Christian thought discouraged intense personal bonds, for the heart should be turned to God. Within monastic communities, particular attachments were seen as threats to group cohesion. In medieval society, friendship entailed speciic expectations and obligations, often formalized in oaths. Godparenthood functioned in Roman Catholic society and, in many places, still functions as a form of alliance between families, a relationship not between godparent and godchild, but godparent and parent.
The classical notion of friendship was revived, along with other ancient modes of feeling, by the Renaissance. Capitalism, said Hume and Smith, by making economic relations impersonal, allowed for private relationships based on nothing other than affection and afinity. One teaches at a school in the suburbs, another works for a business across town, a third lives on the opposite side of the country. We are nothing to one another but what we choose to become, and we can unbecome it whenever we want.
Add to this the growth of democracy, an ideology of universal equality and inter-involvement. We are citizens now, not subjects, bound together directly rather than through allegiance to a monarch. But what is to bind us emotionally, make us something more than an aggregate of political monads? One answer was nationalism, but another grew out of the 18th-century notion of social s es sympathy: friendship, or at least, friendliness, as the affective substructure of modern society.
Wordsworth in Britain and Whitman in America made visions of universal friendship central to their d ea democratic vistas. For Mary Wollstonecraft, the mother of feminism, friendship was to be the key term of a renegotiated sexual contract, a new domestic nh democracy. Modernity believes in equality, and friendships, unlike traditional F relationships, are egalitarian.
Friendships serve no public purpose and ig exist independent of all other bonds. Modernity believes in choice. Friendships, yr unlike blood ties, are elective; indeed, the rise of friendship coincided with the shift away from arranged marriage. Modernity believes in self-expression.
C Modernity believes in freedom. Even modern marriage entails contractual obligations, but friendship involves no ixed commitments. The modern temper runs toward unrestricted luidity and lexibility, the endless play of possibility, and so is perfectly suited to the informal, improvisational nature of friendship.
We can be friends with whomever we want, however we want, for as long as we want. Social changes play into the question as well.
The process is virtually instinctive now: You graduate from college, move to New York or L. The transformations of family life over the last few decades have made friendship more important still. Between the rise of divorce and the growth of single parenthood, adults in contemporary households often no longer have spouses, let alone a traditional extended family, to turn to for support. Children, let loose by the weakening of parental authority and supervision, spin out of orbit at ever-earlier ages.
Both look to friends to replace the older structures. When all the marriages are over, friends are the people we come back to. And even those who grow up in a stable d family and end up creating another one pass more and more time between the ea two. We have yet to ind a satisfactory name for that period of life, now typically a decade but often a great deal longer, between the end of adolescence and the nh making of deinitive life choices. But the one thing we know is that friendship is ai absolutely central to it.
The image of the one true friend, a ou soul mate rare to ind but dearly beloved, has completely disappeared from our culture. We have our better or lesser friends, even our best friends, but no one in a F very long time has talked about friendship the way Montaigne and Tennyson did. We save our iercest energies for sex. We seem to be terribly fragile now. A friend fulills 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. Companies of superior spirits go back at least as far as Pythagoras and Plato and achieved new importance in d ea the salons and coffeehouses of the 17th and 18th centuries, but the Romantic age gave them a fresh impetus and emphasis. And the notion ai of superiority acquired a utopian cast, so that the circle was seen—not least nt because of its very emphasis on friendship—as the harbinger of a more advanced ou age.
The same was true, a century later, of the Bloomsbury Group, two of whose members, Woolf and Forster, produced novel upon novel about friendship. Friendship becomes, on this account, a kind of C alternative society, a refuge from the values of the larger, fallen world.
The Romantic-Bloomsburyan prophecy of society as a set of friendship circles was, to a great extent, realized. Mary McCarthy offered an early and tart view of the desirability of such a situation in The Group; Barry Levinson, a later, kinder one in Diner. Indeed, modernity associates friendship itself with youth, a time of life it likewise regards as standing apart from false adult values.
