You are you, I’m me, were we to meet in real life we might communicate, we might slowly establish that we understand each other, that we have some shared interests, that we are able to communicate reasonably well. Our interactions over time may lead to us developing from a nodding acquaintance, through “someone I like to talk to”, then “Someone who I understand and value” and over time this interaction may even develop into friendship, a much misunderstood relationship that is built on mutual trust and understanding, a strong bond that last through difficult times as well as happy times. Most people, at some point in their lives, usually early on, have heard, perhaps from a parent or grandparent, that they can expect to have perhaps five “real” friends through their life, but that these friends are the people who will support you no matter what, who will be there to celebrate your triumphs, and to pick you up when you fall.
It takes time to build a friendship. It takes times to establish trust in another person, and there is a reason that it takes time, in my opinion. As a species, humans are social creatures, we naturally communicate, even overcoming the barriers of language relatively easily. We like companionship, and interaction, and often use those interactions to define our roles. We are not psychologically designed for isolation, and indeed in most societies isolation and denial of interaction are synonymous with the harshest of punishments. This perceived need for social interaction is almost certainly build in at a genetic level. We are not, on an individual level very good at surviving, and certainly not very good at hunting large game so in order to survive we band together, firstly in family groups, then later into larger communities bonded together for mutual advantage. It has even been suggested by Richard Dawkins that altruism in a genetically coded evolutionary survival trait, in part for this reason.
It is because we seem to be coded for friendship that I have an issue with social networking sites such as facebook, myspace and twitter. It is a fairly simple issue, and one that may seem petty, but for me context is everything, which is why I discussed my views on friendship first. I dislike the ease with which one can establish “friends” on these sites. I think my problem is in the use of the word. We understand what a friend is in real life, we have the experiences necessary to make judgments of what is and isn’t appropriate with friends, we know how to behave because we have established these friendships over a number of years. On social networking sites this isn’t the case, the majority of our online friends are complete strangers who we know next to nothing about, yet time and again I see people who barely know each other sharing the most intimate details of their lives, and perhaps even more problematically, offering advice on other peoples problems from a position of almost complete ignorance.
I am sure many people don’t see this as an issue at all, and many would consider anything that promotes greater interaction between disparate peoples as a good think, encouraging dialogue, but for me there are issues in, as I see it, the misuse of the word friend in this manner…..
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