Pondering Friendship Online

Pondering Friendship Online: Focus on Intimacy, an excellent article from Glenn Fleishman about what friendship means, and the problems some social network sites presents by throwing the word around lightly and enforcing a choice.

For some people (I suspect not the least, introverts), "friend" is a very loaded term, and friendship has many degrees and aspects, and to say "yes" or "no" to a direct request for "friendship" is either stressful or just meaningless. And to have 3,000 "friends" on FaceBook or such sites is equally meaningless. 
Because of my Internet presence, I am asked to be a "friend" on FaceBook by readers and admirers, but much of the time I hardly have a clue who the person is. What's the point?

I'm Danish. Scandinavia has a much higher number per capita of Introvert type people than say Italy or USA, and we don't tend to connect as readily, but then perhaps we take it more seriously when we do. (Note, I'm not claiming that Italians or Americans are generally more superficial people.)

For me, Facebook is just meaningless. Admittedly it has connected me with a couple of old friends... and then after a couple of days of busy mailing, it somehow just faded out. There wasn't anymore any impulse to socialize once we no more shared a class or a club.

Glenn links to this seminal article.  In it, David Weinberger says amongst other things:
"... the Friendster sign-up sheet assumes that there's only one me I want to put forward. I should probably have a profile sheet for at least several different me's: the blogger who wants to find other bloggers, the consultant trolling for clients, etc.

The real issue is, I believe, that any profile asks me to make myself explicit. And that can't be done without doing damage to the truth about myself.

But making explicit doesn't just do damage to selves. In general, making explicit does violence to what is being made explicit. (In the modern age, Heidegger gets credit for this idea.) Making things explicit isn't like unearthing an archaeological find that's just been sitting there, waiting to be dug up. Making explicit often — usually — means disambiguating and reducing complexity.

The reason is simple. The things of the world exist as they are only within deep, messy, inarticulate, shifting, continuous, fuzzy contexts. This is certainly true of human relationships, although I believe it's also true of all that we find on the earth, waiting in it, or promised above it. The analog world — the real world — is ambiguous. That's a source of its richness. In making a piece of it explicit, we make it less ambiguous and thus lose some of its value and truth."

That's an important thought. I've always been against direct statements of "love" and "friendship". For one thing, these things surely can be perceived on their own. For another, to state them directly and simply is to oversimplify them and tends to lock them down, doing harm to the natural development of things.

---

The accompanying article by Adam Engst I have yet to read, but from experience I expect it to be well worth reading also. (Update: it was indeed.)