Google Plus and Circles: A New Way of Grouping Friends

The first chapter in It’s Complicated, “why do kids seem strange online?”, took an interesting perspective on what content teens post online. It seems that all you hear is that teens should be more careful about what they post online, but Boyd looks at the situation differently. Boyd presents that although it is important for teens to be aware of what they are posting, the problem is not just the teens themselves, but also the way the platform is set up. Teens often have no way of knowing which of their social circles will be seeing a post, but they have to pick a group to target with the post. By giving the analogy of the speaker targeting different groups he spoke to, compared to TV, it became clear this is not only a problem for people online. Posting content via social media is just the newest way this problem has been encountered.
Although this book was published just last year, this chapter made me think of ways that social platforms have already improved this. Google plus was created with the purpose of creating a social network that can be directed at certain groups. On Google Plus, connections are sorted into circles like family, friends, work, etc. When something is posted on your page it is very easy to select which circle or circles the post is directed to. Other popular social platforms have since adopted this idea, so certain posts can have a limited audience, but it is not as clear cut as the circles on Google plus.
On Facebook, there is now the option to hide certain posts from certain friends. Although this tries to recreate the idea of targeting an audience, I don’t think it achieves that goal as well as Google plus. By excluding specific people from a post, it seems more like the poster is trying to hide something from specific people instead of just directing a post to a certain group. The key to understanding teens online the way that Boyd does is to understand that teens post items online targeted to a specific group, not everybody except a couple people.

One thought on “Google Plus and Circles: A New Way of Grouping Friends

  1. nklepper

    I think this is a really important point you bring up. 11 years after Facebook was created, we are finally seeing a plateau of usage. Parents and older relatives are flooding the network, making it a less appealing and less frequented by teens than other, more private and trending apps. Teens feel they have to be on their best behavior now that their grandparents are friends with them on Facebook and thus either don’t post anything at all, or rather use the function you mentioned to block certain friends from seeing your content. If there was a way to create circles on Facebook so that users can post certain content to specific groups of friends, that would create less spam and less chance of people unfriending one another.

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