and images. Why spend so much time on seemingly inconsequential changes of
imagery and uninformative communication? Deep concerns have also been raised
about young people who create overly revealing proﬁle pages, in which they appear
in provocative photographs or recount illegal activities such as drug use or underage
drinking. Warnings about the dangers of doing so have stopped some, but not all.
Why would someone choose to post such material once he or she was aware of
the negative consequences? Signaling theory can help explain such behavioral
phenomena.
Fashion and the Display of Information-Based Status
While an outsider might see as wasted the time expended on proﬁle updates and
exchanges of the latest pictures and URLs, another interpretation is that these seemingly
trivial activities are examples of online fashion, signals of social position in an
information based society (Donath, in press; McCracken, 1998; Thornton, 1996).
Fashions, the constant change in the way of doing something, are signals whose
form—the currently popular object or saying—changes frequently, while the meaning—social
position—remains the same. There are fashions in clothing, slang, and
management techniques. Their individual instantiations are easily-copied conventional
signals; it is the constant evolution of forms that creates the reliable signal.
Fashion is about information, about knowing the changing social meaning of an
object or way of doing things.
Individuals’ location on an adoption curve situates them in a complex world of
multiple and shifting subcultures. What they adopt—the cars they drive, music they
listen to, stories they link to—signals their affiliations. When they adopt indicates
their status and commitment to those afﬁliations. Are they among the earliest
adopters, willing to risk mistakes (e.g., wearing boots that never shift from weird
to cool, spending months to learn a new computer language, only to see it abandoned
by its developers) or among the latter ones, knowing the choices they made
have been vetted by numerous predecessors—safe, but never a leader? The rewards of
being a leader are status and influence; the costs are the energy it requires and the risk
of mistaken judgment. Even in the world of blogs, where fashion is in the ostensible
‘‘free’’ medium of information, being at the forefront is costly. Much time is required
to find and disseminate new ideas (Levy, 2004), and publishing erroneous stories is
also a risk (Donath, in press).
Successful blog topics follow the classic innovation diffusion model (Rogers,
2003). A creative but perhaps unknown innovator introduces a link, highly connected
‘‘A-list’’ bloggers popularize it, and then it diffuses, over a period of weeks,
through the rest of the population (Adar, Zhang, Adamic, & Lukose, 2004). Fashion
in SNSs has not yet been formally analyzed, but it is likely to follow a similar pattern.
A tremendous amount of fashion exists on many SNSs, with images, movies, and
jokes tracing network paths as they spread from user to user. For example, Facebook
users can add applications to their proﬁle; these programs, of which there are thousands,
help users share books, movies, and music; play games; create maps of where
242 Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 13 (2008) 231–251 ª 2008 International Communication Association
Well adapted to
IT
Trend seeker
Symbolic capital
they have been, and so forth. Many are social grooming aids for the information
world—their fundamental message is ‘‘I’m thinking of you,’’ conveyed via virtual
gifts or imaginary zombie bites or by letting users throw virtual sheep at each other.
The profile of the fashion-conscious user is studded with icons signaling application
use, and one looks to the fashion leaders to learn which of the newest offerings are
worth adopting, for while some are very clever or useful, others are badly designed
and programmed. Using one of these applications displays one’s fashion knowledge
and status: Is it a cool new app or one that was going out of style a week ago? Does the
sender have enough influence to be able to introduce something new and have it
catch on, or will it just seem like a strange thing to do (‘‘Why are you throwing
a make-believe sheep at me?’’)?
In the public space of SNSs, information fashions can create virtual walls, allowing
those in the know to recognize others within their subculture via their common
understanding of jokes and references that have not yet spread to the mainstream
(Thornton, 1997). For example, in the spring of 2007, a photo of a cat with a slice of
cheese on its head and the caption, ‘‘CHEEZ: you doin it wrong’’ appeared on some
proﬁles. Anyone not privy to the Internet fashion of ‘‘lolcats’’ would ﬁnd this image
bafﬂing, but for those in the know, it was a witty play on the preceding week’s wildly
popular cat picture captioned with, ‘‘I can haz cheezburger?’’(Wikipedia, 2007).
