Feb 28, 2008 7:28 PM
Subject: Friendship....
Body: I believe that the culture we are evolving on the web leads to a change in the expression and experience of friendship. Steve's post title suggests the same, but then he falls into pessimism rather than inquiry, getting trapped in the false issue of what the term 'friendship' means when it is used as a synonym for contact by social networks.
In a world of flow, our sense of friends existence is deepened, since we have a dozen opportunities to acknowledge distant friends' comings and goings, to comment on their insights, and to take their temperature based on how loudly they are shouting on Myspace today. We commune in a virtual marketplace, swapping stories with someone from Belgium, getting advice from Hawaii, and replying to a partner in London. We can arrive in a distant city, and arrive at a dinner party -- a real one -- with colleagues and contacts hat we haven't seen in months, without missing a beat because of our online connection.
The distinction between quality and quantity is missing something fundamental. While some may be accumulating contacts at Facebook like stamp collecting, and while others may be spending dozens of hours per week in chatrooms, it is not the gross metrics that matter, really.
The nature of friendship itself, is shifting. It is no longer the byproduct of physical proximity, it is no longer strongly bounded by geography, and it is strongly mediated by our social tools. Texting, blogging, and trafficking (what we are doing in flow apps) have become essential to our continued connections with our friends, and we could no more keep up our relationships without these tools than we could put aside language itself.
Many would look at the new state of friendship and suggest that something has been lost when you don't have a small group of friends that all know each other, that invite each other over to bbqs every weekend, and who all attended the same schools, workplaces, and places of worship. But I believe that we are moving away from a narrow, parochial, and inbred sort of friendship.
At the same time, I believe that friendship today is strongly informed by a new tribalism: we increasingly distrust large centralized organizations -- media, government, religion, or businesses -- to define our morality, purpose, and goals. We look to ourselves -- and our networks of contacts -- to make sense of the world that confronts us, and we define right and wrong based on the meaning we find through personal affiliation, connection, and commitment.
It's a basic shift of allegiance, and for many it will seem like something is being lost: some will express it as a sense of a lost, golden past, when friendships were more... something.
But I feel otherwise. It's not about metrics, because my yardstick has changed along with everything else. It's really about an enriched self-identity, meaning, and purpose: and those -- for me, at least -- have changed irrevocably through the web, through my connections: and all for the better.
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ANYWAY,
I have recently lost old "friends", and obtained new ones, and even reconnected with my past. All in all i'm satisfied, yet soemtimes, it is sad to lose something you once treasured.