The Performance of Connection

Abstract

My participants use Facebook to make connections, perform connections, and gather information on connections. ‘Connecting’ is the first act required of a Facebook user. This involves finding others and sending and accepting ‘friend requests’. Once friends, people have public access to one another’s Facebook Timelines. When a person addresses another person or interacts with another person’s content, he or she is ‘performing connection’. For example, commenting on a status update is a performance of connection. On the one hand, performances of connection are private social exchanges aimed at social gratification through the mobilisation of interpersonal intimacy. On the other hand, they constitute the public performance of social relationality which projects out toward a bounded public, garnering a form of recognition which strengthens social connections. This should be understood as a mutually constitutive duality which acts to reproduce social connections.