It is hard to see through the veils of history, but one of the things that always strikes me is that if you sit down and really try to put all the pieces together, what you find is an alien world, far more alien than most supposedly alien worlds of science fiction, especially if we're talking about going back all the way to Ancient Greece. What we think of in our bones as civilization doesn't exist then. The closest thing that might get you there is farming communities in the Midwest... with no power, or cell phones, or cars, or houses, with dangerous wild animals still roaming about, no medical treatment, no firearms, and no prior 21st-century civilization thought patterns, and you're still only sort of glimpsing it. Friendship wasn't an affectation, it was a necessity; humans are effectively incapable of surviving as an individual with no social support, and these people were, by modern standards, in a constant state of just barely scraping by. Even wealthy people were still just one bad fall or cut from a lingering death. When reading about the ancient past one must always be sure to keep this backdrop in mind, and not surreptitiously sneak in a modern setting for the drama in your head.
As some people say, we're already in a Singularity relative to ancient Grecians, inasmuch as they couldn't understand our world at all... and I think it's true in the opposite direction, too. History doesn't make any sense at all unless you learn to stop seeing it through 20th/21st century preconceptions about ethics or civilization. (And I'm not saying I've got a grasp on the older preconceptions, I've just observed that using my "default set" certainly doesn't have much explanatory power for why people do what they do in the past.)
I'd submit for your consideration the idea that what we see in ancient friendships is more like what we'd today call the "war buddy" bond, because life was a lot more like a war back then. As we move through history and more and more people are no longer engaged in war with Nature just to survive, we see that level of bond fade because we see the conditions that give rise to that level of bond fade. Personally, I would say this is cause for celebration more than sadness.
I think it's a lot like surplus manufacturing capacity or six sigma in an economic context. In general, surplus manufacturing capacity is bad because it means you're not utilizing your capital to the fullest extent possible. It means you built more factories than you need, so some are sitting idle. And six sigma is good because it reduces variability in quality, which lets you streamline your processes so that there's no wasted effort.
Except then you get World War 2, when suddenly everyone was dropping bombs on each other, and countries needed that surplus manufacturing capacity, and the winner ended up being the one that had the most. Or when 3M introduced six sigma, they found a dramatic decrease in creativity and innovation, because those require waste and variability.
Friendship is wasted when times are good, because you don't need your friends, and they take up time and attention that could be devoted to more productive pursuits. But if you suffer a bad breakup or suddenly get sick, it's awful nice to have somebody who's got your back unconditionally. There's a trade-off between efficiency and reliability, and someone who is always perfectly efficient is usually pretty unreliable when unexpected events occur.
One way I think of it is that friendship of yore was designed for a harsher, crueler world, with serious limits on how much one could broadcast.
Today the opportunities to connect are plentiful; going online can feel like you're at a 24/7 party with a constant stream of new guests and new ideas, so long as you put in the _effort_ to set it up that way. If the only thing you do is add a few acquaintances to Facebook, the article is correct - you won't get any value out of it. But a strategy that has more specific goals in mind than "be friends" is only empowered by the social tools.
One strategy I've used is what I call a social honeypot.
Ie create a project (in my case a magazine) which attracts a passive "income" of new acquaintances who are automatically selected (because they bothered to contact you) for compatibility.
Why celebration? I see your point that survival is starting to become less of an issue, but lack of meaningful friendships has been shown to contribute to poor quality of life.
I think you hit on a great insight though. Common goals are what form deep friendships, and in the modern world our commonalities are very superficial (same workplace, same bars you hang out, shared hobbies, etc). You either gotta undergo severe adversity together, raise children together, or do a startup together to have that deep bond. Even religion isn't good enough.. you really do need to fight a "war".
This article really is the middle of a lot of genres. You can also look at this from an evolutionary psychology view... we're meant to live in tribes, and the move to urban societies isn't socially healthy for us. Rather than a feeling of "we're in it together", most of us want to keep up with the Jones' and comparing against each other. There's nobody to compare with when you're in a tribe, and the more successful tribes aren't bragging about their wealth in their Facebook feed.
To be friends with someone you have to eat a handful of salt together
In other words strong friendship bonds are formed through sharing of adversity. Also, during difficult times people will bond together for support and thus form strong friendships.
I upvoted for insightfulness, and I'm definitely all for not living everyday life like a war, but I'm not sure that the decline of friendship is a good thing. The evidence seems pretty compelling that a lack of good friendships causes unhappiness. For example, religious people tend to be happier than atheists because they have a much easier time making friends, through church: http://www.suntimes.com/news/2728257-418/church-religious-ha...
Perhaps human psychology is conditioned to expect having a few war buddies in its network, similar to how human physiology is conditioned to expect a great deal of physical movement. (http://www.businessinsider.com/sitting-can-kill-you-2011-4)
True. Relations and community were much important in the Ancient world. Consider that the word "idiot" originally meant someone who didn't see the point of politics. Also consider the system of patrons and clients that existed in Ancient Rome.