Fashion is one way of maintaining privacy, while still signaling beliefs and afﬁliations
to potential connections.
Being in fashion—whether via physical clothing or online linking—signals fitness
in the continuously changing information world. It signals status in a society
where ‘‘information prowess’’—i.e., having access to information, the ability (often
termed taste) to distinguish between good and bad information, and the willingness
to adapt to the changes brought by new information—is a fundamental part of the
culture.
Information Exposure: Signaling Imperviousness
Excessive risk taking is another behavior that may seem irrational, but when viewed
as a signal, can be seen as a way of claiming a high level of ﬁtness. From lion-hunting
Masai warriors to cigarette-smoking, drag-racing American teenagers, people (often
young) perform risky acts to prove that they are so ﬁt or skilled that they can afford
to be daring (Dunbar, 1996; Hawkes & Bliege Bird, 2002). Today, posting revealing
or culpable material online arguably has become another forum for signaling imperviousness
to danger and repercussions.
The issue of privacy has generated considerable concern in social network sites.
People give away personal identiﬁcation and publish intimate and revealing stories
about themselves (Barnes, 2006; Gross, Acquisti, & Heinz III, 2005). They may do so
for several possible reasons. Some may think of the site as a closed and safe world,
where only the small audience of their friends will look at their proﬁle. Some may
seek attention and ﬁnd publishing controversial and provocative material to be an
effective means of gaining quick fame (or infamy). In some cases, the users whose
Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 13 (2008) 231–251 ª 2008 International Communication Association 243
In-group formation
proﬁles feature self-portraits with bongs and tales of ripping off the boss may be
unaware of the potential consequences. Others, however, may be quite aware—and
be signaling lack of concern. They may be indicating that their future is so secure that
no social network site indiscretion would jeopardize it, or they may be showing their
alienation from the sort of future where discretion is needed. For such users, the risk
itself is the benefit.
Research Implications
Signaling theory provides a framework for researchers to formulate new hypotheses
about the communicative function of behavior. It suggests new avenues of investigation:
For example, if frequent proﬁle updating is hypothesized to signal status, then an
interesting study would be to examine whether frequent updaters are more inﬂuential.
The signaling model can also suggest ways of communicating concerns about the
behavior. If reducing risky activity is the goal, distinguishing among different possible
motivations is needed to counteract them. In the example of users posting overly
revealing information, learning about the consequences can alter the behavior of those
users who were simply unaware of the danger (Lenhart & Madden, 2007b). However,
if courting risks is done to signal imperviousness to danger, exhortations from others
to be careful are counterproductive, in that raising perception of the act as risky
increases its value as a signal of daring (Donath, in press). In such situations, making
the behavior seem foolish rather than dangerous can be a better approach.
Understanding which costs have communicative value is important for designers.
Efﬁciency and ease of use are common design goals. Yet if a design eliminates
costs that had functioned as signaling costs, a decrease in reliability may have an
unforeseen effect. Thus with information access, if the information itself is the end
(as it is with ‘‘useful’’ information), making access easier is beneﬁcial. When information
is used to signal status, as it is with fashion, then making access easier
accelerates the race, rather than increasing efﬁciency (Donath, in press). Designers
can use signaling theory to distinguish between useful costs that aid reliability and
ones that are inefﬁciencies.
Supernets and Social Transformation
Will SNS-based social supernets transform society? To do so, SNSs must ﬁrst ﬂourish
as a social technology, with large populations using them extensively. They must also
be capable of increasing the scale of social groups. As this article has discussed, this
depends on their ability to extend trust and improve trustworthiness, abilities in part
determined by their design. If these conditions are met and social supernets do arise,
how might they affect society?
