Facebook, Path and Co: Should We Defriend or Redefine Friendship?

Mal Fletcher

Posted on: Tuesday 23 November 2010

‘A friend,’ wrote Len Wein, ‘is someone who is there for you when he or she would rather be anywhere else.’

A new social networking service launched last week is looking to profit from a growing trend on social networking sites.

The trend is known as ‘defriending’. As the name suggests, it involves people trimming the number of friends they want to stay connected with on platforms like Facebook.

The new networking project, called Path, allows users a maximum of 50 online friends as opposed to Facebook’s maximum allowance of 5,000 friends.

Globally, the average Facebook user has around 120 friends. In the UK last year, a study revealed that the average Brit claims to have 130 Facebook buddies. The same Brits, though, said that they had only three real-time friends.

At the same time, another study showed that an increasing number of British people feel lonely and somewhat cut off from others in their immediate environment.

Clearly, when we talk about online friends, either our definition of friendship has shifted significantly or we’re using the word friendship to describe something entirely new.

One online dictionary defines a friend as ‘a person attached to another by feelings of affection or personal regard.’ Obviously, it is possible to have some of these feelings for people we’ve met only via online networking.

However, the question remains as to just how close one can become to a person one has only known – or primarily known - via a computer or a PDA screen.

This is obviously the thinking behind the defriending trend and the launch of Path.

A keen Facebook user quoted in The Times a few days ago spoke I think for many others when she said that at first people want to add everyone to their friends list. ‘Then you realise,’ she added, ‘that you don’t really care that much about their lives.’

In a way, the notion of online friendship – be it via Facebook or Path – can set us up for a false sense of intimacy. It can leave us feeling that we have a wider and stronger network of personal support then we really enjoy – and that our friendships are deeper than they are.

Let’s face it: who wants to read online messages from people they hardly know who’re looking for very personal support through times of crisis?

Who wants to offer ongoing, practical support – as opposed to encouraging clichés – for a ‘friend’ whom they’ve never actually met? And someone who may or may not choose to remain a friend tomorrow?

Even if you did want to practically help a cyber-friend in need, how would you do that when you’re not connected except via cyberspace?

Sure, you can send money electronically, but how do you send real empathy through an optic fibre cable? How do you actually sit with someone and offer a real, as against metaphoric, shoulder to cry on?

Even well established friendships suffer I think if the only contact friends have is through instant electronic interfaces. Abiding and deep friendships arise over long periods of time through closely shared experiences, including difficult challenges and uplifting celebrations.

Real friendship isn’t normally something you ‘sign up’ for, on the spur of the moment, because you like the other person’s photograph or bio. A real friend isn’t someone you normally drop in an instant, either, with nothing more than a mouse click.

I’m not for a moment denigrating the positive role social networking sites can play in our lives. They’re wonderful for helping us to stay in touch with friends, especially over long distances.

Yet the variety and depth of friendship they offer is not enough.  It’s similar to the difference between playing a game of football online and playing it in real-time. The latter will bring many more cuts and bruises, but the player comes away knowing that he’s actually played football.

We mustn’t allow friendship to become a computer game version of itself. It’s unhealthy to let our friendship-building muscles atrophy while we play with networking online. The latter is a great support for friendship, but it’s not friendship itself.

Perhaps we need another word for what happens on Facebook, Path, Twitter and the like. This would at least recognize that something as profound, unpredictable, demanding and yet uplifting as human friendship can’t be squeezed conveniently into a handheld or desktop gadget.

A friend is indeed someone who is ‘there for you’, even if they physically would rather be anywhere else.