We have sought to prolong youth indeinitely by holding fast to our youthful friendships, and we have mourned the loss of youth through an unremitting nostalgia for those friendships.
One of the most striking things about the way the 20th century s understood friendship was the tendency to view it through the ilter of memory, es as if it could be recognized only after its loss, and as if that loss were inevitable. Pr The culture of group friendship reached its apogee in the s.
Communes, bands, and other 60s friendship ai groups including Woodstock, the apotheosis of both the commune and the rock nt concert were celebrated as joyous, creative places of eternal youth—havens ou from the adult world. It F is also no wonder that 60s group friendship began to generate its own nostalgia ht as the baby boom began to hit its 30s.
The Big Chill, in , depicted boomers ig attempting to recapture the magic of a lates friendship circle. Most of the characters in those productions, though, were married. C It was only in the s that a new generation, remaining single well past 30, found its own images of group friendship in Seinfeld, Sex and the City, and, of course, Friends. By that point, however, the notion of friendship as a redoubt of moral resistance, a shelter from normative pressures and incubator of social ideals, had disappeared.
With the social-networking sites of the new century—Friendster and MySpace were launched in , Facebook in — 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.
There they are, my friends, all in the same place. To imagine d ea that they added up to a circle, an embracing and encircling structure, was a belief, I realized, that violated the laws of feeling as well as geometry. They nh were a set of points, and I was wandering somewhere among them. Facebook seduces us, however, into exactly that illusion, inviting us to believe that by ai assembling a list, we have conjured a group.
Visual juxtaposition creates the nt mirage of emotional proximity. The same path was long ago trodden by op community. As the traditional face-to-face community disappeared, we held on C to what we had lost—the closeness, the rootedness—by clinging to the word, no matter how much we had to water down its meaning. And now friendship, which arose to its present importance as a replacement for community, is going the same way.
Not an actual connection, just a sense. But the more important one is, why did you need to tell us that? Until a few years ago, you could share your thoughts with only one friend at a time on the phone, say , or maybe with a small group, later, in person.
And when you did, you were s talking to speciic people, and you tailored what you said, and how you said it, to es who they were—their interests, their personalities, most of all, your degree of Pr mutual intimacy. It meant having a conversation. We address ourselves not to a circle, but to a cloud. Sex and yr Friends went off the air just ive years ago, and already we live in a different op world. Friendship like activism has been smoothly integrated into our new electronic lifestyles.
And what happens when we do ind the time to get together? I asked a woman I know whether her teenage daughters and their friends still have the kind of intense friendships that kids once did.
Yes, she said, but they go about them differently. And teenagers are just an early version of the rest of us. A study found that one American in four reported having no close conidants, up from one in 10 in The more people we know, the lonelier we get. The new group friendship, already vitiated itself, is cannibalizing our individual friendships as the boundaries between the two blur. The most disturbing thing about Facebook is the extent to which people are willing—are eager—to conduct their private lives in public.
Perhaps Pr I need to surrender the idea that the value of friendship lies precisely in the space of privacy it creates: not the secrets that two people exchange so much as d ea the unique and inviolate world they build up between them, the spider web of shared discovery they spin out, slowly and carefully, together. Are we really so ai hungry for validation? So desperate to prove we have friends?
Long-lost friends can reconnect, far-lung ones can stay in touch. I wonder, though. But now I ind the opposite is true. Reading about the mundane ig details of their lives, a steady stream of trivia and ephemera, leaves me feeling both empty and unpleasantly full, as if I had just binged on junk food, and yr precisely because it reminds me of the real sustenance, the real knowledge, we op exchange by e-mail or phone or face-to-face.