Perhaps their greatest potential is to augment personal information ﬂow. Before
the invention of mass media, people learned new things from their acquaintances
(Ong, 2002). Knowledge ﬂowed through social networks, and the limits of a network
limited the spread of knowledge. If two villages had only one person who traveled
244 Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 13 (2008) 231–251 ª 2008 International Communication Association
Oral culture
between them, information ﬂow between the two communities was constrained by
what that ‘‘bridge’’ was privy to and deemed worthy to pass on (Burt, 2000).
Until about 500 years ago, human populations were so isolated from each other
that over the millennia they evolved divergent languages, cultures, and even distinct
physical characteristics (Cavalli-Sforza & Cavalli-Sforza, 1995). Today, as paved
roads criss-cross continents and thousands of passenger airplanes circle the globe
every day, a chain of personal relationships connects every person on earth (with the
exception of a few thousand isolated tribes-people in the remote Amazon; Roach,
2003) to every other person in a global social network.
The human beings who make up this global network are in some ways
unchanged. They still must eat, ﬁnd shelter, and acquire information. Yet how they
do these things has changed. Eating no longer involves a dangerous group hunt for
scarce meat, but rather a trip to the grocery store, where the perils come not in the
form of fangs and claws, but as sneak attacks from stealth marketing campaigns that
leave one guiltily but gluttonously checking out a cartful of junk food. Building
a shelter is no longer a communal effort requiring an extensive network of close
personal ties, but rather a commercial one requiring only a good relationship with
a bank. Acquiring information about current events or how to do something no
longer requires maintaining social ties and engaging in conversation, but instead
simply watching the news or typing a query. Markets and commercial services have
in many ways replaced cultivating connections.
It is perhaps ironic that at the point in history when people have the greatest
ability to stay in touch with each other, they are the least dependent on personal
relationships for daily survival. Modern markets make it possible to survive in social
isolation and, by choice or circumstance, some people do. Yet most choose to live in
a socially connected world of family, friends, co-workers, and acquaintances.
Given that people no longer have to rely on personal relationships for building
their homes, obtaining their food, or acquiring information, what is it that they seek
in friendship and in social ties? Certainly, people still receive material assistance and
support from their friends, and being part of a close-knit network brings companionship
and a sense of belonging (Wellman & Gulia, 1999). These beneﬁts ﬂow
primarily from close relationships. What of casual acquaintances, the weaker ties
that would account for many of the connections in a social supernet?
As Granovetter (1973, 1983) demonstrated, a key strength of weak ties is their
ability to provide a wide range of information. Despite the ubiquity of mass media,
personal networks remain an important information source. People can use their
beliefs about another person’s knowledge and credibility to assess new ideas that
come from that source. People care about many matters that are too personal, too
local, to be part of a central repository. They may care more that people they know
recommend a book than about how it is generally received. By increasing the number
of weak ties one can maintain, social supernets have the potential to expand their
users’ range of information sources, while maintaining a socially local context of
personal acquaintanceship.
Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 13 (2008) 231–251 ª 2008 International Communication Association 245
Seeking information from acquaintances puts information giving and seeking
into the social economics of the relationship; it is an exchange of favors, of revealing
needs and providing assistance. Whether as a means for bolstering status, strengthening
ties, or for showing one’s esoteric knowledge, people use information strategically
(Burt, 1997; Paine, 1967). For social supernets to thrive and to affect society
signiﬁcantly, their design needs to support such strategic information sharing.
Changing Relationships
As SNSs expand, they may transform the concepts of friendship, personal acquaintance,
and public celebrity. New types of relationships are already emerging within
them, such as ‘‘friendsters,’’ i.e., people known only in the context of an SNS (boyd
2006). These changes are occurring in the midst of related cultural reconﬁgurations,
from the reduced autonomy of American youth to the increased attention to the
private lives of public ﬁgures.
