virtual friendship essay

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Virtual Friendship, for Real

May-June 2010

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As research is illuminating the human social networks that have existed since time immemorial, a parallel thread of inquiry is exploring a new kind of social interaction: online friendship. At Harvard, Nicholas Christakis’s lab (see main article ), has been gathering and studying data on the Facebook pages and usage habits of one recent class at “a diverse private college in the northeast United States.”

But because Facebook “friends” are often what we call “acquaintances” in the offline world, researchers had to find a way to weed through a Facebook user’s “friendships” to find the most meaningful relationships. They developed a concept they call the “picture friend”—someone with whom a subject has appeared in a photograph posted on Facebook. The definition of a picture friend also requires the subject to have “tagged” the photograph with the friend’s identity. This helps weed out group photographs in which not everybody knows each other, and indicates that the subject wishes the association with the tagged friend to be recognized.

The numbers alone were interesting. Although the average number of Facebook friends wasn’t far from Dunbar’s number (a number that some argue represents the maximum number of people the human brain can keep straight, and the maximum size for a smoothly functioning social group; see “ Networks, Neolithic to Now ”), the number of picture friends was 6.6—close to the size of the core discussion network. That concept, coined and studied by Geisinger professor of sociology Peter Marsden, who has taught about social networks at Harvard since the 1980s, denotes the people with whom we spend free time and discuss important matters—the people with whom our friendship is tangible and quantifiable, with whom we interact on a regular basis.

As a proxy for happiness, Christakis and colleagues also examined whether or not the students in the Facebook sample were smiling in their profile photos. The resulting network map (see image) looked uncannily like the map showing happiness or unhappiness in the Framingham Heart Study (to read about their findings from this dataset, see “ Costs and Benefits of Connection ”). Both the non-smilers on Facebook and the unhappy Framingham subjects were distinct minorities—and they tended to cluster together, even falling in similar locations in the network when the two maps were compared.

There are some differences: for example, researchers found that influence on tastes in books and movies doesn’t spread through Facebook friends, but does spread through friendships that began offline but are maintained online. But in many other ways, the online and offline worlds are remarkably similar. In fact, in their book, Connected , Christakis, a professor of medical sociology, and James Fowler ’92, Ph.D. ’03, now a political scientist at the University of California, recount the case of a woman who divorced her real-life husband after finding his avatar “cheating”—having virtual sex with another player’s avatar—in the video game Second Life.

The authors argue that websites—social, dating, video-game, or otherwise—“just realize our ancient propensity to connect to other humans, albeit with electrons flowing through cyberspace rather than conversation drifting through the air. While the social networks formed online may be abstract, large, complex, and supermodern, they also reflect universal and fundamental human tendencies that emerged in our prehistoric past when we told stories to one another around campfires in the African savanna.”

This is an online-only sidebar to the feature article " Networked ."

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Virtual Friendship and the New Narcissism

Christine Rosen

F or centuries, the rich and the powerful documented their existence and their status through painted portraits. A marker of wealth and a bid for immortality, portraits offer intriguing hints about the daily life of their subjects — professions, ambitions, attitudes, and, most importantly, social standing. Such portraits, as German art historian Hans Belting has argued, can be understood as “painted anthropology,” with much to teach us, both intentionally and unintentionally, about the culture in which they were created.

Self-portraits can be especially instructive. By showing the artist both as he sees his true self and as he wishes to be seen, self-portraits can at once expose and obscure, clarify and distort. They offer opportunities for both self-expression and self-seeking. They can display egotism and modesty, self-aggrandizement and self-mockery.

Today, our self-portraits are democratic and digital; they are crafted from pixels rather than paints. On social networking websites like MySpace and Facebook, our modern self-portraits feature background music, carefully manipulated photographs, stream-of-consciousness musings, and lists of our hobbies and friends. They are interactive, inviting viewers not merely to look at, but also to respond to, the life portrayed online. We create them to find friendship, love, and that ambiguous modern thing called connection. Like painters constantly retouching their work, we alter, update, and tweak our online self-portraits; but as digital objects they are far more ephemeral than oil on canvas. Vital statistics, glimpses of bare flesh, lists of favorite bands and favorite poems all clamor for our attention — and it is the timeless human desire for attention that emerges as the dominant theme of these vast virtual galleries.

Although social networking sites are in their infancy, we are seeing their impact culturally: in language (where to friend is now a verb), in politics (where it is de rigueur for presidential aspirants to catalogue their virtues on MySpace), and on college campuses (where not using Facebook can be a social handicap). But we are only beginning to come to grips with the consequences of our use of these sites: for friendship, and for our notions of privacy, authenticity, community, and identity. As with any new technological advance, we must consider what type of behavior online social networking encourages. Does this technology, with its constant demands to collect (friends and status), and perform (by marketing ourselves), in some ways undermine our ability to attain what it promises — a surer sense of who we are and where we belong? The Delphic oracle’s guidance was know thyself . Today, in the world of online social networks, the oracle’s advice might be show thyself .

Making Connections

T he earliest online social networks were arguably the Bulletin Board Systems of the 1980s that let users post public messages, send and receive private messages, play games, and exchange software. Some of those BBSs, like The WELL (Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link) that technologist Larry Brilliant and futurist Stewart Brand started in 1985, made the transition to the World Wide Web in the mid-1990s. (Now owned by Salon.com, The WELL boasts that it was “the primordial ooze where the online community movement was born.”) Other websites for community and connection emerged in the 1990s, including Classmates.com (1995), where users register by high school and year of graduation; Company of Friends, a business-oriented site founded in 1997; and Epinions, founded in 1999 to allow users to give their opinions about various consumer products.

A new generation of social networking websites appeared in 2002 with the launch of Friendster, whose founder, Jonathan Abrams, admitted that his main motivation for creating the site was to meet attractive women. Unlike previous online communities, which brought together anonymous strangers with shared interests, Friendster uses a model of social networking known as the “Circle of Friends” (developed by British computer scientist Jonathan Bishop), in which users invite friends and acquaintances — that is, people they already know and like — to join their network.

Friendster was an immediate success, with millions of registered users by mid-2003. But technological glitches and poor management at the company allowed a new social networking site, MySpace, launched in 2003, quickly to surpass it. Originally started by musicians, MySpace has become a major venue for sharing music as well as videos and photos. It is now the behemoth of online social networking, with over 100 million registered users. Connection has become big business: In 2005, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation bought MySpace for $580 million.

Besides MySpace and Friendster, the best-known social networking site is Facebook, launched in 2004. Originally restricted to college students, Facebook — which takes its name from the small photo albums that colleges once gave to incoming freshmen and faculty to help them cope with meeting so many new people — soon extended membership to high schoolers and is now open to anyone. Still, it is most popular among college students and recent college graduates, many of whom use the site as their primary method of communicating with one another. Millions of college students check their Facebook pages several times every day and spend hours sending and receiving messages, making appointments, getting updates on their friends’ activities, and learning about people they might recently have met or heard about.

There are dozens of other social networking sites, including Orkut, Bebo, and Yahoo 360º. Microsoft recently announced its own plans for a social networking site called Wallop; the company boasts that the site will offer “an entirely new way for consumers to express their individuality online.” (It is noteworthy that Microsoft refers to social networkers as “consumers” rather than merely “users” or, say, “people.”) Niche social networking sites are also flourishing: there are sites offering forums and fellowship for photographers, music lovers, and sports fans. There are professional networking sites, such as LinkedIn, that keep people connected with present and former colleagues and other business acquaintances. There are sites specifically for younger children, such as Club Penguin, which lets kids pretend to be chubby, colored penguins who waddle around chatting, playing games, earning virtual money, and buying virtual clothes. Other niche social networking sites connect like-minded self-improvers; the site 43things.com encourages people to share their personal goals. Click on “watch less TV,” one of the goals listed on the site, and you can see the profiles of the 1,300 other people in the network who want to do the same thing. And for people who want to join a social network but don’t know which niche site is right for them, there are sites that help users locate the proper online social networking community for their particular (or peculiar) interests.

