» Is The Web Changing the Meaning of Friendship?

The internet has transformed our ability to communicate, and spawned a world of social networking sites. These are an excellent way for people to maintain existing friendships over a distance, and can be a way to get to know new people, but they need to be treated with some caution.

In a face to face situation you have the ability to see, hear and understand the relationship you’re developing. You spend time directly in the company of another person, you can control the speed and extent of the development. You can use judgment and commonsense. With the internet you lose many of these important aspects of the relationship. You rely almost entirely on written communication, and not everyone is at their best expressing their personality through writing.

In a recent BBC News article Baroness Susan Greenfield, a neuroscientist who currently heads the UK’s Royal Institution, commented about the differences between social networking and real life conversations.

In the real life situation you:
“…require a sensitivity to voice tone, body language and perhaps even to pheromones – those sneaky molecules that we release and which others smell subconsciously.
“Moreover, according to the context and, indeed, the person with whom we are conversing, our own delivery will need to adapt. None of these skills are required when chatting on a social networking site.”

Sometimes the anonymity online users are able to hide behind, makes them forget judgment and commonsense. This is regularly illustrated in blogging, where some people choose to leave hurtful or blatantly derogatory comments. Even more disturbing are the growing number of instances where online ‘friendships’ are a cover for bullying, grooming and other dubious activities, occasionally resulting in the suicide of vulnerable people.

Many users seek out more and more ‘friends’ to feed their need. Social networking sites fuel this constantly, developing new ways to show your ‘friendship’ – buy a virtual cup of coffee, send a kiss or a hug, join a cause – the options are endless it seems. And once you’re registered on a site you automatically give up a degree of control – friends of your friends may be able to view your information, and seek to become your friend; people you haven’t heard from for years – and don’t want to hear from – can crawl out of the woodwork and try to get back into your life.

Friendship, but with a specific purpose

The same thing can happen in blogging communities, where collecting ‘friends’ can be one of  the ways to increase the rating of your blog, which in turn means it will show higher in search results, which theoretically implies you will get more traffic. Friends take on a totally different meaning here. They are a means to an end. The definition of friendship has become similar to the transactional definition used in the non-profit sector in relation to its supporters, also called ‘friends’:

“If you give us money, we will be your friend. If we think you will give us money, we will court you as our friend. If you fail to give us money, we will eventually stop calling you. The more money you give us, the more friendly we will be.”

With blogging communities money isn’t usually changing hands directly but the expectation is that an offer of friendship will be reciprocated. The desire is that your ‘friends’ will visit your blog to increase your traffic; they will click on links to show they’ve been, or click on ads, which will earn you credits or money in some other system.

And in return you say you will do the same for them. But if you have several hundred ‘friends’ in each community you inhabit, how can you meet all these demands? If you do drop by regularly you’re most likely staying for as short a time as it takes to register your visit. You don’t have time to add real value, you’re just making the next notch in the belt.

To use ‘friendship’ as the description for these online transactional relationships is to devalue the true meaning of friendship. True friends, even online friends, spend time getting to know one another. They visit together, virtually or face to face, because they want to, not because they are seeking a particular outcome to the encounter.

Learn what makes a real friend, and how to succeed in making real, lasting friendships