The Institutionalization of Social Networks: Facebook
1 Comment Published by Alejandro November 24th, 2008 in *OIINEWS, Internet
On Thursday night, I was browsing my profile on Facebook when I spotted that my relationship status was not entirely correct; it said that I was in a relationship with my partner. I consider that being a relationship with someone is a relatively loose bond, it is a bond you can have with a girlfriend, friends, clients or even acquaintances, but it doesn’t define my life with H (she likes to keep a low profile so I won’t mention her name). We’ve been together more than seven years now, and as far as I can tell, think and feel this is much more than a relationship; I consider her my wife in all rights and obligations, whatever papers, administration, church or society says. So, being consequent with this, I changed my Facebook relationship status to married. Yet I was not expecting my friends’ reaction.
In a matter of hours, I had messages from friends expressing surprise and, very kindly, congratulating me for the news, though they hadn’t been invited to the supposed wedding. They, and I guess other people too, took this change in my Facebook profile as a reality within the social institutions we’ve been taught to live in. I am not a sociologist, so I won’t try to explain the social process behind this phenomenon, but I think that social networks are getting so embedded in our lives that they are becoming social institutions in which we trust, for the information we found in them comes directly from our family, friends and other people we have previously given our trust to.
NB: From here, I would like to thank all my friends that congratulate me for my wedding 
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About
Alejandro Ribo-Labastida, DPhil student, Oxford Internet Institute
This is a problem with Facebook: the pre-defined categories of our social lives. I see the term “relationship” in structural terms, and for me it is pretty blank (just a reciprocal connection). But on the other hand am I not a native English speaker. In short, Facebook must be a social institution. It´s natural for me to think about it as an arena for intimate social interaction and therefore we take it for a reality in its own right.