Social networking sites are also fertile ground for those who make it their lives’ work to get your attention — namely, spammers, marketers, and politicians. Incidents of spamming and spyware on MySpace and other social networking sites are legion. Legitimate advertisers such as record labels and film studios have also set up pages for their products. In some cases, fictional characters from books and movies are given their own official MySpace pages. Some sports mascots and brand icons have them, too. Procter & Gamble has a Crest toothpaste page on MySpace featuring a sultry-looking model called “Miss Irresistible.” As of this summer, she had about 50,000 users linked as friends, whom she urged to “spice it up by sending a naughty (or nice) e-card.” The e-cards are emblazoned with Crest or Scope logos, of course, and include messages such as “I wanna get fresh with you” or “Pucker up baby — I’m getting fresh.” A P& G marketing officer recently told the Wall Street Journal that from a business perspective, social networking sites are “going to be one giant living dynamic learning experience about consumers.”

As for politicians, with the presidential primary season now underway, candidates have embraced a no-website-left-behind policy. Senator Hillary Clinton has official pages on social networking sites MySpace, Flickr, LiveJournal, Facebook, Friendster, and Orkut. As of July 1, 2007, she had a mere 52,472 friends on MySpace (a bit more than Miss Irresistible); her Democratic rival Senator Barack Obama had an impressive 128,859. Former Senator John Edwards has profiles on twenty-three different sites. Republican contenders for the White House are poorer social networkers than their Democratic counterparts; as of this writing, none of the GOP candidates has as many MySpace friends as Hillary, and some of the leading Republican candidates have no social networking presence at all.

Despite the increasingly diverse range of social networking sites, the most popular sites share certain features. On MySpace and Facebook, for example, the process of setting up one’s online identity is relatively simple: Provide your name, address, e-mail address, and a few other pieces of information and you’re up and running and ready to create your online persona. MySpace includes a section, “About Me,” where you can post your name, age, where you live, and other personal details such as your zodiac sign, religion, sexual orientation, and relationship status. There is also a “Who I’d Like to Meet” section, which on most MySpace profiles is filled with images of celebrities. Users can also list their favorite music, movies, and television shows, as well as their personal heroes; MySpace users can also blog on their pages. A user “friends” people — that is, invites them by e-mail to appear on the user’s “Friend Space,” where they are listed, linked, and ranked. Below the Friends space is a Comments section where friends can post notes. MySpace allows users to personalize their pages by uploading images and music and videos; indeed, one of the defining features of most MySpace pages is the ubiquity of visual and audio clutter. With silly, hyper flashing graphics in neon colors and clip-art style images of kittens and cartoons, MySpace pages often resemble an overdecorated high school yearbook.

By contrast, Facebook limits what its users can do to their profiles. Besides general personal information, Facebook users have a “Wall” where people can leave them brief notes, as well as a Messages feature that functions like an in-house Facebook e-mail account. You list your friends on Facebook as well, but in general, unlike MySpace friends, which are often complete strangers (or spammers) Facebook friends tend to be part of one’s offline social circle. (This might change, however, now that Facebook has opened its site to anyone rather than restricting it to college and high school students.) Facebook (and MySpace) allow users to form groups based on mutual interests. Facebook users can also send “pokes” to friends; these little digital nudges are meant to let someone know you are thinking about him or her. But they can also be interpreted as not-so-subtle come-ons; one Facebook group with over 200,000 members is called “Enough with the Poking, Let’s Just Have Sex.”

Degrees of Separation

I t is worth pausing for a moment to reflect on the curious use of the word networking to describe this new form of human interaction. Social networking websites “connect” users with a network — literally, a computer network. But the verb to network has long been used to describe an act of intentional social connecting, especially for professionals seeking career-boosting contacts. When the word first came into circulation in the 1970s, computer networks were rare and mysterious. Back then, “network” usually referred to television. But social scientists were already using the notion of networks and nodes to map out human relations and calculate just how closely we are connected.

In 1967, Harvard sociologist and psychologist Stanley Milgram, best known for his earlier Yale experiments on obedience to authority, published the results of a study about social connection that he called the “small world experiment.” “Given any two people in the world, person X and person Z,” he asked, “how many intermediate acquaintance links are needed before X and Z are connected?” Milgram’s research, which involved sending out a kind of chain letter and tracing its journey to a particular target person, yielded an average number of 5.5 connections. The idea that we are all connected by “six degrees of separation” (a phrase later popularized by playwright John Guare) is now conventional wisdom.

But is it true? Duncan J. Watts, a professor at Columbia University and author of Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age , has embarked on a new small world project to test Milgram’s theory. Similar in spirit to Milgram’s work, it relies on e-mail to determine whether “any two people in the world can be connected via ‘six degrees of separation.’” Unlike Milgram’s experiment, which was restricted to the United States, Watts’s project is global; as he and his colleagues reported in Science , “Targets included a professor at an Ivy League university, an archival inspector in Estonia, a technology consultant in India, a policeman in Australia, and a veterinarian in the Norwegian army.” Their early results suggest that Milgram might have been right: messages reached their targets in five to seven steps, on average. Other social networking theorists are equally optimistic about the smallness of our wireless world. In Linked: The New Science of Networks , Albert-László Barabási enthuses, “The world is shrinking because social links that would have died out a hundred years ago are kept alive and can be easily activated. The number of social links an individual can actively maintain has increased dramatically, bringing down the degrees of separation. Milgram estimated six,” Barabási writes. “We could be much closer these days to three.”

What kind of “links” are these? In a 1973 essay, “The Strength of Weak Ties,” sociologist Mark Granovetter argued that weaker relationships, such as those we form with colleagues at work or minor acquaintances, were more useful in spreading certain kinds of information than networks of close friends and family. Watts found a similar phenomenon in his online small world experiment: weak ties (largely professional ones) were more useful than strong ties for locating far-flung individuals, for example.

Today’s online social networks are congeries of mostly weak ties — no one who lists thousands of “friends” on MySpace thinks of those people in the same way as he does his flesh-and-blood acquaintances, for example. It is surely no coincidence, then, that the activities social networking sites promote are precisely the ones weak ties foster, like rumor-mongering, gossip, finding people, and tracking the ever-shifting movements of popular culture and fad. If this is our small world, it is one that gives its greatest attention to small things.

Even more intriguing than the actual results of Milgram’s small world experiment — our supposed closeness to each other — was the swiftness and credulity of the public in embracing those results. But as psychologist Judith Kleinfeld found when she delved into Milgram’s research (much of which was methodologically flawed and never adequately replicated), entrenched barriers of race and social class undermine the idea that we live in a small world. Computer networks have not removed those barriers. As Watts and his colleagues conceded in describing their own digital small world experiment, “more than half of all participants resided in North America and were middle class, professional, college educated, and Christian.”

Nevertheless, our need to believe in the possibility of a small world and in the power of connection is strong, as evidenced by the popularity and proliferation of contemporary online social networks. Perhaps the question we should be asking isn’t how closely are we connected, but rather what kinds of communities and friendships are we creating?

Won’t You Be My Digital Neighbor?

