Citizensheep » How the internet supports friendships

1 February, 2009

This post is in: Ramblings, Social media

How the internet supports friendships

The internet can be great for supporting and developing friendships, but it doesn’t create them by itself. It’s simply a tool: we use it to support the things we want to do in our lives, which include offline as well as online activity. Friendships may be part of that.

Pete Ashton recently wrote about how we should put more of ourselves into our online activity, as that is what gives it meaning. I agree, although I’m not sure it’s any different from offline activity. And it depends on why you’re active in that realm in the first place.

If your intention is to grow a network of friends or professional contacts then yes, the more you can engage in an honest and personal way the better. However I personally have no problem with people just broadcasting if that’s what they feel comfortable with, or if they’re simply having fun doing it.

However I do tend to agree with Pete’s idea that people bond around ‘pointless, transient, silly and fun things’. I think this is because they are actually safe and easy ways to form connections with other people (something we tend to crave). This is certainly what I’ve been getting out of blogging and Twitter. And as a result, as Pete suggests, this has led to more serious discussions and collaborations (such as the recent re-writing of Birmingham’s Big City Plan ).

Use of the internet does not in itself create frinedships. I suspect that those friendships formed purely through Twitter will be much less durable than those that have also developed offline, especially now that Twitter is getting so big and people are spreading themselves much more thinly. What the internet does offer is a way of discovering and cementing friendships much more quickly than ever before. But the way we engage in those friendships is really no different.

I was recently encouraged to participate in a sort of ‘chain letter’. I had to write seven things about myself that other people may not know, then pass the task on to seven others. I don’t usually like this sort of thing because it makes me feel obliged to do something I’m not entirely comfortable with else feel guilty for letting someone down; and angry with that person for obliging me to do it in the first place.

But this one was passed to me just after I’d read Pete’s post, and around the time that Jon Hickman had set up @cluedo on Twitter (which encouraged people to discover someone’s identity by asking questions of them). So the ‘chain letter’ seemed an ideal way of further developing new friendships: I was genuinely keen to discover more about the people I was getting to know, in their words, and to share (just a little bit) more of myself.

As a result I know that Nicky didn’t start talking until she was three years-old, Jon doesn’t like vegetables, Midge regrets not taking his physics degree seriously and Bruce is actually quite shy. Not greatly illuminating in themselves, but they all help to create richer connections between these people.

We don’t use the internet because we’re friendless, unintersting geeks who sit at home blogging and twittering because we have no life: we use it precisely in order to support and enrich our thoroughly active offline lives.