The Greeks thought that there were two levels of humanity: zoon bios (biological life) and zoon politicon (political life).
With our current (post)modern civilization, we are in many ways going back to an even more primitive (ie Neolithic) stadium of existence, where political life ceases to exist and life is more playful/hedonistic.
One example: the institution of monogamy is something that didn't really exist in Neolithic times (there are some indications that only 40% of men reproduced). It was something that arose with agriculture and today we are in many ways back to a hunter-gatherer world.
I think Sweden is at the forefront of this neo-Neolithic trend, having often been termed a country of "state individualism", where the individual is free to decouple from social relations and depend on the State as a safety net.
I think the idea that there's a war between human and nature is a very modern one. People in pre-modern times didn't see themselves as separate from nature, they were nature.
Just like other (what we see as distinct) entities in nature do not see themselves as separate from anything else. They go about their business, transform energy to their bodies (eat). If and when they cease to exist, then it's not a big deal.
I don't mean war in a philosophical sense, I mean in a psychological and practical sense. Life was hard. So hard they don't even think to complain about how hard life was because they can't even conceive of the life we live.
My father is into genealogy, and while it doesn't float my boat I'm at least interested enough to listen. He shows me family records, including births and deaths, and even just the late 19th century is a freaking bloodbath by modern standards. Infant after infant after toddler listed in the death records, just to name one example.
I think the core of the article is human intimacy. The cause of this intimacy is not always the fear and economics of survival. I like to think along - "Friend is your need answered". One has different needs, some professional, some emotional and some relating to fear. Facebook and other media does not replace but blurs distinctions and level of intimacy required with a new generalized publish and subscribe model.
>"Friendship wasn't an affectation, it was a necessity; humans are effectively incapable of surviving as an individual with no social support, and these people were, by modern standards, in a constant state of just barely scraping by."
That's just society though, that's not friendship. Going out on a hunting party requires me to be friendly, cordial at least, with those I hunt with. Being friends would probably help as it implies a better understanding and ability to predict action, compensate for inaction and so work better toward the goal. You can do useful work with people you don't get on with at all.
tl;dr - You reminded me of a favorite article on relativism and understanding other cultures (especially other cultures very far from us in time and circumstances). There's a quote from the piece below, and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in this issue.
>> As some people say, we're already in a Singularity relative to ancient Grecians, inasmuch as they couldn't understand our world at all... and I think it's true in the opposite direction, too.
This reminded me immediately of a line of thought from Bernard Williams[1]. He's discussing relativism, and he argues that there is some truth to it (roughly: relativism, understood in a very specific way makes sense for ethics, but not for science). In order to make this argument, he considers what it would mean for two or more systems of belief to come into contact. (As a shorthand, he calls a system of belief an S throughout the paper.) He wants to make the claim that relativism is coherent in cases where Ss can to some extent understand one another, but there is no real possibility of a person with S1 giving that up in favor of S2 (or vice-versa).
This is already very long, but my point is that I think it's not so much that "they couldn't understand our world at all" or that we can't understand theirs. It's rather that however well we understand it, we simply could not give up our S and take up theirs - not without massive false consciousness.
Here's the key quote you made me think of:
>> [M]any Ss which have been held are not real options now. The life of a Greek Bronze Age chief, or a mediaeval Samurai, and the outlooks that go with those, are not real options for us: there is no way of living them. This is not to say that reflection on those value-systems may not provide inspiration for thoughts about elements missing from modern life, but there is no way of taking on those Ss. Even Utopian projects among a small band of enthusiasts could not reproduce that life: still more, the project of re-enacting it on a societal scale in the context of actual modern industrial life would involve one of those social or political mistakes, in fact a vast illusion. The prospect of removing the conditions of modern industrial life altogether is something else again -- another, though different, impossibility.[2]
[2] "The Truth in Relativsm" Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, New Series, Vol. 75, (1974 - 1975), pp. 215-228, on page 224. It's here on JSTOR, in case people have access to that: http://www.jstor.org/stable/view/4544875. It's also collected in Bernard Williams Moral Luck.
The closest thing that might get you there is farming communities in the Midwest... with no power, or cell phones, or cars, or houses, with dangerous wild animals still roaming about, no medical treatment, no firearms, and no prior 21st-century civilization thought patterns, and you're still only sort of glimpsing it.
Seriously? And people in the Midwest are still somehow the "ignorant ones" ... Stay classy.
No, that was, "Start here (Midwest), then add the following things to get closer". Obviously none of those are true... even if you were feeling persnickety and critical "no firearms" should have been a bit of a clue!
(Might I also add that farming is increasingly a technological job; they are on the forefront of practical robotics, to say nothing of the knowledge that industrial farming requires about various bits of chemistry and finances.)
I chose the Midwest farming communities because of population density. Even a "small village" today is packed very tightly compared to "the old days"; hooray modern sanitation!