Twenty years ago, students might have gathered after school; today, they spend
less time together in person, but stay in constant touch by instant messenger and are
aware of the daily events in each other’s lives through updates on their proﬁles. The
relationships may not be markedly different from pre social technology (bullying,
famously, has migrated to the online world), but they have adapted the signals they
use to indicate and infer popularity, romantic interest, and social adeptness to this
ubiquitously connected space (Herring, 2008). One of the consequences of these
changes is that information that was once local is becoming global. The dramas of
high school friendships, blind date traumas, and mundane job irritations, once hot
gossip only to the immediate circle of the people involved, are now published for
worldwide consumption on blogs and network sites.
News about public ﬁgures inundates culture—their homes, diets, and breakups;
what they ate for dinner; and how much they drank afterwards. Once celebrities were
unreachable, open for idolization and emulation, but not interaction. Today, many
SNS users fill their friend lists with famous stars. Some celebrities truly engage with
their fan base; others have employees or software programs standing in. The interaction
constitutes the celebrity as a sort of fantasy friend. Moreover, as the software
improves and the interactions become more personalized, the line between real and
fictional friend becomes blurred. Is this deception—or entertainment? When is the
signal’s form, i.e., the appearance of friendship, sufficient and when is its implied
quality, i.e., a genuine sentiment, what is really desired? (Donath, in press; Turkle,
2006)
The changes wrought by SNSs are migrating from the private world of the
personal screen to the physical and public space of the city. In the 1930s, Louis
Wirth (1938) wrote about the isolation of urban life, where one is alone in the midst
of millions. While lonely, the isolation of the unconnected city is necessary to preserve
not only privacy but also sanity: All activity would come to a halt if every rush
hour commuter was obliged to greet and acknowledge everyone encountered. Yet the
less guarded mores of the online world seem poised to spread to the physical world.
246 Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 13 (2008) 231–251 ª 2008 International Communication Association
Really change?
Seems to reflect the
relationship?
Mobile social network sites allow people to broadcast proﬁles designed to be viewed
by physically proximate strangers (Jones, Grandhi, Whittaker, Chivakula & Terveen,
2004; Smith, 2005), simultaneously lessening the anonymity of the crowd and providing
a buffer to the commitments of engagement.
What does it mean to be acquainted with a person? To be a friend, to have met
them, to be a ‘‘friendster’’? What does it mean to know someone in this world of
ubiquitous awareness and mass celebrity intimacy, in a city ﬂooded with social
computing? Researchers seeking to understand the phenomenon of articulated social
networks and designers creating their future incarnations need to study the evolution
of social networks and base their theories and designs on the understanding that
the social ecosystem is rapidly evolving and that the very purpose of connection is
in ﬂux.
The Pleasures of Social Grooming
Grooming is soothing and sensuous. Much of that hedonic quality was lost in the
evolution from grooming to gossiping, although situating social interactions around
meals and other sensory-rich experiences recaptures some of this. Computer-based
communication, in contrast, is decidedly austere. Hunching over a keyboard and
peering at a ﬂat screen to log into an SNS is a somatically uninspiring experience. A
big question about the ultimate cultural signiﬁcance of these sites is whether people
will use them enough for them to effect real transformation.
One signiﬁcant draw of SNSs is the appeal of ceaseless novelty—of seeing blog
entries, getting new comments, seeing what has changed. Perhaps the basic pleasure
that social network sites provide is endless novelty in the flow of new people and new
information, and the knowledge that someone is paying attention to you—social
grooming for the information age.
Note
1 Dunbar estimated that apes maintain about 50 ties, while humans, in cultures ranging
from tribal groups to modern institutions, maintain groups of 150 to 200 people. ‘‘The
ﬁgure of 150 seems to represent the maximum number of individuals with whom we
can have a genuinely social relationship’’ (Dunbar, 1996, p. 77). He noted that most
people have an average of 10-15 intimate acquaintances and can recognize at most
2,000.
