Anne Truitt Zelenka and Steve Rubel On Web Friendship

Anne Truitt Zelenka and Steve Rubel wonder about the notion of friendship in the new connected age: is is quality or quantity?

[from Friendships in the Connected Age: Higher Quantity AND Higher Quality by Anne Truitt Zelenka]

The difference between in-person connectedness and web connectedness

The relationship between friendship quality and friendship quantity is probably U-shaped, especially in the physical world. More friends up to a point means higher quality friendships. When you have very few friends, you might expect too much of each of them. As you reach some optimal number of friends, you have plenty of time to keep up with them but aren’t so demanding of their time or emotional support, because you have enough friends to supply that. Then, as you keep adding friends, the quality of your friendships suffers. You don’t keep in touch with everyone except superficially. You don’t provide them much emotional support because you’re spread too thin.

But the web changes that. More connectedness suddenly jumps us to a totally different curve of friendship quality vs. friendship quantity. You can stay in touch with many more people. You can give specially targeted support because you understand much better the contours and context of each friend’s life. You can connect and communicate with much less trouble than before, because you know when your friends are available and how best to reach them.

Anne intentionally contrasted her view with Steve Rubel's, where Steve suggests that the Web may be degrading the experience of friendship and its rewards:

[from The Web Changes How We Define Friendship by Steve Rubel] It's clear from all of this that our entire concept of friendships is changing. It's becoming more about quantity and less about quality.

This can be a very good thing. I am friends with people in social networks from other countries. Technology makes that possible.

On the other hand, these same technologies enable anyone to add me as a friend, even though we've never met.

It leaves me all confused about what friendship will look like in 10 years. It seems like it's declining in quality, even as technology scales it in quantity and helps our networks spread far and wide.

I believe that the culture we are evolving on the web leads to a change in the expression and experience of friendship. Steve's post title suggests the same, but then he falls into pessimism rather than inquiry, getting trapped in the false issue of what the term 'friendship' means when it is used as a synonym for contact by social networks. Anne actually suggests that the Web can improve things, at least in terms of serendipity.

In a world of flow, our sense of friends existence is deepened, since we have a dozen opportunities to acknowledge distant friends' comings and goings, to comment on their insights, and to take their temperature based on how loudly they are shouting on Twitter today. We commune in a virtual village marketplace, swapping stories with someone from Switzerland, getting advice from Hawaii, and replying to a partner in London. We can arrive in a distant city, and arrive at a dinner party -- a real one -- with colleagues and contacts hat we haven't seen in months, without missing a beat because of our online connection.

The distinction between quality and quantity is missing something fundamental. While some may be accumulating contacts at Facebook like stamp collecting, and while others may be spending dozens of hours per week in chatrooms, it is not the gross metrics that matter, really.

The nature of friendship itself, is shifting. It is no longer the byproduct of physical proximity, it is no longer strongly bounded by geography, and it is strongly mediated by our social tools. Texting, blogging, and trafficking (what we are doing in flow apps) have become essential to our continued connections with our friends, and we could no more keep up our relationships without these tools than we could put aside language itself.

While I believe that Dunbar's Constant may not be the absolute we once thought it was -- we may well be able to remain closely involved with more than 150 people -- the shift to 200 or even more close friends does not signal the advent of a new global perspective on friendship. It is not the number of friends but the nature of friendship that is important.

And the new nature of connected friendship is taking on the shape of the Web itself:

1. it is increasingly open (much of our fraternizing is in public),
   
2. tolerant of diversity (I disagree publicly with my friends, but I accept this as part of friendship, not a blind gang-like sharing of narrow perspectives; and they are from all over, all colors, all shapes and sizes)
   
3. bottom-up (its not because we work together, or because we are members of some organized group)
   
4. personal (I don't belong to cliques, but am connected to individuals)
   
5. flowing (people's relationships are constantly changing, and shifting in complexity).

Many would look at the new state of friendship and suggest that something has been lost when you don't have a small group of friends that all know each other, that invite each other over to bbqs every weekend, and who all attended the same schools, workplaces, and places of worship. But I believe that we are moving away from a narrow, parochial, and inbred sort of friendship.

At the same time, I believe that friendship today is strongly informed by a new tribalism: we increasingly distrust large centralized organizations -- media, government, religion, or businesses -- to define our morality, purpose, and goals. We look to ourselves -- and our networks of contacts -- to make sense of the world that confronts us, and we define right and wrong based on the meaning we find through personal affiliation, connection, and commitment.

It's a basic shift of allegiance, and for many it will seem like something is being lost: some will express it as a sense of a lost, golden past, when friendships were more... something.

But I feel otherwise. It's not about metrics, because my yardstick has changed along with everything else. It's really about an enriched self-identity, meaning, and purpose: and those -- for me, at least -- have changed irrevocably through the web, through my connections: and all for the better.

Comments

[Stephen Collins]

Stowe, I also riffed off Anne's post (which I loved) today. I noted that a level of granularity in relationship might improve the situation, but that also, that granularity was app-dependent.