And the whole theatrical quality C of the business, the sense that my friends are doing their best to impersonate themselves, only makes it worse. The person I read about, I cannot help feeling, is not quite the person I know. Tear them out of that texture—read about their brats, look at pictures of their vacation—and they mean nothing. Tear out enough of them and you ruin the texture itself, replace a matrix of feeling and memory, the deep subsoil of experience, with a spurious sense of familiarity.
Your year-old self knows them. Your year-old self should not know them. Facebook holds out a utopian possibility: What once was lost will now be found. But the heaven of the past is a promised land destroyed in the reaching. Facebook, here, becomes the anti madeleine, an eraser of memory. Mementos, snapshots, reunions, and now this—all of them Pr modes of amnesia, foes of true remembering. The past should stay in the heart, where it belongs. Second, that identity is reducible to information: the name of your ig cat, your favorite Beatle, the stupid thing you did in seventh grade.
Third, that it is reducible, in particular, to the kind of information that social-networking Web yr sites are most interested in eliciting, consumer preferences. We wear T-shirts that proclaim our brand loyalty, pique ourselves on owning a Mac, and now put up lists of our favorite songs. But when I think about my friends, what makes them who they are, and why I love them, it is not the names of their siblings that come to mind, or their fear of spiders.
It is their qualities of character. Yet even those are just descriptions, and no more specify the individuals uniquely than to say that one has red hair, another is tall. To understand what they really look like, you would have to see a picture. Character, revealed through action: the two eternal elements of narrative. In order to know people, you have to listen to their stories.
But that is precisely what the Facebook page does not leave room for, or friends, time for. Literally does not leave room for. E-mail, with its rapid-ire etiquette and scrolling format, already trimmed the letter down to a certain acceptable maximum, perhaps a thousand words. Now, with Facebook, the box is shrinking s es even more, leaving perhaps a third of that length as the conventional limit for a message, far less for a comment.
And we all know the deal on Twitter. The Pr page missive has gone the way of the buggy whip, soon to be followed, it seems, by the three-hour conversation. Each evolved as a space for telling stories, an act d ea that cannot usefully be accomplished in much less.
Posting information is like pornography, a slick, impersonal exhibition. Exchanging stories is like making nh love: probing, questing, questioning, caressing.
It is mutual. It is intimate. It takes patience, devotion, sensitivity, subtlety, skill—and it teaches them all, too. Networking once meant ou something speciic: climbing the jungle gym of professional contacts in order to advance your career. The truth is that Hume and Smith were not completely F right.
Commercial society did not eliminate the self-interested aspects of making ht friends and inluencing people, it just changed the way we went about it. Now, ig in the age of the entrepreneurial self, even our closest relationships are being pressed onto this template. We have given our hearts to machines, and now we are turning into machines. The face of friendship in the new century.
Why or why not? What term or terms would you prefer to label your connections in social networking sites? Deresiewicz historicizes friendship and in many ways romanticizes it. These issues are ones that online communication sites are more frequently grappling with as their typical users grow older. The site nh was suggesting that she get back in touch with an old family friend who played piano at her wedding four years ago.
Its software is quick to offer helpful nudges about things ig like imminent birthdays and friends you have not contacted in a while. But the yr company has had trouble automating the task of iguring out when one of its op users has died.
C That can lead to some disturbing or just plain weird moments for Facebook users as the site keeps on shufling a dead friend through its social algorithms. Facebook says it has been grappling with how to handle the ghosts in its machine but acknowledges that it has not found a good solution. Katz said. Now, people over 65 are adopting Facebook at a faster pace than any other age group, with 6.
Townsend d said. Purvin, a year-old teacher living in Plano, Tex. Early on it yr would immediately erase the proile of anyone it learned had died. Chin says Facebook now recognizes the importance of inding an appropriate C way to preserve those pages as a place where the mourning process can be shared online. Following the Virginia Tech shootings in , members begged the company to allow them to commemorate the victims.