References
Adar, E., Zhang, L., Adamic, L. A., & Lukose, R. M. (2004, May). Implicit structure and the
dynamics of blogspace. Paper presented at the 13th International World Wide Web
Conference: Workshop on the Weblogging Ecosystem, New York.
Bacharach, M., & Gambetti, D. (2001). Trust in signs. In K. Cook (Ed.), Trust in Society
(pp. 148–184). New York: Russell Sage Foundation.
Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 13 (2008) 231–251 ª 2008 International Communication Association 247
Barnes, S. (2006). A privacy paradox: Social networking in the United States. First Monday,
11(9). Retrieved August 10, 2007 from http://www.ﬁrstmonday.org/issues/issue11_9/
barnes/index.html
boyd, d. (2006). Friends, Friendsters, and Top 8: Writing community into being on social
network sites. First Monday, 11(12). Retrieved August 10, 2007 from http://
ﬁrstmonday.org/issues/issue11_12/boyd/index.html
boyd, d., & Heer, J. (2006). Proﬁles as conversation: Networked identity performance on
Friendster. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Ninth Annual Hawai’i International Conference on
System Sciences. Los Alamitos, CA: IEEE Press.
Burt, R. S. (1997). The contingent value of social capital. Administrative Science Quarterly,
42(2), 339–365.
Burt, R. S. (2000). Bandwidth and echo: Trust, information, and gossip in social networks. In
A. Casella & J. E. Rauch (Eds.), Networks and Markets: Contributions from Economics and
Sociology (pp. 30–74). New York: Russell Sage Foundation.
Cavalli-Sforza, L. L., & Cavalli-Sforza, F. (1995). The Great Human Diasporas (S. Thorne,
Trans.). Reading, MA: Perseus Books.
DePaulo, B. M., & Kashy, D. A. (1998). Everyday lies in close and casual relationships. Journal
of Personality and Social Psychology, 74(1), 63–79.
Donath, J. (in press). Signals, Truth, and Design. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Donath, J. (1998). Identity and deception in the virtual community. In M. Smith & P. Kollock
(Eds.), Communities in Cyberspace (pp 29–59). New York: Routledge.
Donath, J., & boyd, d. (2004). Public displays of connection. BT Technology Journal, 22(4),
71–82.
Dunbar, R. I. M. (1996). Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Dunbar, R. I. M. (2004). Gossip in evolutionary perspective. Review of General Psychology,
8(2), 100–110.
Ellison, N. B., Steinﬁeld, C., & Lampe, C. (2007). The beneﬁts of Facebook ‘‘friends:’’ Social
capital and college students’ use of online social network sites. Journal of
Computer-Mediated Communication, 12(4), article 1. Retrieved August 10, 2007 from
http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol12/issue4/ellison.html
Enquist, M., & Leimar, O. (1993). The evolution of cooperation in mobile organisms. Animal
Behaviour, 45(4), 747–757.
Fallows, D. (2003). Spam: How it is Hurting Email and Degrading Life on the Internet. Pew
Internet & American Life Project report. Retrieved August 10, 2007 from http://
www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/102/report_display.asp
Fono, D., & Raynes-Goldie, K. (2007). Hyperfriends and beyond: Friendship and social norms on
LiveJournal.InM.Consalvo &C.Haythornthwaite(Eds.),SelectedPapersfromtheAssociation
of Internet Researchers Conference 2005, Vol. 4 (pp. 91–104). New York: Peter Lang.
Godfray, H. C. J. (1991). Signalling of need by offspring to their parents. Nature, 352(6333),
328–330.
Goffman, E. (1959). The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Garden City, NY: Doubleday
Anchor Books.
Good, D. (2000). Individuals, interpersonal relations, and trust. In D. Gambetta (Ed.), Trust:
Making and Breaking Cooperative Relations (pp. 31–48). Oxford, UK: University of
Oxford Press.
248 Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 13 (2008) 231–251 ª 2008 International Communication Association
Goodman, J. T., & Rounthwaite, R. (2004). Stopping outgoing spam. In Proceedings of the 5th
ACM conference on Electronic commerce (pp. 30–39). New York: ACM Press.
