friend or follow

According to official data, the average Facebook user has 130 friends on the site.

Of course, we all know that Facebook “friendship” does not connote real friendship. It does not confer any of the obligations we might associate with friendship, certainly not obligations of the play-attending type, and not even obligations of a fundamental sort. If you and I are Facebook friends, we do not need to know anything about each other, much less care for each other.

By the same token, Facebook friendship does not confer any of the real joys of friendship, like sharing a really deep secret, or sitting in a room together in silence, or having a rip-roarin’ good time together.

On Facebook, the concept of “friendship” is promiscuous, attaching itself to just about any human interaction.

By contrast, the scale of friendship is necessarily limited. Friendship is a bounded relationship, one that thrives on intimacy and depth rather than extension and breadth. Friendship thrives, as C.S. Lewis wrote, by withdrawing people from networks of collective “togetherness” into smaller and more partial spheres. Even if, as Lewis says, friendship is the least jealous of loves, it is always to some degree exclusive. Friendship flourishes when given lots of time and little distraction: conditions which you cannot extend to more than a very few people. In the end, the scale of friendship is limited because each of our lives is limited. Our time is limited, and friendship requires time.

We live in a world where we encounter so many people who could be our friends – and perhaps Facebook friends should be regarded in those terms, as people who might be our friends if certain contingencies were different – but where, for that same reason, it becomes harder and harder to be friends with any of them.

The Chronicle Review has an indepth post called ‘Faux Friendship’ By William Deresiewicz which has some salient points:

We live at a time when friendship has become both all and nothing at all. Already the characteristically modern relationship, it has in recent decades become the universal one: the form of connection in terms of which all others are understood, against which they are all measured, into which they have all dissolved.
The classical notion of friendship was revived, along with other ancient modes of feeling, by the Renaissance. Truth and virtue, again, above all: “Those who venture to criticize us perform a remarkable act of friendship,” wrote Montaigne, “for to undertake to wound and offend a man for his own good is to have a healthy love for him.” His bond with Étienne, he avowed, stood higher not only than marriage and erotic attachment, but also than filial, fraternal, and homosexual love. “So many coincidences are needed to build up such a friendship, that it is a lot if fortune can do it once in three centuries.”

“The most beautiful discovery that true friends can make is that they can grow separately without growing apart.” Elizabeth Foley

Now we can see why friendship has become the characteristically modern relationship. Modernity believes in equality, and friendships, unlike traditional relationships, are egalitarian. Modernity believes in individualism. Friendships serve no public purpose and exist independent of all other bonds. Modernity believes in choice. Friendships, unlike blood ties, are elective; indeed, the rise of friendship coincided with the shift away from arranged marriage. Modernity believes in self-expression. Friends, because we choose them, give us back an image of ourselves. Modernity believes in freedom. Even modern marriage entails contractual obligations, but friendship involves no fixed commitments. The modern temper runs toward unrestricted fluidity and flexibility, the endless play of possibility, and so is perfectly suited to the informal, improvisational nature of friendship. We can be friends with whomever we want, however we want, for as long as we want.A study found that one American in four reported having no close confidants, up from one in 10 in 1985. The figures date from 2004, and there’s little doubt that Facebook and texting and all the rest of it have already exacerbated the situation. The more people we know, the lonelier we get.
Now, in the age of the entrepreneurial self, even our closest relationships are being pressed onto this template. A recent book on the sociology of modern science describes a networking event at a West Coast university: “There do not seem to be any singletons—disconsolately lurking at the margins—nor do dyads appear, except fleetingly.” No solitude, no friendship, no space for refusal—the exact contemporary paradigm. At the same time, the author assures us, “face time” is valued in this “community” as a “high-bandwidth interaction,” offering “unusual capacity for interruption, repair, feedback and learning.” Actual human contact, rendered “unusual” and weighed by the values of a systems engineer.

Where is friendship in your list of values of criteria in your relationships?

I’ll leave you with a funny song by Kate Miller-Heidke called ‘Are You F*cking Kidding Me? (Facebook Song) LIVE’

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