A ccording to a survey recently conducted by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, more than half of all Americans between the ages of twelve and seventeen use some online social networking site. Indeed, media coverage of social networking sites usually describes them as vast teenage playgrounds — or wastelands, depending on one’s perspective. Central to this narrative is a nearly unbridgeable generational divide, with tech-savvy youngsters redefining friendship while their doddering elders look on with bafflement and increasing anxiety. This seems anecdotally correct; I can’t count how many times I have mentioned social networking websites to someone over the age of forty and received the reply, “Oh yes, I’ve heard about that MyFace! All the kids are doing that these days. Very interesting!”

Numerous articles have chronicled adults’ attempts to navigate the world of social networking, such as the recent New York Times essay in which columnist Michelle Slatalla described the incredible embarrassment she caused her teenage daughter when she joined Facebook: “everyone in the whole world thinks its super creepy when adults have facebooks,” her daughter instant-messaged her. “unfriend paige right now. im serious…. i will be soo mad if you dont unfriend paige right now. actually.” In fact, social networking sites are not only for the young. More than half of the visitors to MySpace claim to be over the age of 35. And now that the first generation of college Facebook users have graduated, and the site is open to all, more than half of Facebook users are no longer students. What’s more, the proliferation of niche social networking sites, including those aimed at adults, suggests that it is not only teenagers who will nurture relationships in virtual space for the foreseeable future.

What characterizes these online communities in which an increasing number of us are spending our time? Social networking sites have a peculiar psychogeography. As researchers at the Pew project have noted, the proto-social networking sites of a decade ago used metaphors of place to organize their members: people were linked through virtual cities, communities, and homepages. In 1997, GeoCities boasted thirty virtual “neighborhoods” in which “homesteaders” or “GeoCitizens” could gather — “Heartland” for family and parenting tips, “SouthBeach” for socializing, “Vienna” for classical music aficionados, “Broadway” for theater buffs, and so on. By contrast, today’s social networking sites organize themselves around metaphors of the person , with individual profiles that list hobbies and interests. As a result, one’s entrée into this world generally isn’t through a virtual neighborhood or community but through the revelation of personal information. And unlike a neighborhood, where one usually has a general knowledge of others who live in the area, social networking sites are gatherings of deracinated individuals, none of whose personal boastings and musings are necessarily trustworthy. Here, the old arbiters of community — geographic location, family, role, or occupation — have little effect on relationships.

Also, in the offline world, communities typically are responsible for enforcing norms of privacy and general etiquette. In the online world, which is unfettered by the boundaries of real-world communities, new etiquette challenges abound. For example, what do you do with a “friend” who posts inappropriate comments on your Wall? What recourse do you have if someone posts an embarrassing picture of you on his MySpace page? What happens when a friend breaks up with someone — do you defriend the ex? If someone “friends” you and you don’t accept the overture, how serious a rejection is it? Some of these scenarios can be resolved with split-second snap judgments; others can provoke days of agonizing.

Enthusiasts of social networking argue that these sites are not merely entertaining; they also edify by teaching users about the rules of social space. As Danah Boyd, a graduate student studying social networks at the University of California, Berkeley, told the authors of MySpace Unraveled , social networking promotes “informal learning…. It’s where you learn social norms, rules, how to interact with others, narrative, personal and group history, and media literacy.” This is more a hopeful assertion than a proven fact, however. The question that isn’t asked is how the technology itself — the way it encourages us to present ourselves and interact — limits or imposes on that process of informal learning. All communities expect their members to internalize certain norms. Even individuals in the transient communities that form in public spaces obey these rules, for the most part; for example, patrons of libraries are expected to keep noise to a minimum. New technologies are challenging such norms — cell phones ring during church sermons; blaring televisions in doctors’ waiting rooms make it difficult to talk quietly — and new norms must develop to replace the old. What cues are young, avid social networkers learning about social space? What unspoken rules and communal norms have the millions of participants in these online social networks internalized, and how have these new norms influenced their behavior in the offline world?

Social rules and norms are not merely the strait-laced conceits of a bygone era; they serve a protective function. I know a young woman — attractive, intelligent, and well-spoken — who, like many other people in their twenties, joined Facebook as a college student when it launched. When she and her boyfriend got engaged, they both updated their relationship status to “Engaged” on their profiles and friends posted congratulatory messages on her Wall.

But then they broke off the engagement. And a funny thing happened. Although she had already told a few friends and family members that the relationship was over, her ex decided to make it official in a very twenty-first century way: he changed his status on his profile from “Engaged” to “Single.” Facebook immediately sent out a feed to every one of their mutual “friends” announcing the news, “Mr. X and Ms. Y are no longer in a relationship,” complete with an icon of a broken heart. When I asked the young woman how she felt about this, she said that although she assumed her friends and acquaintances would eventually hear the news, there was something disconcerting about the fact that everyone found out about it instantaneously; and since the message came from Facebook, rather than in a face-to-face exchange initiated by her, it was devoid of context — save for a helpful notation of the time and that tacky little heart.

Indecent Exposure

E nthusiasts praise social networking for presenting chances for identity-play; they see opportunities for all of us to be little Van Goghs and Warhols, rendering quixotic and ever-changing versions of ourselves for others to enjoy. Instead of a palette of oils, we can employ services such as PimpMySpace.org, which offers “layouts, graphics, background, and more!” to gussy up an online presentation of self, albeit in a decidedly raunchy fashion: Among the most popular graphics used by PimpMySpace clients on a given day in June 2007 were short video clips of two women kissing and another of a man and an obese woman having sex; a picture of a gleaming pink handgun; and an image of the cartoon character SpongeBob SquarePants, looking alarmed and uttering a profanity.

This kind of coarseness and vulgarity is commonplace on social networking sites for a reason: it’s an easy way to set oneself apart. Pharaohs and kings once celebrated themselves by erecting towering statues or, like the emperor Augustus, placing their own visages on coins. But now, as the insightful technology observer Jaron Lanier has written, “Since there are only a few archetypes, ideals, or icons to strive for in comparison to the vastness of instances of everything online, quirks and idiosyncrasies stand out better than grandeur in this new domain. I imagine Augustus’ MySpace page would have pictured him picking his nose.” And he wouldn’t be alone. Indeed, this is one of the characteristics of MySpace most striking to anyone who spends a few hours trolling its millions of pages: it is an overwhelmingly dull sea of monotonous uniqueness, of conventional individuality, of distinctive sameness.

The world of online social networking is practically homogenous in one other sense, however diverse it might at first appear: its users are committed to self-exposure. The creation and conspicuous consumption of intimate details and images of one’s own and others’ lives is the main activity in the online social networking world. There is no room for reticence; there is only revelation. Quickly peruse a profile and you know more about a potential acquaintance in a moment than you might have learned about a flesh-and-blood friend in a month. As one college student recently described to the New York Times Magazine : “You might run into someone at a party, and then you Facebook them: what are their interests? Are they crazy-religious, is their favorite quote from the Bible? Everyone takes great pains over presenting themselves. It’s like an embodiment of your personality.”

It seems that in our headlong rush to join social networking sites, many of us give up one of the Internet’s supposed charms: the promise of anonymity. As Michael Kinsley noted in Slate , in order to “stake their claims as unique individuals,” users enumerate personal information: “Here is a list of my friends. Here are all the CDs in my collection. Here is a picture of my dog.” Kinsley is not impressed; he judges these sites “vast celebrations of solipsism.”

