Friendship in the Digital Age

Social network sites arise questions over the changing form and meaning of friendship. Do SNS encourage us to develop a narrow sense of friendship, to treat all friends the same way? Are we flattening friendships by essentially commodifying them? How many of our friends do we actually talk to on facebook or would we cross the road to talk to them in real life?

The Dunbar number 150 is the number of people one can have stable, cohesive social ties, this theory is disrupted now as we can have hundreds and thousands of friends on SNS. With facebook we can 'handle' having more friends beyond the number of friendships which actually matter significantly to us. Facebook has become more efficient in cultivating relationships in shorter space of time, but that doesn't mean the friendships are as meaningful, but are more likely to have weaker ties than strong ones as time and investment becomes an issue. The convenience of SNS helps make communication with different people easy and more fluid, but also to keep up with friends who live far away or are overseas. We can look at their status and photos to see what they are getting up to in their lives, this can make contacting friends more 'lazy' in a sense because instead of making an effort to contact them you can just click on their profile or check the newsfeed, depending on how actively engaged they are online and how often they update.

Judith Donath (2008) in her reading "Signals in Social Supernets" differentiates between strong ties which are close confidants who require a large commitment of time and attention and have frequent acts of contact while weak ties are distant acquaintances who whom one feels less responsibility to make contact with. No relationships means it is better than the other, just different and have new forms of opportunities. The strength in weak ties is that they are the ones to most likely gain new insights as there is a wider diversity of people than strong ties. Donath states that weaker ties are beneficial because it gives users the potential to expand their range of information sources; "Whether as a means for bolstering status, strengthening ties, or for showing one's esoteric knowledge, people use information strategically." This breaks us out of existence to modern citizens of the world which is not bad but essential for "social grooming." SNS can encourage us to waste time on people we won't ever be close to but that becomes the strength of them. SNS is a way of extending one's social network to ties outside of your offline existence and people who are just acquaintances or 'mutual friends' of your friends may become friends of value if an effort is made by both.

Judith Donath questions if SNS will shift people's social world from one focused on a few important relationships to one consisting of an immense number of weak relationships? While the term 'friend' has taken on new meanings now in social network platforms because of the ambiguity and nostalgia, in facebook we cannot list who are our close friends and who are mere acquaintances, but it is our interactions which determine this. I have people on my friends list who I wouldn't necessarily label a friend, nor would I cross the road to talk to them in real life, but facebook gets you, to some extent, caring and paying attention to everyone on your friends list and in return it is hoped that they also care about you, even if you may never contact them online or offline. So while SNS encourages people to extend their social networks to wider circle of acquaintances, it can also strengthen bonds already in place.

To friend or not to friend. That is the question

Friends, they are our partners in crime, the people whom we love, support and laugh with. Friends pick you up on a bad day and lend a hand when you need one. Friends are the people we confide in, they lend a shoulder to cry on or offer an ear to listen to your problems. Friends are people who share our likes and interests, offer companionship and are people who we enjoy being around. They are the people we have grown up with, people who we have met from sport teams, schools and youth groups. Traditionally we would interact and communicate with our friends by seeing each other face to face, talking on the phone, writing letters, Christmas and birthday cards.

However, something that really interests me is the idea of online friendships and whether the dynamic of friendship has changed since the invention of the internet. If you think about it, social network sites like facebook allow its users to combine all of their networks and converge them into one space. Take my own page for example; I have 394 friends who include work mates, family and friends from the various schools I attended as well as friends who I have met online. Social network sites make it easy and effortless for individuals to keep in touch. By the click of a mouse I can see how my cousin in Russia is doing by looking at her status updates, or by viewing her pictures. I can send emails, virtual gifts and cards over the internet much like I would in times when these technologies were not available. I can instant-message and Skype my friends, talking to them in real time and be kept in the loop of what goes on in their daily lives.

The internet even allows me the opportunity to meet and become acquainted with people online whom I would otherwise not have the chance to meet outside of the cyberspace world. Can these people then too be classed as friends? Social network sites in general seem to encourage this kind of behaviour amongst its users. I would consider some people whom I have met through various blogs, websites and social network sites to be my friends as I am sure many other people have too.

What do you think? Has the idea of friendship and those who we regard as friends really changed all that much with the invention of the internet? If you think about it, we still do many of the same things to keep in contact with friends that we have always done, except now it is done online. Emails have replaced hand written litters as skyping and text messaging has replaced phone calls. In essence, it is very much the same. On the other hand, many of us today also have friends and contacts from places all around the world whom we have never actually met face to face but talk to regular basis. In this instance the concept of a friendship has changed dramatically as it challenges traditional notions of friendship. Is it the same or different? Looks like friendship is changing with technology too, do you agree?