Grafe, T. U. (1997). Costs and beneﬁts of mate choice in the lek-breeding reed frog,
Hyperolius marmoratus. Animal Behaviour, 53(5), 1103–1117.
Granovetter, M. S. (1973). The strength of weak ties. American Journal of Sociology, 78(6),
1360–1380.
Granovetter, M. S. (1983). The strength of weak ties: A network theory revisited. Sociological
Theory, 1, 201–233.
Gross, R., Acquisti, A., & Heinz III, H. J. (2005). Information revelation and privacy in online
social networks. Proceedings of the 2005 ACM Workshop on Privacy in the Electronic Society
(pp. 71–80). New York: ACM Press.
Guilford, T., & Dawkins, M. S. (1991). Receiver psychology and the evolution of animal
signals. Animal Behaviour, 42(1), 1–14.
Guilford, T., & Dawkins, M. S. (1995). What are conventional signals? Animal Behaviour,
49(6), 1689–1695.
Hawkes, K., & Bliege Bird, R. (2002). Showing off, handicap signaling, and the evolution of
men’s work. Evolutionary Anthropology, 11(2), 58–67.
Herring, S. C. (2008). Questioning the generational divide: Technological exoticism and adult
construction of online youth identity. In D. Buckingham (Ed.), Youth, Identity, and
Digital Media (pp. 71–94). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Holland, D., & Skinner, D. (1987). Prestige and intimacy: The cultural models behind
Americans’ talk about gender types. In D. Holland & N. Quinn (Eds.), Cultural Models in
Language and Thought (pp. 78–111). New York: Cambridge University Press.
Horrigan, J., Boase, J., Rainie, L., & Wellman, B. (2006). The Strength of Internet Ties. Pew
Internet & American Life Project report. Retrieved August 10, 2007 from http://
www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/172/report_display.asp
Jones, Q., Grandhi, S. A., Whittaker, S., Chivakula, K., & Terveen, L. (2004). Putting systems
into place: A qualitative study of design requirements for location-aware community
systems. In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work
(pp. 202–211). New York: ACM Press.
Lampe, C., Ellison, N., & Steinﬁeld, C. (2007). A familiar Face(book): Proﬁle elements as
signals in an online social network. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human
Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 435–444). New York: ACM Press.
Lenhart, A., & Madden, M. (2007a). Social Networking Websites and Teens: An Overview.
Pew Internet and American Life Project report. Retrieved August 10, 2007 from
http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/198/report_display.asp
Lenhart, A., & Madden, M. (2007b). Teens, Privacy, and Online Social Networks: How Teens
Manage Their Online Identities and Personal Information in the Age of MySpace. Pew
Internet & American Life Project report. Retrieved August 10, 2007 from http://
www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/211/report_display.asp
Levin, D. Z., & Cross, R. (2004). The strength of weak ties you can trust: The mediating role of
trust in effective knowledge transfer. Management Science, 50(11), 1477–1490.
Levy, S. (2004, December 20). The alpha bloggers. Newsweek. Retrieved September 27, 2007
from http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6693381/site/newsweek/
Maynard-Smith, J., & Harper, D. (2003). Animal Signals. Oxford, UK: Oxford University
Press.
Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 13 (2008) 231–251 ª 2008 International Communication Association 249
McCracken, G. (1998). Plenitude: Culture by Commotion (Vol. 1). Toronto, ON:
Periph.:Fluide.
McPherson, M., Smith-Lovin, L., & Cook, J. M. (2001). Birds of a feather: Homophily in
social networks. Annual Review of Sociology, 27(1), 415–444.
Nardi, B. A., Whittaker, S., Isaacs, E., Creech, M., Johnson, J., & Hainsworth, J. (2002).
Integrating communication and information through ContactMap. Communications of
the ACM, 45(4), 89–95.