Social networkers, particularly younger users, are often naïve or ill-informed about the amount of information they are making publicly available. “One cannot help but marvel at the amount, detail, and nature of the personal information some users provide, and ponder how informed this information sharing can be,” Carnegie Mellon researchers Alessandro Acquisti and Ralph Gross wrote in 2006. In a survey of Facebook users at their university, Acquisti and Gross “detected little or no relation between participants’ reported privacy attitudes and their likelihood” of publishing personal information online. Even among the students in the survey who claimed to be most concerned about their privacy — the ones who worried about “the scenario in which a stranger knew their schedule of classes and where they lived” — about 40 percent provided their class schedule on Facebook, about 22 percent put their address on Facebook, and almost 16 percent published both.

This kind of carelessness has provided fodder for many sensationalist news stories. To cite just one: In 2006, NBC’s Dateline featured a police officer posing as a 19-year-old boy who was new in town. Although not grounded in any particular local community, the imposter quickly gathered more than 100 friends for his MySpace profile and began corresponding with several teenage girls. Although the girls claimed to be careful about the kind of information they posted online, when Dateline revealed that their new friend was actually an adult male who had figured out their names and where they lived, they were surprised. The danger posed by strangers who use social networking sites to prey on children is real; there have been several such cases. This danger was highlighted in July 2007 when MySpace booted from its system 29,000 sex offenders who had signed up for memberships using their real names. There is no way of knowing how many sex offenders have MySpace accounts registered under fake names.

There are also professional risks to putting too much information on social networking sites, just as for several years there have been career risks associated with personal homepages and blogs. A survey conducted in 2006 by researchers at the University of Dayton found that “40 percent of employers say they would consider the Facebook profile of a potential employee as part of their hiring decision, and several reported rescinding offers after checking out Facebook.” Yet college students’ reaction to this fact suggests that they have a different understanding of privacy than potential employers: 42 percent thought it was a violation of privacy for employers to peruse their profiles, and “64 percent of students said employers should not consider Facebook profiles during the hiring process.”

This is a quaintly Victorian notion of privacy, embracing the idea that individuals should be able to compartmentalize and parcel out parts of their personalities in different settings. It suggests that even behavior of a decidedly questionable or hypocritical bent (the Victorian patriarch who also cavorts with prostitutes, for example, or the straight-A business major who posts picture of himself funneling beer on his MySpace page) should be tolerated if appropriately segregated. But when one’s darker side finds expression in a virtual space, privacy becomes more difficult and true compartmentalization nearly impossible; on the Internet, private misbehavior becomes public exhibitionism.

In many ways, the manners and mores that have already developed in the world of online social networking suggest that these sites promote gatherings of what psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton has called “protean selves.” Named after Proteus, the Greek sea god of many forms, the protean self evinces “mockery and self-mockery, irony, absurdity, and humor.” (Indeed, the University of Dayton survey found that “23 percent [of students] said they intentionally misrepresented themselves [on Facebook] to be funny or as a joke.”) Also, Lifton argues, “the emotions of the protean self tend to be free-floating, not clearly tied to cause or target.” So, too, with protean communities: “Not just individual emotions but communities as well may be free-floating,” Lifton writes, “removed geographically and embraced temporarily and selectively, with no promise of permanence.” This is precisely the appeal of online social networking. These sites make certain kinds of connections easier, but because they are governed not by geography or community mores but by personal whim, they free users from the responsibilities that tend to come with membership in a community. This fundamentally changes the tenor of the relationships that form there, something best observed in the way social networks treat friendship.

The New Taxonomy of Friendship

T here is a Spanish proverb that warns, “Life without a friend is death without a witness.” In the world of online social networking, the warning might be simpler: “Life without hundreds of online ‘friends’ is virtual death.” On these sites, friendship is the stated raison d’être . “A place for friends,” is the slogan of MySpace. Facebook is a “social utility that connects people with friends.” Orkut describes itself as “an online community that connects people through a network of trusted friends.” Friendster’s name speaks for itself.

But “friendship” in these virtual spaces is thoroughly different from real-world friendship. In its traditional sense, friendship is a relationship which, broadly speaking, involves the sharing of mutual interests, reciprocity, trust, and the revelation of intimate details over time and within specific social (and cultural) contexts. Because friendship depends on mutual revelations that are concealed from the rest of the world, it can only flourish within the boundaries of privacy; the idea of public friendship is an oxymoron.

The hypertext link called “friendship” on social networking sites is very different: public, fluid, and promiscuous, yet oddly bureaucratized. Friendship on these sites focuses a great deal on collecting, managing, and ranking the people you know. Everything about MySpace, for example, is designed to encourage users to gather as many friends as possible, as though friendship were philately. If you are so unfortunate as to have but one MySpace friend, for example, your page reads: “You have 1 friends,” along with a stretch of sad empty space where dozens of thumbnail photos of your acquaintances should appear.

This promotes a form of frantic friend procurement. As one young Facebook user with 800 friends told John Cassidy in The New Yorker , “I always find the competitive spirit in me wanting to up the number.” An associate dean at Purdue University recently boasted to the Christian Science Monitor that since establishing a Facebook profile, he had collected more than 700 friends. The phrase universally found on MySpace is, “Thanks for the add!” — an acknowledgment by one user that another has added you to his list of friends. There are even services like FriendFlood.com that act as social networking pimps: for a fee, they will post messages on your page from an attractive person posing as your “friend.” As the founder of one such service told the New York Times in February 2007, he wanted to “turn cyberlosers into social-networking magnets.”

The structure of social networking sites also encourages the bureaucratization of friendship. Each site has its own terminology, but among the words that users employ most often is “managing.” The Pew survey mentioned earlier found that “teens say social networking sites help them manage their friendships.” There is something Orwellian about the management-speak on social networking sites: “Change My Top Friends,” “View All of My Friends” and, for those times when our inner Stalins sense the need for a virtual purge, “Edit Friends.” With a few mouse clicks one can elevate or downgrade (or entirely eliminate) a relationship.

To be sure, we all rank our friends, albeit in unspoken and intuitive ways. One friend might be a good companion for outings to movies or concerts; another might be someone with whom you socialize in professional settings; another might be the kind of person for whom you would drop everything if he needed help. But social networking sites allow us to rank our friends publicly. And not only can we publicize our own preferences in people, but we can also peruse the favorites among our other acquaintances. We can learn all about the friends of our friends — often without having ever met them in person.

Status-Seekers

O f course, it would be foolish to suggest that people are incapable of making distinctions between social networking “friends” and friends they see in the flesh. The use of the word “friend” on social networking sites is a dilution and a debasement, and surely no one with hundreds of MySpace or Facebook “friends” is so confused as to believe those are all real friendships. The impulse to collect as many “friends” as possible on a MySpace page is not an expression of the human need for companionship, but of a different need no less profound and pressing: the need for status. Unlike the painted portraits that members of the middle class in a bygone era would commission to signal their elite status once they rose in society, social networking websites allow us to create status — not merely to commemorate the achievement of it. There is a reason that most of the MySpace profiles of famous people are fakes, often created by fans: Celebrities don’t need legions of MySpace friends to prove their importance. It’s the rest of the population, seeking a form of parochial celebrity, that does.

But status-seeking has an ever-present partner: anxiety. Unlike a portrait, which, once finished and framed, hung tamely on the wall signaling one’s status, maintaining status on MySpace or Facebook requires constant vigilance. As one 24-year-old wrote in a New York Times essay, “I am obsessed with testimonials and solicit them incessantly. They are the ultimate social currency, public declarations of the intimacy status of a relationship…. Every profile is a carefully planned media campaign.”

