Faux Friendship - We are connected to everyone. We don’t really know anyone.

[BridgeTheGap]

We live in an age 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. Romantic partners refer to each other as boyfriends and girlfriends. Spouses boast they are best friends. Parents urge their young children and beg their teenage ones to think of them as friends. Teachers, clergy, and even bosses seek to mitigate and legitimate their authority by asking those they oversee to regard them as friends. As the anthropologist Robert Brain has put it, we’re friends with everyone now.

Yet what, in our brave new mediated world, is friendship becoming? The Facebook phenomenon, so sudden and forceful a distortion of social space, needs little elaboration. (If we have 768 “friends,” in what sense do we have any?) Yet Facebook and MySpace and Twitter—and whatever we’re stampeding for next—are just the latest stages of a long attenuation. They have accelerated the fragmentation of consciousness, but they didn’t initiate it. They have reified the idea of universal friendship, but they didn’t invent it. In retrospect, it seems inevitable that once we decided to become friends with everyone, we would forget how to be friends with anyone. We may pride ourselves today on our aptitude for friendship, but it’s not clear that we still even know what it means.

How did we come to this pass? The idea of friendship in ancient times could not have been more different. Far from being ordinary and universal, friendship, for the ancients, was rare, precious, and hard-won. In a world ordered by relations of kin and kingdom, friendship’s elective affinities were exceptional, even subversive. David loved Jonathan despite the enmity of Saul; Achilles’ bond with Patroclus outweighed his loyalty to the Greek cause. Friendship was a high calling, demanding extraordinary qualities of character, rooted in virtue and dedicated to the pursuit of goodness and truth.

The rise of Christianity put the classical ideal in eclipse—Christian thought discouraged intense personal bonds, for the heart should be turned to God. The classical notion of friendship, however, was revived 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.”

http://www.utne.com/Spirituality/Faux-Friendship-Facebook.aspx?utm_content=05.12.10+Arts&utm_campaign=Emerging+Ideas-Every+Day&utm_source=iPost&utm_medium=email

[zipplewrath]

1. Change in language

We hardly use the word "acquaintance" any more. Friend has been watered down, roughly at the same time that the concept of "family" became much narrower. The concept of large EXTENDED families has diminished over the decades. Much rarer now to know or meet your "second cousin" or visit with the "great uncle". I do hear the concept of "family of choice", basically describing friends in the sense of an elevated status (greater trust, more involvement, etc.).

[CrispyQ]

2. A good article. He makes some valid points.

snip...

(If we have 768 “friends,” in what sense do we have any?)

snip...

I remember realizing a few years ago that most of the members of what I thought of as my “circle” didn’t actually know one another. One I’d met in graduate school, another at a job, one in Boston, another in Brooklyn, one lived in Minneapolis now, another in Israel, so that I was ultimately able to enumerate some 14 people, none of whom had ever met any of the others. To imagine that they added up to a circle, an embracing and encircling structure, was a belief, I realized, that violated the laws of feeling as well as those of geometry.

Facebook, however, seduces us into exactly that illusion, inviting us to believe that by assembling a list, we have conjured a group. Visual juxtaposition creates the mirage of emotional proximity. “It’s like they’re all having a conversation,” a woman I know once said about her Facebook page, full of comments from friends and friends of friends. “Except they’re not.”

Friendship is devolving, in other words, from a relationship to a feeling—from something people share to something we all hug privately to ourselves in the loneliness of our electronic caves. The same path was long ago trodden by community. As face-to-face community disappeared, we held on to what we had lost—the closeness, the rootedness—by clinging to the word. Now we speak of the Jewish “community” and the medical “community” and the “community” of readers, even though none of them actually is one. What we have instead is, if we’re lucky, a “sense” of community—the feeling without the structure; a private emotion, not a collective experience.

Until a few years ago, you could share your thoughts with only one friend at a time (on the phone, say), or maybe with a small group in person. And when you did, you were talking to specific people, and you tailored what you said, and how you said it, to who they were—their interests, their personalities, most of all, your degree of mutual intimacy. Now we’re broadcasting our stream of consciousness to all 500 friends at once. We haven’t just stopped talking to our friends as individuals, at such moments; we have stopped thinking of them as individuals.

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~emphasis added

I had a FB account for about a month. I deactivated it. People I didn't even know were asking to befriend me, simply because I knew someone that they knew. Then I realized, "What if this person doesn't really know the person I know? What if they simply befriended them from someone else's list? How far removed are these people, from the person I actually know?" WTF? It seemed like a competition to me - who has the most 'friends.'