Facebook's Poke: Uncomfortable or Comforting

Thinking about the “small-world” argument described in Granovetter’s article, we found that in fact our absent link was not absent at all. In the Mutual Friends section of Facebook we found we had two mutual friends. One mutual friend, with whom Megan had gone to highschool, Elinor had just come from a dinner with him before their meeting. This coincidence proves Granovetter’s forbidden triad. Seeing this forbidden triad through the lens of Facebook is often how current college students come to understand their social networks. However, both Elinor and Megan rarely take advantage of Facebook’s full networking opportunities, visiting the site only when notifications arrive in our email inboxes. In our meeting, we decided to break down inhibitions and discuss the sections of Facebook we do not use, particularly “the poke” option. To poke is a physical action being enacted virtually. We asked what does it mean? What does it mean to our mutual friends? Boyd discusses how the teens she studied had a “desire to engage publicly” (21). In a closed system, unable to be hacked into, Facebook’s poke becomes a way to fulfill that desire. Yet the implications of a poke are vast and unclear, different for every viewer of the act, and so how can such a tricky action be fulfilling? Or is “the poke” another way to make our large, incomprehensible world a “small-world” where we can feel somehow connected?

Elinor and Megan