The sites themselves were designed to encourage this. Describing the work of B.J. Fogg of Stanford University, who studies “persuasion strategies” used by social networking sites to increase participation, The New Scientist noted, “The secret is to tie the acquisition of friends, compliments and status — spoils that humans will work hard for — to activities that enhance the site.” As Fogg told the magazine, “You offer someone a context for gaining status, and they are going to work for that status.” Network theorist Albert-László Barabási notes that online connection follows the rule of “preferential attachment” — that is, “when choosing between two pages, one with twice as many links as the other, about twice as many people link to the more connected page.” As a result, “while our individual choices are highly unpredictable, as a group we follow strict patterns.” Our lemming-like pursuit of online status via the collection of hundreds of “friends” clearly follows this rule.

What, in the end, does this pursuit of virtual status mean for community and friendship? Writing in the 1980s in Habits of the Heart , sociologist Robert Bellah and his colleagues documented the movement away from close-knit, traditional communities, to “lifestyle enclaves” which were defined largely by “leisure and consumption.” Perhaps today we have moved beyond lifestyle enclaves and into “personality enclaves” or “identity enclaves” — discrete virtual places in which we can be different (and sometimes contradictory) people, with different groups of like-minded, though ever-shifting, friends.

Beyond Networking

T his past spring, Len Harmon, the director of the Fischer Policy and Cultural Institute at Nichols College in Dudley, Massachusetts, offered a new course about social networking. Nichols is a small school whose students come largely from Connecticut and Massachusetts; many of them are the first members of their families to attend college. “I noticed a lot of issues involved with social networking sites,” Harmon told me when I asked him why he created the class. How have these sites been useful to Nichols students? “It has relieved some of the stress of transitions for them,” he said. “When abrupt departures occur — their family moves or they have to leave friends behind — they can cope by keeping in touch more easily.”

So perhaps we should praise social networking websites for streamlining friendship the way e-mail streamlined correspondence. In the nineteenth century, Emerson observed that “friendship requires more time than poor busy men can usually command.” Now, technology has given us the freedom to tap into our network of friends when it is convenient for us. “It’s a way of maintaining a friendship without having to make any effort whatsoever,” as a recent graduate of Harvard explained to The New Yorker . And that ease admittedly makes it possible to stay in contact with a wider circle of offline acquaintances than might have been possible in the era before Facebook. Friends you haven’t heard from in years, old buddies from elementary school, people you might have (should have?) fallen out of touch with — it is now easier than ever to reconnect to those people.

But what kind of connections are these? In his excellent book Friendship: An Exposé , Joseph Epstein praises the telephone and e-mail as technologies that have greatly facilitated friendship. He writes, “Proust once said he didn’t much care for the analogy of a book to a friend. He thought a book was better than a friend, because you could shut it — and be shut of it — when you wished, which one can’t always do with a friend.” With e-mail and caller ID, Epstein enthuses, you can. But social networking sites (which Epstein says “speak to the vast loneliness in the world”) have a different effect: they discourage “being shut of” people. On the contrary, they encourage users to check in frequently, “poke” friends, and post comments on others’ pages. They favor interaction of greater quantity but less quality.

This constant connectivity concerns Len Harmon. “There is a sense of, ‘if I’m not online or constantly texting or posting, then I’m missing something,’” he said of his students. “This is where I find the generational impact the greatest — not the use of the technology, but the overuse of the technology.” It is unclear how the regular use of these sites will affect behavior over the long run — especially the behavior of children and young adults who are growing up with these tools. Almost no research has explored how virtual socializing affects children’s development. What does a child weaned on Club Penguin learn about social interaction? How is an adolescent who spends her evenings managing her MySpace page different from a teenager who spends her night gossiping on the telephone to friends? Given that “people want to live their lives online,” as the founder of one social networking site recently told Fast Company magazine, and they are beginning to do so at ever-younger ages, these questions are worth exploring.

The few studies that have emerged do not inspire confidence. Researcher Rob Nyland at Brigham Young University recently surveyed 184 users of social networking sites and found that heavy users “feel less socially involved with the community around them.” He also found that “as individuals use social networking more for entertainment, their level of social involvement decreases.” Another recent study conducted by communications professor Qingwen Dong and colleagues at the University of the Pacific found that “those who engaged in romantic communication over MySpace tend to have low levels of both emotional intelligence and self-esteem.”

The implications of the narcissistic and exhibitionistic tendencies of social networkers also cry out for further consideration. There are opportunity costs when we spend so much time carefully grooming ourselves online. Given how much time we already devote to entertaining ourselves with technology, it is at least worth asking if the time we spend on social networking sites is well spent. In investing so much energy into improving how we present ourselves online, are we missing chances to genuinely improve ourselves?

We should also take note of the trend toward giving up face-to-face for virtual contact — and, in some cases, a preference for the latter. Today, many of our cultural, social, and political interactions take place through eminently convenient technological surrogates — Why go to the bank if you can use the ATM? Why browse in a bookstore when you can simply peruse the personalized selections Amazon.com has made for you? In the same vein, social networking sites are often convenient surrogates for offline friendship and community. In this context it is worth considering an observation that Stanley Milgram made in 1974, regarding his experiments with obedience: “The social psychology of this century reveals a major lesson,” he wrote. “Often it is not so much the kind of person a man is as the kind of situation in which he finds himself that determines how he will act.” To an increasing degree, we find and form our friendships and communities in the virtual world as well as the real world. These virtual networks greatly expand our opportunities to meet others, but they might also result in our valuing less the capacity for genuine connection. As the young woman writing in the Times admitted, “I consistently trade actual human contact for the more reliable high of smiles on MySpace, winks on Match.com, and pokes on Facebook.” That she finds these online relationships more reliable is telling: it shows a desire to avoid the vulnerability and uncertainty that true friendship entails. Real intimacy requires risk — the risk of disapproval, of heartache, of being thought a fool. Social networking websites may make relationships more reliable, but whether those relationships can be humanly satisfying remains to be seen.

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Brian J. A. Boyd

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“We have come to expect more from technology and less from each other, and now we are so much further along this path of being satisfied with less,” said MIT Professor Sherry Turkle, who gave the keynote at Conference on AI & Democracy.

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Why virtual isn’t actual, especially when it comes to friends

Harvard Staff Writer

Tech, society expert Turkle warns growing number of chatbots for companionship isn’t good for individuals, or democracy

It can help clean a house, drive a car, write a school essay, help read a CT scan. It can also promise to be a good friend.

But MIT Professor Sherry Turkle advises drawing a hard line on artificial-intelligence applications on that last one.

Turkle, a pioneer in the study of the impact of technology on psychology and society, says a growing cluster of AI personal chatbots being promoted as virtual companions for the lonely poses a threat to our ability to connect and collaborate in all aspects of our lives. Turkle sounded her clarion call last Thursday at the Conference on AI & Democracy , a three-day gathering of experts from government, academia, and the private sector to call for a “movement in the effort to control AI before it controls us.”

“We have come to expect more from technology and less from each other, and now we are so much further along this path of being satisfied with less,” said Turkle, the Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at MIT.

Technology can change people’s lives and make them more efficient and convenient, but the time has come to shift our focus from what AI can do for people and instead reflect on what AI is doing to people, said Turkle during her keynote address. Social media has already altered human interactions by producing both isolation and echo chambers, but the effects of personal chatbot companions powered by AI can lead to the erosion of people’s emotional capacities and democratic values, she warned.

“As we spent more of our lives online, many of us came to prefer relating through screens to any other kind of relating,” she said. “We found the pleasures of companionship without the demands of friendship, the feeling of intimacy without the demands of reciprocity, and crucially, we became accustomed to treating programs as people.”

