Does the Web encourage superficial friendships?
For the first session, I’m trying to find a pithily made case that the Web encourages superficial, degraded friendships. Given my poor powers of recall (which will become painfully obvious throughout the term), I’ve been poking around inefficiently, although I did get some good responses when I twittered the question. Here are a couple of sources:
Miller McPherson et al., “Birds of a Feather” is not about whether e-friendships are less significant but about whether e-friends affiliate more with people like them than they do in real-world friendships. (Cass Sunstein is among those who raise a similar alarm.)
Robert Kraut has a whole bunch of articles. Here’s how one of them (with J. Cummings and J. Lee) opens:
People maintain only a limited number of personal relationships. Researchers
estimate that people typically keep ten to twenty important relationships, out of
the approximately 1,000 individuals whom they interact with or can identify (e.g.,
Fisher, 1982; Wellman, 1992). Friendships, in contrast to family relationships, are
especially fragile, and require active maintenance or they die (Canary & Stafford,
1994). While family ties exist because of the accident of birth and are often
maintained through obligation, friendship and romantic relationships are
voluntary. They grow, decline, and end through concrete actions (Allan, 1979).In this paper we examine how young adults maintain friendships when faced with
life events that threaten them, such as moving from high school to college. In
particular, we examine the role that phone and computer communications play in
maintaining these friendships as the parties move geographically apart.
They find that the different modalities of communication affect the drop-off in closeness.
Ethan Watters’ Urban Tribes (book and blog) looks at e-friendship. I haven’t read it (it sure is familiar, though), but it apparently argues that the new media enable friends to be more attentive to one another.
Robert Putnam in Bowling Alone mainly talks about the breakdown of community, which is different from friendship. I don’t recall him talking about friendship per se, but I’ll take a look; it’s been a while since I read the book.
Steve Rubel has posted about the decline in friendship, pointing to a Wikipedia entry on just that topic.
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Tova Goldring
February 3, 2008 @ 9:17 pm
Personally, I cannot really say whether friends that people meet online are necessarily more superficial than those one meets in person. Shallow friendships are prevalent in both realms. As someone who has moved around a lot, however, I can say that the web has made it much easier to keep in touch with old friends, reconnect after many year, and maintain relationships. Those friends of mine who are not that active on the web, or do not have much access to it, are often the same individuals which whom I have lost touch. In this way, the Web doesn’t necessarily demean friendship, but can strengthen it.