Tags: culture arts, Facebook, relationships, science technology, Social Networks
At least, Jonah Lehrer doesn’t think so. He wrote a piece in Wired last week where he argued against the idea that Facebook somehow makes friendship thinner and more superficial; he cited an article he wrote last year about the whole thing:
On Facebook, though, the average user has approximately 110 “friends,” which has led some scientists to speculate that the Web is altering the very nature of human networks. For the first time in history, we can keep track of hundreds of people. The computer, they say, is helping to compensate for the limitations of the brain.
But Christakis and Fowler were skeptical of such claims. They knew that social habits are stubborn things. So they persuaded a university to let them analyze the Facebook pages of its students, devising a clever way to distinguish between casual friends and deeper emotional connections. After analyzing thousands of photos, the scientists found that, on average, each student had 6.6 close friends in their online network. In other words, nothing has really changed; even the most fervent Facebook users still maintain only a limited circle of intimates.
Basically, while it may look like we have a bazillion friends on Facebook with whom we interact very shallowly, the amount of those people who are our real friends is basically the same as in real life. I’ll say from my own experience that I use Facebook as yet another mode of interaction with my good friends. It adds another channel of communication to text, email, instant messaging, and good-ol’-fashion face-to-face interactions, and it’s just plain fun! I’d say it enhances my relationships with my good friends rather than taking away from them.
I think this just ties into the hubbub that generally surrounds the development of new technologies. We often don’t know how these technologies are going to affect us mentally and physically, and we tend to leap to rather extreme conclusions. Heck, back when bikes were first invented, people feared that the high speeds of bicycle travel would result in something they called bicycle face, some kind of distortion of the facial muscles. Maybe someday people will look back on our fears surrounding Facebook and friendship and see them as equally irrational.
Another, less serious reason I really like Lehrer’s piece is because he mentions Virginia Woolf and one of her most famous essays, “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown.” I’ve become a huge Woolf fan this semester, and it’s neat to see her ideas applied to something as seemingly unrelated as Facebook!
(Photo by Spencer E Holtaway used under a Creative Commons license.)
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9 Comments
Really interesting counterpoint to Zadie Smith’s article, one i read about a week ago. I think it’s got some good points: it’s not that we don’t have close friendships anymore, we kind of compartmentalize them. Sure, all friends on facebook have the same nominal weight, but it’s clear that we spend a lot more time in real life and on facebook with a few of those friends, than many of our friends who we’ve only met once or not at all.
I agree: Facebook is what you make of it. However, as a friend of mine once told me, Facebook gives people an excuse not to talk to people. It fosters the uttering of our every whimsical thought and feeling. I’m sick of responding to insincere “How are you?????” every two months when I haven’t talked to a person whom really I barely know in the first place. It fragments our brains (by seeing far more information than we really need to know about other people), standardizes our identity (going along with what Zadie said), and gives rise to our inner-celebrity ego. How many times have you been out and noticed that someone really wants the events to occur just so that they can be documented on Facebook?
A Happy Birthday on a wall or a RIP on a status are not equivalents to doing actual things to show you care in real life, but Facebook gives you an excuse not to do those things in real life. When everyone is a friend and gets similar treatment, no one is a real friend. Facebook is what you make of it. But lot’s of people are using it in ways that belittle significance and meanings in actual friendships.
I’m definitely on board with what you’re saying, and I do think Facebook opens up a space for these things to happen.
But a couple other things to consider: you mention that “Faceboook gives people an excuse not to talk to people,” but what about people who are so shy that they have a hard time approaching new friends (or future significant others)? Facebook might give them a bridge to new relationships in which they get start talking to acquaintances on Facebook and ultimately develop face-to-face relationships they wouldn’t otherwise have been confident enough to reach. I think it cuts both ways.
And speaking of relationships, the Facebook relationship status brings a whole new meaning to public representations of a romantic relationship. Being “Facebook official” often indexes a certain level of seriousness in the real relationship, and to go from “in a relationship” to “single” on Facebook entails making a strong public statement about the end of a relationship. You can argue whether or not you think this is a good thing, but I don’t think it automatically makes relationships shallower or more fragmented; it just modulates the way we express and represent them to ourselves and other people.
Facebook does give them shy people an opportunity to talk to people, it also allows them to continue being shy. If the response is that a shy person would be shy regardless of the internet and that this discussion is better than none at all, there is a point to that. And I wouldn’t respond by automatically saying that those discussions and friendships are any less valuable than those in real life, because that would be ignoring a host of online communities that find social fulfillment.
Absolutely. And all this boils down to the question of whether we can put Facebook to any use we choose or whether just participating in it at all automatically shapes our actions in certain ways. A hard debate to settle, obviously.
Thanks for your comments, Erik!
Facebook is awesome. While it can be somewhat superficial, I think that facebook is what you make of it. If you use it to develop friendships with people you just met, or to keep in touch with old friends from home or family members, I think facebook is a fantastic tool that facilitates better communication, therefore developing better/closer friendships. Personally, I think the arguments against facebook should focus on how addicting it is rather than how it makes friendship superficial, because it’s really addicting, as addicting as consuming crack (assumably!).
I agree, Facebook is largely what you make of it. And one argument against it is certainly that it can be a huge time-suck, but there are also the privacy issues surrounding it. Facebook is great, but it ain’t perfect.
Nice article, Aaron! See you in Woolf class tomorrow morning!
I strongly believe that the internet does more to bring people together than push them apart. Facebook is valuable precisely because of its casual nature: most friendships require some casual interaction. Without Facebook and things like it, long-distance friendships would be more likely to become “work.”
I suspect that the possibility of long-distance casual friendships helps bring types of people together who would otherwise not interact much, which can make the world a little less nasty. For example, I communicate regularly with my friend Charlie (a student at Hillsdale College) via Facebook. Our main common interest is politics, and in a casual online setting, we can joke about it. If we had to write formal e-mails, they would probably consist of lengthy diatribes, because he is very conservative and I am very liberal, and we would get bored quickly.
I completely agree, Sara. Glad you liked the post!