In her work Turkle has researched the effects of mobile technology, social networking, digital companions such as Aibo , a robotic dog, and Paro , a robotic baby harp seal, and the latest online chatbots such as Replika , which bills itself as the “AI companion who cares.”

Turkle has grown increasingly concerned about the effects of applications that offer “artificial intimacy” and a “cure for loneliness.” Chatbots promise empathy, but they deliver “pretend empathy,” she said, because their responses have been generated from the internet and not from a lived experience. Instead, they are impairing our capacity for empathy, the ability to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes.

“What is at stake here is our capacity for empathy because we nurture it by connecting to other humans who have experienced the attachments and losses of human life,” said Turkle. “Chatbots can’t do this because they haven’t lived a human life. They don’t have bodies and they don’t fear illness and death … AI doesn’t care in the way humans use the word care, and AI doesn’t care about the outcome of the conversation … To put it bluntly, if you turn away to make dinner or attempt suicide, it’s all the same to them.”

Artificial intimacy programs derive some of their appeal from the fact that they come without the challenges and demands of human relationships. They offer companionship without judgment, drama, or social anxiety, she said, but lack genuine human emotion and offer only “simulated empathy.” she said. Also troubling is that those programs condition people to be less willing to feel vulnerable or respect the vulnerability of others.

“Human relations are rich, demanding and messy,” said Turkle. “People tell me they like their chatbot friendship because it takes the stress out of relationships. With a chatbot friend, there’s no friction, no second-guessing, no ambivalence. There is no fear of being left behind … All that contempt for friction, second-guessing, ambivalence. What I see is features of the human condition, but those who promote artificial intimacy see as bugs.”

The effects of social media and AI can also be felt in societal polarization and the erosion of civic and democratic values, said Turkle. Experts need to raise the alarm on the perils that AI represents to democracy. Virtual reality is friction-free, and democracy depends on embracing friction, said Turkle.

“Early on, [Silicon Valley companies] discovered a good formula to keep people at their screens,” said Turkle. “It was to make users angry and then keep them with their own kind. That’s how you keep people at their screens, because when people are siloed, they can be stirred up into being even angrier at those with whom they disagree. Predictably, this formula undermines the conversational attitudes that nurture democracy, above all, tolerant listening.

“It’s easy to lose listening skills, especially listening to people who don’t share your opinions. Democracy works best if you can talk across differences by slowing down to hear someone else’s point of view. We need these skills to reclaim our communities, our democracies, and our shared common purpose.”

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Do Online Friendships Differ From Face-to-Face Friendships?

Will online friends make the face-to-face cut.

Posted May 29, 2020 | Reviewed by Jessica Schrader

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A lot of us had been reaching out to solidify connections with our support networks as we navigated our own personal lockdown living. Some of us also probably turned to the vast pool of online support options, as many of us felt the need to create a safety net or wider array of social and emotional support options.

When we’re faced with a crisis, one of our first responses might be to seek our support—there’s logic behind the saying, “There is safety in numbers.” It’s human nature to create and rely on a social support network and with the internet, we’ve been able to reach out to people around the globe and share our experiences over the past months.

Some of these relationships may have “heated up” due to the crisis situation we found ourselves facing. As we begin to acclimate to the new routines and work arrangements we’re entering, we may be wondering about our ability to maintain these close connections—as well as wondering about our interest in maintaining them.

What Makes a Friendship?

For any relationship to count as a friendship , several factors must be present. These include mutual affinity, mutual respect, and reciprocity. The most basic purpose of a friendship is to provide support, similar to family relationships in the best of circumstances. However, friendships are unique in that they are totally voluntary relationships—you can’t make a person like you or want to socially engage with you if they have no interest in doing so.

The three most common “motivating factors” for friendship development include shared interests, shared activities, or proximity. However, we also tend to subconsciously measure the potential “value” or “appropriateness” of a new friend by things such as their appearance, their status, their values, and their similarity to ourselves.

Our face-to-face social lives tend to be more conscripted by these factors than they do in our online lives. When we’re in an online environment, we tend to focus on individual qualities and experiences than these more culturally-bound or culturally-influenced factors.

It’s usually pretty easy to build an online support network through formal and informal pathways, whether you’re seeking advice on a particular topic or responding to others’ posts or to those who respond to your own social media posts.

In an online environment, we are typically seeking out people who share our hobbies, interests, or experiences. We want to connect with people who reflect our passions or our feelings about topics that we value, such as social issues, political issues, or contemporary culture. We also like to connect with those who are experiencing the events or transitions that we are experiencing, such as new mothers and home bakers. We also connect over hobbies, such as fellow kayakers, armchair travelers, or Disney World fans. Health and personal challenges also lead us to reach out to those who are facing similar things, such as 12-step groups or disease/illiness-specific support groups.

While few of us are actually going to meet up with online friends/real-world strangers, there is less concern about “how others see them” and more about what they mean to us and what we gain from the relationship. In addition, the more time we spend with someone, the more likely we are to begin to “like them” and feel a connection. If we visit an online support group or online chat group on a regular and consistent basis, the more likely we are to begin to see the group members or chat partners as “friends.”

Dark Secrets May Be More Easily Shared Online

Another benefit of online friends is the freedom we feel to share information with those that we are unlikely to ever meet in person as we don’t fear later shame or that feeling of “retroactive embarrassment .” It’s like the willingness to share more personal information with others in stalled elevators or in happenstance transient friendships that pop up over a vacation or summer camp, etc. There’s a greater sense of anonymity and less concern about “what will this person think of me?” We are unlikely to be seeing this person on a frequent basis, so we won’t be reminded of our vulnerability and personal revelations. Our “confessions” are limited to a containable space and shared with people we actually never have to engage with again, if we choose not to.

"Pandemic Friends" May Disappear When Pandemic Fears Subside

While some online friendships deepen over time and endure for decades, there has to be more to the relationship than just one shared preference or experience. Friendships that flourish require an investment of time, energy, and support.

The most important aspect of friendship longevity has to do with the ability of the relationship to handle the dynamic nature of individuals. People are not static—we are changing and developing every day. If a friendship is too brittle or based on a single shared commonality, it is unlikely to have the depth and resilience to thrive as each person moves through life. While we all have friends from different stages of our lives, and seeing them may take us back in our minds to that time when their presence in our lives was so valued, if we don’t have enough connections beyond that one shared thing, the relationship won’t endure.

Will Our New Online Friends Make the “F2F World” Friendship Cut?

When we’re only engaging in online connections, we’re focused on the similarities between us and others. However, when we’re thinking of moving to a face-to-face relationship, we may become keenly aware of the differences between us and our online friends.

Not only does the depth of the connection matter, so does our willingness to let the part of ourselves that we may have shared in pseudo-anonymity and confidentially online “show up” in our real lives. If the bond is built on a love of a travel destination, we may plan a destination meet-up. This can become an annual pilgrimage or the experience may lead us to realize that one face-to-face meet-up may be enough for a lifetime if that perfectly acceptable online friend turns out to be totally unacceptable as a friend in real life—for whatever reason that might be.

Another aspect of moving online friendships into our real world is that when we share online, we are doing so in the comfort and privacy of our own homes. We are controlling the audience, the setting, and our communications. When we build friendships in face-to-face settings, we are losing any sense of anonymity and our being “exposed” in a way that some online connections cannot survive, for whatever reason.