Offenhuber, D., & Donath, J. (2007, October 28-November 1). Comment Flow. Poster
presented at InfoVis 2007, Sacramento, CA.
Ong, W. J. (2002). Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London, UK:
Routledge.
Paine, R. (1967). What is gossip about? An alternative hypothesis. Man, New series, 2(2),
278–285.
Pavlov, O. V., Melville, N., & Plice, R. K. (2005). Mitigating the tragedy of the digital
commons: The problem of unsolicited commercial email. Communications of the
Association for Information Systems, 16, 73–90.
Price, L. (2006, October/November). A big ﬁsh in aSmallWorld. Haute Living, pp. 51–54.
Retrieved August 15, 2007 from http://www.hautelivingny-digital.com/hautelivingny/
200609/
Raub, W., & Weesie, J. (1990). Reputation and efﬁciency in social interactions: An example of
network effects. The American Journal of Sociology, 96(3), 626–654.
Roach, J. (2003, March 12). Amazon tribes: Isolated by choice? National Geographic News.
Retrieved August 10, 2007 from http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/03/
0310_030310_invisible1.html
Rogers, E. (2003). The Diffusion of Innovations, 5th ed. New York: Free Press.
Slotnik, D. E. (2007, February 26). Too few friends? A web site lets you buy some (and they’re
hot). The New York Times. Retrieved September 27, 2007 from http://www.nytimes.com/
2007/02/26/technology/26fake.html
Smith, I. (2005). Social-mobile applications. Computer, 38(4), 84–85.
Spence, M. (1973a). Job market signaling. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 87(3), 355–374.
Spence, M. (1973b). Time and communication in economic and social interaction. The
Quarterly Journal of Economics, 87(4), 651–660.
Thornton, S. (1996). Club Cultures: Music, Media and Subcultural Capital. Middletown, CT:
Wesleyan University Press.
Thornton, S. (1997). General introduction. In K. Gelder & S. Thornton (Eds.), The
Subcultures Reader (pp. 1–7). London: Routledge.
Turkle, S. (2006). Diary. London Review of Books, 28(8), 36–37.
Wellman, B., Garton, L., & Haythornthwaite, C. (1997). Studying online social networks.
Journal of Computer Mediated Communication, 3 (1). Retrieved August 10, 2007 from
http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol3/issue1/garton.html
Wellman, B., & Gulia, M. (1999). The network basis of social support: A network is more than
the sum of its ties. In Networks in the Global Village (pp. 83–118). Boulder, CO: Westview
Press.
Whittaker, S., Jones, Q., & Terveen, L. (2002). Contact management: identifying contacts to
support long-term communication. In Proceedings of the 2002 ACM conference on
Computer Supported Cooperative Work (pp. 216–225). New York: ACM Press.
250 Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 13 (2008) 231–251 ª 2008 International Communication Association
Wikipedia. (2007, August 14). Lolcat. Retrieved August 15, 2007 from http://
en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Lolcat&oldid=151216708
Wirth, L. (1938). Urbanism as a way of life. The American Journal of Sociology, 44(1), 1–24.
Zahavi, A. (1975). Mate selection—a selection for a handicap. Journal of Theoretical Biology,
53(1), 205–214.
Zahavi, A. (1977). The cost of honesty (further remarks on the handicap principle). Journal of
Theoretical Biology, 67(3), 603–605.
Zinman, A., & Donath, J. (2007, August). Is Britney Spears spam? Paper presented at the CEAS
2007—Fourth Conference on Email and Anti-Spam, Mountain View, CA.
About the Author
Judith Donath ½judith@media.mit.edu is an associate professor at the MIT Media
Lab, where she directs the Sociable Media research group. Her work focuses on the
social side of computing, synthesizing knowledge from ﬁelds such as graphic design,
urban studies, and cognitive science to build innovative interfaces for online communities
and virtual identities.
Address: Bldg e15-392, 20 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA
Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 13 (2008) 231–251 ª 2008 International Communication Association 251