Building Friendships Takes More Than Cyber Skills

Mal Fletcher

Posted on: Wednesday 10 November 2010

I was asked this morning by a BBC producer how these austere times are affecting how people form and maintain friendships.

It’s an important question.  

Friends become especially important in tough times and times of rapid change, because they offer us reassurance. Close friends in particular provide a sense that, not matter what is going on in the wider world, we actually matter.

In an age of 24/7 global news coverage, it’s easy to feel we rate fairly low as individuals on the scale of significance. Friends offer us a sense that what we think and do actually counts for something beyond ourselves.

Friendships also offer continuity. It’s often said that the only thing that doesn’t change today is change itself. Impermanence is the permanent wallpaper of our daily lives.

Close friends, especially those whom we’ve known for a long time, provide important links with our past, our traditions and our sense of being part of a longer story. This sense of context provides security and meaning when life is moving at a rapid and often confusing clip.

When it comes to how we form friendships, much emphasis is placed on the phenomenon of social networking. Facebook and Twitter and the like are great for keeping in touch, especially with family and friends spread over long distances. Skype is now being integrated into Facebook, which will soon make the networking experience just that little bit more lifelike.

Yet in terms of building strong and resilient friendships, I think social networking has limited value.

A fairly recent study tracked 125,000 emails sent by very productive workers in large companies. It found that more than 80 percent of the messages were sent to fellow-workers in the same room or close by.

Electronic communications, it seems, work best when they’re an adjunct to rather than a replacement for something more personal.

Whatever the advances in emerging technology – including much heralded breakthroughs in holographic systems – I think we’ll continue to find that nothing replaces eyeball-time.

When national mail systems first became reliable, writing letters fast became a popular means of communication, over both long and short distances. Some people even found that writing their thoughts to a loved one or friend came more easily than articulating them up-close-and-personal.

It’s sad to think that an entire generation has now emerged for whom letter-writing is an anachronism. They’ve never known the simply pleasure of hand-writing a letter or waiting eagerly for a mail delivery.

Letters and cards have proven great supports to friendships for centuries, yet even the most committed Victorian pen pals longed to meet up at some point.

The introduction of the telephone proved a great boon to friendship, too. It still is, perhaps even more so given the preponderance of mobiles. Yet how many people use their phones to arrange a place and time to meet in person? And how many phone conversations are really following up face-to-face chats?

A recent survey found that British people have on average one close friend and three Facebook friends. Many commentators saw it as something of a melancholy comment on the state of society – especially given the number of people today who suffer from feelings of alienation brought on by urban isolation.

It seems that the human being is hard-wired for contact. Nothing replaces actually sitting across the table from someone and having a heart-to-heart conversation. Even if the subject matter is lightweight, those friendly chats help us build bonds of companionship that can’t be replicated via cyberspace.

It’s harder, in cyberspace, to offer another person the two essential building blocks for lasting friendships.

The first is empathy, the ability not only to discern a person’s words, but to “hear” the feelings underlying those words. As a friend unburdens his or her heart to you, nothing shows respect like being able to feed back, in your own words, how you think they’re feeling and why.

Opportunities for showing empathy on a telephone are just as limited, as you have only the voice to “read”. Text-based cyber-comms are even more restricting. Even with the introduction of VOIP video services, a great blessing though they are, cyber-talk is still too stunted to replace physical interaction.

The other essential skill in building friendship is encouragement. People who have a wide range of long-term close friendships tend to be skilled at offering encouragement, even when they least feel like giving it.

Often, the power of your encouragement is inversely proportional to how you feel when you’re giving it. The best time to be encouraging is often when you feel least like giving it, or when you feel most in need of it yourself.

A very encouraging person is seldom short of friends. You can tweet words of encouragement and you can send Facebook messages of encouragement. But nothing beats actually patting someone on the back, or locking eyes with them while you tell them how good you feel about their contribution.

As we move forward with ever new forms of tech-driven conversation, including fully haptic virtual meetings, let’s not forget the pre-eminence of physical contact. In tough times, friends are worth their weight in gold – and friendship is something you just can’t digitize.


Q: Do you believe that overall social networking helps or hinders the formation of long-term friendships? I'd love your comments and thoughts below...