In essence, all friendships are going to be voluntary relationships and as much as we might like to be able to “force friend” a person, it’s not something we can force to happen. Just as some friendships are really reflections of who we were at a certain point in our lives, but nothing more, some online friendships will only be able to exist when they are restricted to the virtual world where we can share and be whatever we want with a sense of safety from more public exposure.

Suzanne Degges-White, Ph.D. , is a licensed counselor and professor at Northern Illinois University.

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Home — Essay Samples — Sociology — Digital Communication — Making Real Friends on the Internet

Making Real Friends on The Internet

• Categories: Digital Communication Friendship

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Published: Sep 5, 2023

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Table of contents

The pros of online friendships, the cons of online friendships, fostering healthy online friendships, the future of online friendships, conclusion: navigating the digital realm.

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Why virtual friendship is no genuine friendship

2012, Ethics and Information Technology

Related Papers

Sofia Kaliarnta

In a special issue of ''Ethics and Information Technology'' (September 2012), various philosophers have discussed the notion of online friendship. The preferred framework of analysis was Aristotle's theory of friendship: it was argued that online friendships face many obstacles that hinder them from ever reaching the highest form of Aristotelian friendship. In this article I aim to offer a different perspective by critically analyzing the arguments these philosophers use against online friendship. I begin by isolating the most common arguments these philosophers use against online friendship and proceed to debunk them one by one by pointing out inconsistencies and fallacies in their arguments and, where needed, offering empirical findings from media and communication studies that offer a more nuanced view on online friendships. I conclude my analysis by questioning the correctness of the application of the Aristotelian theory of friendship by the critics of online friendship: in my view, the critics are applying the Aristotelian theory to online friendships in a rather narrow and limited way. Finally, I conclude my thesis by proposing that in the rapidly changing online landscape, a one-size-fits-all application of the Aristotelian theory on friendship is not sufficient to accurately judge the multitude of relationships that can exist online and that the various positive and valuable elements of online friendships should also be acknowledged and analyzed.

Ethics and Information Technology

Johnny Hartz Søraker

Proceedings 14th International Conference on ICT, Society and Human Beings (ICT 2021), the 18th International Conference Web Based Communities and Social Media (WBC 2021)

Good friendships improve our lives. But philosophers, psychologists, and other social scientists disagree about the nature of friendship and the value of virtual friendships. Recent technological advances and global crises highlight the importance of answering the question: can virtual friendships be good? We argue against accounts of friendship that suggest virtual relationships are necessarily deficient, focusing on rejecting the requirements of physical proximity and complete authenticity for friendship. We propose a more inclusive account of friendship that focusses on positive intentions and experiences. We also discuss examples of virtual friendships that highlight their advantages in modern times, especially their ability to promote intercultural cohesion. Finally, we suggest implications to help guide individual and collective decisions about friendship in a way that improves wellbeing.

Adam Briggle

William Bülow , Cathrine Felix

There is an ongoing debate about the value of virtual friendship. In contrast to previous authorships, this paper argues that virtual friendship can have independent value. It is argued that within an Aristotelian framework, some friendships that are perhaps impossible offline can exist online, i.e., some offline unequals can be online equals and thus form online friendships of independent value.

Alexis Elder

I defend social media’s potential to support Aristotelian virtue friendship against a variety of objections. I begin with Aristotle’s claim that the foundation of the best friendships is a shared life. Friends share the distinctively human and valuable components of their lives, especially reasoning together by sharing conversation and thoughts, and communal engagement in valued activities. Although some have charged that shared living is not possible between friends who interact through digital social media, I argue that social media preserves the relevantly human and valuable portions of life, especially reasoning, play, and exchange of ideas. I then consider several criticisms of social media’s potential to host friendships, and refute or weaken the force of these objections, using this conception of a distinctively human shared life. I conclude that we should use the shared life to evaluate features of social media and norms for users’ conduct.

Computers in Human …

Mila Kingsbury

NDUKAKU OKORIE

In philosophical literature, one pertinent debate is the interrogation of ethical issues arising from a social activity, such as internet-based friendship. Social media has undoubtedly become an organised platform for making friends, but with inadequate analysis of its ethical implications. This is important because friendship is a relationship with significant moral implications. This paper will examine the ethical implications of issues such as anonymity, commitment, risk, empathy and shared history arising from social media friendship. The study will make use of both primary and secondary sources of data. The primary source will include Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. Secondary source include books, journal articles and the Internet. Data collected will be subjected to textual interpretation, conceptual analysis and philosophical argumentation. The paper will argue that genuine friendship requires a history of shared experience, which is absent in social media friendship. Hence, ...

This entry reviews and discusses several issues regarding online friendship. After introducing two opposite perspectives: the cues-filtered-out perspective and the social information process theory, it examines empirical studies with particular focuses on online friendships development, comparisons between online friendship and its offline counterpart, and the impacts of online friendship on the offline life.

Friendship in the Time of Facebook

International Institute for Ethics and Contemporary Issues, Ukrainian Catholic University IIECI

International Institute for Ethics and Contemporary Issues of UCU presents Special Edition 2019 - Friendship at the Time of Facebook. These are essays written by the members of the International Institute for Ethics and Contemporary Issues (IIECI), UCU on the occasion of the international conference Friendship in the Time of Facebook held by IIECI in partnership with the Faculty of Social Sciences (FSS), UCU and the Analytical Center, UCU on February 27 - March 1, 2019. Conference "Friendship at the time of Facebook" was the first of the series under the title "Holistic Human Development in the Digital Age." The next conference will be held February 25-27, 2020 at the Ukrainian Catholic University of UCuniversity

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Questioning the Virtual Friendship Debate: Fuzzy Analogical Arguments from Classification and Definition

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• Published: 04 September 2017
• Volume 32 , pages 99–149, ( 2018 )

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• Oliver Laas   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-3716-6501 1 , 2  

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Arguments from analogy are pervasive in everyday reasoning, mathematics, philosophy, and science. Informal logic studies everyday argumentation in ordinary language. A branch of fuzzy logic, approximate reasoning, seeks to model facets of everyday reasoning with vague concepts in ill-defined situations. Ways of combining the results from these fields will be suggested by introducing a new argumentation scheme—a fuzzy analogical argument from classification—with the associated critical questions. This will be motivated by a case study of analogical reasoning in the virtual friendship debate within information ethics. The virtual friendship debate is a disagreement over whether virtual friendships are genuine friendships. It will be argued that the debate could move away from its current impasse, caused by unproductive metaphysical and logical assumptions, if extant arguments are reinterpreted as fuzzy analogical arguments from classification, and subjected to a new set of critical questions which would replace the quest for facts of essence about friendship with an emphasis on empirical data, persuasion, and definitional power.

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A Dialogue Concerning Contradiction and Reasoning

Arguments by Analogy (and What We Can Learn about Them from Aristotle)

Undead argument: the truth-functionality objection to fuzzy theories of vagueness.

Not all arguments in the debate take one of these two forms. Briggle’s ( 2008 ) argument in support of virtual friendships, for instance, takes the form of a counteranalogy to a disanalogy from classification. I have omitted his argument, along with many others, in the brief overview below since a detailed logical analysis of argumentation in the virtual friendship debate is beyond the scope of this paper.

All references are to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics ( NE ) in Barnes ( 1984 ).

A graph is an ordered pair, \(V,E\) , where \(V\) is a set of vertices or nodes and \(E\) is a set of edges or lines that relate the vertices. A directed graph is an ordered pair, \(V,A\) , where \(V\) is a set of vertices and \(A\) is a set of ordered pairs of vertices, called arrows or directed edges .

The subscript in “genuine friendship CK ” indicates that this is Cocking’s and Kennett’s definition of genuine friendship.