Grieving friends can still post messages on those pages. But with a ratio of roughly , members to every Facebook employee, the company must ind ways to let its members and its computers do much of that work. To memorialize a proile, a family member or d friend must ill out a form on the site and provide proof of the death, like a ea link to an obituary or news article, which a staff member at Facebook will then review.
We have to do it correctly. A friend of Simon Thulbourn, a software engineer living in Germany, found an obituary that mentioned someone with a similar name and submitted it to Facebook last October as evidence that Mr. Thulbourn was dead. He was soon locked out of his own page. Thulbourn said by e-mail. Thulbourn created a Web page and posted about it on Twitter until news of the mix-up began to spread on technology blogs and the company took notice.
He received an apology from Facebook and got his account back. The memorializing process has other quirks. These are issues that Facebook no doubt wishes it could avoid entirely. But death, of course, is unavoidable, and so Facebook must ind a way to integrate s it into the social experience online.
Katz, the Rutgers professor, said. Examine published eulogies and other tributes to noteworthy F individuals and determine what might be a typical style and tone for a ht eulogy.
How would you characterize the composing process for a eulogy ig or tribute? Would composing in an online space such as Facebook change the process of eulogizing an individual? How and why? Would your friends and family members have access to your emails, online proile, and so on after your death?
What, if any, measures could you take beforehand to ensure that your information would be accessible to friends and family upon your death? Given that Shakespeare wrote his plays in the language of his time, would he take to Twitter if he were alive today? Now people keep Facebook and Twitter accounts, updating nt their status daily, hourly, even minute-by-minute, and almost nothing is private.
F ht Feeding the cat ig Watching TV yr Eating a tuna sandwich op To be fair, even great diarists of the past had bad days: Samuel Pepys, the C Englishman whose journals clariied a big chunk of the 17th century for historians, sometimes had nothing more imaginative to say than: And so to bed.
Surely we could do better years later? Coherence would be nice. They are a new form of entertainment and marketing that can occupy people for hours in any given day. Boring, vapid or just TMI—too much information—updates often ai dominate in cyberspace. Was it specialty cheese or incontinence yr supplies?
So do I! The most inane updates, says Karyn Cronin , 32, an administrative assistant in St. Paul, say things like Just got back from the grocery store with all the kids, and boy are we exhausted. Slowly, style and etiquette rules for status updates are evolving, as people get more practice and as skillful updaters become more recognized.
A recent example: Suzanne is thinking: Change is inevitable … except from a s es vending machine. He says status updates can be useful for telling friends and family ai where you are—Jeff is at Disneyland—without having to make dozens of phone calls. But a lot of people treat it as a personal journal, and they vent. So what makes a good status update? Think before you tweet, Ostrow advises.
Why such a useless post? Turns out she was excited because her local frozen yogurt shop was s giving away free scoops that day. Next year, only the best tweeters survive. Milstein argues that ai even the most banal updates serve a purpose. Anne Trubek, a writer and associate op professor of composition and rhetoric at Oberlin College who is studying status updates as a developing 21st-century literary form, sorted them into four C categories for her column in the online magazine GOOD: The prosaic Jill is baking bread ; the informative Jack loves this article from GOOD, followed by the link ; the clever and funny Johnny thinks Obama should be sworn in a few more times, just to be EXTRA safe ; and the poetic or nonsensical If Jim were a cloud, he would rain Earl Grey tea.
Trubek likes them all, especially for the brevity that forces people to think and write in new ways. How does following an author change the way you interact with their work? Do you receive a different insight into them, their personality, or their writing based on their tweets? Does the brevity of a Twitter tweet make you think differently about what you have to say to your social network?
For example, if you Pr wanted to see how Twitter users were talking about the results of a recent election, you might search the hashtag election. After searching for your d chosen hashtag and reading the tweets tagged with your chosen word, ea write a response that analyzes how Twitter users are using this hashtag: What trends do you notice?
