In an article for The Chronicle of Higher Education, William Deresiewicz examines the new forms of friendship that have emerged in the age of Facebook. While social media has allowed us the opportunity to be connected to everyone, it more often than not comes at the expense of deep, meaningful, shaping friendship. Deresiewicz writes:
[Concerning] the moral content of classical friendship, its commitment
to virtue and mutual improvement, that … has been lost. We have ceased to
believe that a friend's highest purpose is to summon us to the good by offering
moral advice and correction. We practice, instead, the nonjudgmental friendship
of unconditional acceptance and support—"therapeutic" friendship, [to
quote] Robert N. Bellah's scornful term. We seem to be terribly fragile now. A
friend fulfills her duty, we suppose, by taking our side—validating our
feelings, supporting our decisions, helping us to feel good about ourselves. We
tell white lies, make excuses when a friend does something wrong, do what we
can to keep the boat steady. We're busy people; we want our friendships fun and
friction-free ….
With the social-networking sites of the new century—Friendster and
MySpace were launched in 2003, Facebook in 2004—the friendship circle has
expanded to engulf the whole of the social world, and in so doing, destroyed
both its own nature and that of the individual friendship itself. Facebook's
very premise—and promise—is that it makes our friendship circles visible. There
they are, my friends, all in the same place. Except, of course, they're not in
the same place, or, rather, they're not my friends. They're a [superficial
likeness or semblance] of my friends—little dehydrated packets of images and
information, no more my friends than a set of baseball cards is the New York
Mets ….
Deresiewicz concludes: "Friendship is devolving, in other words,
from a relationship to a feeling—from something people share to something each
of us hugs privately to ourselves in the loneliness of our electronic
caves."
William Deresiewicz, "Faux Friendship," The Chronicle of
Higher Education
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