The subscript in “Aristotelian virtue friendship M ” indicates that this is McFall’s definition of the Aristotelian concept of virtue friendship.

McFall does not directly state that he adopts the singleness of mind condition, but he does claim that friends mold each other by absorbing one another’s better traits, which I interpret as requiring more than mere mirroring.

The subscript indicates that the definitions was originally defended by Sherman ( 1987 ).

The subscript indicates that this definition was put forth by Helm ( 2013 ).

For an overview of different types of (re)definitions and an in-depth examination of persuasive definitions, see Macagno and Walton ( 2014 , pp. 69–108).

The material in this section is drawn from Laas ( 2015 ).

Is it not the case that there are more interpretations of ‘virtual’ in the literature? Quine’s criterion is syntactic, and employing it to determine the ontological commitments of different interpretations ignores minute differences in semantic content in favor of capturing their semantic function, as gleaned from semantic content, on the syntactic level within some first-order language. This, I believe, yields broadly three kinds of interpretations in philosophy.

Typicality is a robust empirical feature of concepts. The literature is vast, but for an overview see Smith and Medin ( 1981 ) and Murphy ( 2002 ).

I would like to thank an anonymous reviewer for their very helpful comments and suggestions that have greatly improved this part of the paper.

Compare this with the hedge ‘very’ which is commonly defined in the fuzzy logic literature as \(V_{{{\mathbf{M}},g}} \left( {{\text{very}}\left( \varphi \right)} \right) = V_{{{\mathbf{M}},g}} \left( \varphi \right)^{2}\) . Suppose \(V_{{{\mathbf{M}},g}} \left( {tall\left( a \right)} \right) = 0.4\) . Then \(V_{{{\mathbf{M}},g}} \left( {{\text{very}}\left( {tall\left( a \right)} \right)} \right) = 0.4^{2} = 0.16\) , whereas \(V_{{{\mathbf{M}},g}} \left( {{\text{virtually}}\left( {tall\left( a \right)} \right)} \right) = 0.4^{0.5} \approx 0.6\) . Thus, the hedge ‘virtually’ broadens the extension of the predicate by increasing the degree to which it is true of things in the domain of discourse whereas ‘very’ narrows the extension of a predicate by decreasing the degree to which it is true of things in the domain.

If we introduce linguistic truth values as ordinary language expressions of truth degrees, and allow them to be modified by hedges, then an expression like \({\text{virtually}}\left( {friend\left( {a,b} \right)} \right)\) , which is a translation of “ \(a\) is \(b\) ’s virtual friend,” is equivalent to “It is virtually true that \(a\) is \(b\) ’s friend,” where ‘virtually true’ is a linguistic truth value. Other examples of linguistic truth values are ‘true’, ‘very true’, and ‘essentially false’. (See Zadeh 1975a , b , c ).

I have not defined a fuzzy conjunction at this point because it is not directly relevant for what follows. Furthermore, one can define different kinds of conjunctions in systems of fuzzy logic, and judging which would be appropriate in the present context would take me too far afield from the main topic of this essay.

Contrary to Russell ( 1923 ) and Dummett ( 1975 ), I believe logical reasoning with vague concepts is possible. This is one of the reasons for adopting a fuzzy logic for interpreting the term ‘virtual’, and for elucidating analogical reasoning with graded and vague concepts.

Software cost estimation models are used to predict features like software development effort, cost, and time, software reliability, and programmers’ productivity. (Idri et al. 2002 , p. 147) .

There are various other conceptions of what membership degrees are based on and how they should be measured (see Bilgiç and Burhan Türksen 2000 ).

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7 Reasons Why Virtual Friendships Are Better Than Real Ones

Distance Doesn’t Matter

What are web buds good for.

By Nicole Fryer, University of Pittsburgh

Friendships are important at any point in your life, but what happens when you start going to college?

You’re busy building your new life, they’re busy building theirs and you’re both trying to get an education. There’s no time to drive or fly and meet up, so you have no other choice but to continue the relationship virtually.

Even with texting, Skype and every other social media outlet readily available, here’s how to keep that virtual friendship while you’re busy studying, and why virtual friendships can be stronger than other relationships.

1. Text Me Through the Phone

If the friendship started out virtual, not much is going to change through college. A few years back, I discovered a site where I could share my writing, and, while most people shared some shitty fanfictions, I talked and connected with other writers and readers, and met some really great people.

Most of them lived too far away to meet up in person, but we would Skype and text each other when we weren’t logged into the website. When some of those friends went to college, we continued to text and keep in contact, though sometimes it wasn’t as frequent.

2. Save Your Goodbyes

When either of you start classes, it’s not as hard to say goodbye. In fact, if your situation is similar to mine, those virtual friends live several states away, and you may have never met them face to face.

So, when you pack your bags and move to college, you don’t have those awkward and sad goodbye hugs that you do with your other friends before you leave.

3. Lean on Me

If you meet friends online, chances are there’s going to be a slight age gap between the two of you. Several of my online friends are a year older and a year wiser. They started college before me and gave me guidance on what to expect.

One of my friends goes to school in Poland, so she’s teaching me how to adjust to such a big change. On the other hand, some of my online friends are a little younger and are just getting ready to graduate high school and move to college, so it’s my turn to give them guidance.

4. No Excuses

You’re both busy, and since you’ve never met face to face, there’s not that awkward start-up period when the two of you start talking again. The both of you are living your separate lives, hanging out with other friends, so there’s a total understanding of not talking for a while.

That “Hey, how you’ve been” text is always great, and after filling each other in on one another’s lives, it’s like the two of you never stopped talking. Sometimes I’ll go months without talking to some of them, while others I try to talk to every day, or at least several times a week, but college and homework get in the way.

5. Judgment-Free Zone

Since you haven’t met in person, or don’t see each other nearly as much as some of your other friends, it’s easier to have real conversations with them. Sure, your other friends are there for you too, but if you drop a huge bomb on them, it can be awkward. College is a time to experiment with pretty much anything, so if you’re thinking about trying something new, or you’ve already done it, you can tell your virtual friend.

Sure, they’re your friend, and they might not be the happiest with you, but there’s a lot less judgment while you’re telling them that you tried these exotic drinks and had too much, or that you’ve slept with someone you shouldn’t have. Trust me, they’re the friends you’ll want to tell.

6. Different Strokes

If the friendship didn’t start out virtual but it is now, that’s okay too. Sometimes people move away, or the two of you just don’t click in person but click well over text.

One of my childhood friends moved out of state years ago, but by keeping in contact, it was like we grew up together. We’ve become different people, and if we met up in person, we’d probably struggle to find something we’re both into, but that doesn’t stop us from texting about our boy problems and sharing songs with one another to help us feel better.

7. No Shame

Just because the friendship is virtual, it does not mean that it’s devalued in any way, and there’s no need to be ashamed of making friends online. When I started making friends online, I was still a teenager and my parents were a little leery of the concept. Just make sure to take precautions when you first start talking and make sure they aren’t some creep (and depending on the site you meet them on, there’s probably a slim chance of that happening.)

Even if parents aren’t the issue, other people may challenge how strong a friendship can be if it is strictly virtual. Chances are, if the virtual friendship is a strong one, your friend will know everything about you because they’re super easy to talk to; a person who would ask such a question might not be as worthy of friendship. So, don’t let anyone tell you that the friendship won’t work out—strong friendships never die, no matter how they were built.

• Virtual Friendships

Nicole Fryer, University of Pittsburgh

English nonfiction writing, social media.

[…] https://studybreaks.com/2017/05/17/21721/ […]

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