How do you see an ongoing conversation nh taking form around this hashtag? What aspects of the conversation are ai left out or missed because the conversation is taking place via Twitter? Seuss, for example— or a ictional character—Mr. Then write a series of tweets ht from your author or your character in their style of writing or speaking. Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was shot on January 8, at a political gathering with her constituents outside of a Safeway grocery store in Tucson, Arizona.
After the shooting, online speculation about the motives for the shooting was abundant, especially on Twitter. The following snapshot of a Twitter feed from January 14, and news report from Poynter. Gabrielle Giffords, was followed quickly by nh social media receiving more than its share of credit and blame for mistakes made in the early reporting.
In fact, if anything, it reminded me that news of John F. And therein lies a dilemma, of course. To date, we remain far from having old media accuracy at digital media speed. But this is d dificult, if not impossible. And it is tempting but impractical to ea call for a squad of people to monitor tweets. For hours after it was reported she was alive, people kept discovering the original tweet nh that she was dead, retweeting it to their friends without seeing the ai update.
In several cases, the retweet of the incorrect report came three or more hours after the report irst spread. Krueger writes that an Associated Press ht Managing Editors study and webinar suggest questions for developing ethics ig and credibility standards to be applied to Twitter and Facebook messages as yr well.
How can we help avoid the spread of misinformation? In a small group, compose a list of evaluative criteria that can be applied to information online. How do you know the information is valid? Here Gladwell questions how activism might be different in an age of social media. They were freshmen at North Carolina A. The seats op were for whites. The snack bar was for blacks.
C Another employee, a black woman who worked at the steam table, approached the students and tried to warn them away. Around ive-thirty, the front doors to the store were locked. Finally, they left by a side door. The men were dressed in suits and ties. The students had brought their schoolwork, and studied as they sat at the counter. By Thursday, the protesters numbered three hundred, including three white women, from the Greensboro campus of the University of North Carolina.
By Saturday, the sit-in had reached six hundred. People spilled out onto the street. White teen-agers waved Confederate lags. Someone threw a irecracker. At noon, the A. Smith College, in Charlotte, joined d ea in, followed on Wednesday by students at St. By the end of the month, there were sit-ins ai throughout the South, as far west as Texas. Everyone wanted to go. Thousands were arrested and untold thousands more radicalized. The new tools of social C media have reinvented social activism.
With Facebook and Twitter and the like, the traditional relationship between political authority and popular will has been upended, making it easier for the powerless to collaborate, coordinate, and give voice to their concerns.
Where activists were once deined by their causes, they are now deined by their tools. Facebook warriors go online to push for change. Glassman, a former senior State Department oficial, told a crowd of cyber activists at a recent conference sponsored by Facebook, A.
Al Qaeda is stuck Pr in Web 1. The Internet is now about interactivity and conversation. Why does it matter who is eating whose d ea lunch on the Internet? Are people who log on to their Facebook page really the best hope for us all?
Nor does it seem nt to have been a revolution, not least because the protests—as Anne Applebaum ou suggested in the Washington Post—may well have been a bit of stagecraft cooked up by the government.
In a country paranoid about Romanian revanchism, the F protesters lew a Romanian lag over the Parliament building. In the Iranian ht case, meanwhile, the people tweeting about the demonstrations were almost all ig in the West.
Innovators tend to be solipsists. They often want to cram every stray fact and experience into their new model. Fifty years after one of the most extraordinary episodes of social upheaval in American history, we seem to have forgotten what activism is.
Greensboro in the early nineteen-sixties was the kind of place where racial insubordination was routinely met with violence. The four students who irst sat down at the lunch counter were terriied. On the irst day, the store manager notiied the police chief, who immediately sent two oficers to the store.
On Saturday, as tensions grew, someone called in a bomb threat, and the entire store had to be evacuated. The nt Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee recruited hundreds of Northern, ou largely white unpaid volunteers to run Freedom Schools, register black voters, and raise civil-rights awareness in the Deep South.
Within days of arriving in Mississippi, three volunteers—Michael ig Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman—were kidnapped and killed, and, during the rest of the summer, thirty-seven black churches were set on yr ire and dozens of safe houses were bombed; volunteers were beaten, shot at, op arrested, and trailed by pickup trucks full of armed men.
A quarter of those C in the program dropped out. Activism that challenges the status quo—that attacks deeply rooted problems—is not for the faint of heart. What makes people capable of this kind of activism? This pattern shows up again and again. One study of the Red Brigades, the Italian terrorist group of the nineteen-seventies, found that seventy per cent of recruits had at least one good friend already in the organization.
The same is true of the men who joined the mujahideen in Afghanistan. Even revolutionary actions that look spontaneous, like the demonstrations in East Germany that led to the fall of the Berlin Wall, are, at core, strong-tie phenomena. The opposition s es movement in East Germany consisted of several hundred groups, each with roughly a dozen members. Pr Each group was in limited contact with the others: at the time, only thirteen d per cent of East Germans even had a phone.
All they knew was that on Monday ea nights, outside St. Nicholas Church in downtown Leipzig, people gathered to nh voice their anger at the state.
They would all have remembered the murder of Emmett Till in , the op Montgomery bus boycott that same year, and the showdown in Little Rock in Then McNeil came into the dorm room and asked the others if they were ready.
The platforms of social media are built around weak ties. Facebook is a tool for eficiently managing your acquaintances, for keeping up with the people you would not otherwise be able to stay in touch with. This is in many ways a wonderful thing. There is strength in weak ties, as the sociologist Mark Granovetter has observed.
Our acquaintances—not our friends— are our greatest source of new ideas and information. The Internet lets us exploit the power of these kinds of distant connections with marvelous eficiency. Bhatia needed a bone-marrow transplant, but he could not ind a match among ai his relatives and friends. The odds were best with a donor of his ethnicity, and nt there were few South Asians in the national bone-marrow database. Eventually, nearly twenty-ive thousand new people were registered ig in the bone-marrow database, and Bhatia found a match.
By not asking too op much of them. You can get thousands of people to sign up for a C donor registry, because doing so is pretty easy.
You have to send in a cheek swab and—in the highly unlikely event that your bone marrow is a good match for someone in need—spend a few hours at the hospital. Social networks are effective at increasing participation— by lessening the level of motivation that participation requires. The Facebook page of the Save Darfur Coalition has 1,, members, who have donated an average of nine cents apiece. The next biggest Darfur charity on Facebook has 22, members, who have donated an average of thirty-ive cents.
Help s Save Darfur has 2, members, who have given, on average, ifteen cents. This is a powerful mechanism to engage this critical population. We are a long way from the lunch counters of Greensboro. In the late nineteen-ifties, F there had been sixteen sit-ins in various cities throughout the South, ifteen of ht which were formally organized by civil-rights organizations like the N. Possible locations for activism were scouted.
Plans were drawn up. Youth Council. They had close ties with the head of the C local N. They had been briefed on the earlier wave of sit-ins in Durham, and had been part of a series of movement meetings in activist churches. When the sit-in movement spread from Greensboro throughout the South, it did not spread indiscriminately. The civil-rights movement was high-risk activism.
It was also, crucially, strategic activism: a challenge to the establishment mounted with precision and discipline. At the center of the movement was the black church, which had, as Aldon D. Pr Facebook and the like are tools for building networks, which are the opposite, in structure and character, of hierarchies.
Decisions are made through consensus, and the ties that bind people to the group are loose. The paper includes several design recommendations for future networking sites. This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution.
Google Scholar. Zahavi A: 'The cost of honesty further remarks on the handicap principle ', Journal of Theoretical Biology, 67 , pp — Mulrine A: 'Love. Granovetter M S: 'The strength of weak ties: a network theory revisited', Sociological Theory, 1 , pp — Download references. You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar. Donath, J.
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