I live in Indiana, in the middle of the sticks. There's farms on 3 sides of us, with a smallish forest on the 4th. Cell phones go in and out regularly (we live in hilly terrain). We have no high speed internet, nor does our house have reliable 3G service. AT&T is due to roll it out within a month.
Deer are the most common pest. I've had 3 totalled vehicles because of them. The next are the wolves and coyotes we have. A few years ago, a mailwoman was attacked by a pack of wolves and dogs. We also have rattlesnakes and cottonmouths along with various other not as poisonous snakes. In our area, we also have black widows and brown recluses.
Admittedly, I only live maybe 50 minutes away from Indianapolis (via I65). But even a half an hour out of Indy can leave you in some ass-backwards part of the state.
And honestly, many people I know locally choose to be ignorant. I tend to think it's an American attitude against "bein dem smart types", and not just Midwesterners.
Friendship's always struck me as closely tied in with serendipity.
When I was in college, I had a wide circle of online friends in the Harry Potter fandom. I figured I'd never meet most of them, many of them were just bored high-schoolers, and a few had pretty serious mental problems. My parents were like "Why do you spend so much time talking to these people?" Hell, when I've mentioned the Harry Potter fandom as a significant life event in a past comment here, tptacek was like "Fanfiction? Seriously?"
But over the years since then, that group of friends gave me tons of emotional support through my first forays into dating and my academic difficulties in college. They gave me the advice that eventually convinced me to stay in school. Advice on, and a ready-made friends-group for, my semester abroad in New Zealand. My first software project, carried through from conception to completion. The nucleus of my social contacts while I was heads-down working on my startup after college. My job at Google. My first kiss, repeat date, and make-out session.
You can't always predict what good things will result from a relationship with someone. One of the things that I hated about the startup scene was that everyone wants something - they'll take you out for coffee to pitch their new startup that needs a technical cofounder, but as soon as you make it clear that you're not ready to do that at this time, you never hear from them again. I never expected that I would get a job at Google from someone in the Harry Potter fandom - after all, she wasn't even a CS major, I'd met her in person all of once, and our conversations consisted mostly of squeeing over Harry/Luna and nothing technical. But when I started looking for jobs and asked who was hiring, she was like "I know this guy, I can vouch for him", and I'd say it's worked out pretty well for everyone involved.
If he had an interesting, thought-provoking point to make, I couldn't extract it through the technophobia and sweeping generalizations and general framework of data-impoverished assumptions that began the article. At the risk of committing the same sin, it does seem that this is the very essence of the out-of-touch article. The author feels greatly disconnected, or for some reason feels like other people are too greatly disconnected for his comfort, and blames modernity. If I am (shallowly) reading this correctly, that is not an original nor profound thought.
I dont feel you deserve to be voted down on this comment...
I actually think your statement - while ultimately needing more argument behind it - is actually true of just about all of the analysis I read these days. It's all thoroughly atavistic - without a particularly well explained explanation as to what exactly is the value of the thing being lost.
This article is actually better than most... but it's not great. It intimates that the strength of friendship comes from the intimacy that allows for critique as well as support.
But then the author goes on to focus on the elements of social networking which are actually entirely compatible with the account of friendship that he praises - namely the drop in signalling costs associated with online social networking.
Backward looking authors such as these are usually confused in this way - they fret over the seeming 'cheapness' of online social networking - but confuse this with the corresponding superficiality of those relationships.
To dispel this confusion I like to use the following analogy. Back when were apes - we used to signal allegiance by grooming - an expensive and time consuming activity. Now imagine that we developed language within the space of generation (not true - but bear with me) - imagine what the grand parents would have thought of their grandchildren signalling to each other cheaply to one another using language. they would have thought it cheap - and insincere.
But of course - the use of language in and of itself is not constitutive of a shallow relationship. What they would be reacting to is a sudden drop in the cost of signalling - and would mistrust it because of the costs that they were used to.
The upshot is that there is nothing essential in the nature of social networking that leads to a lack of intimacy. You can't blame the tech here.
Having said that - there is a danger posed to intimacy by some of the uses being made of the tech. But it will come from the ability to trade out your established intimacy for economic reward.
Why does any criticism of technology instantly get labeled as technophobia or luddism? Is it not good to ask why technology X is in your life, and if you want it to be?
> Yet what, in our brave new mediated world, is friendship becoming? The Facebook phenomenon, so sudden and forceful a distortion of social space, needs little elaboration. Having been relegated to our screens, are our friendships now anything more than a form of distraction?
to show he is not technophobic.
Similar missives have been written for each generation. So I am skeptical and don't think he met that burden in this article.
His general framework of data impoverished assumption?
His assumptions in the first two paragraphs are quite evident, and any later assumptions are supported by data which he provides later on.
I find no sweeping generalizations on his part, he deals with modern society as a whole and maybe that requires him to make general comments.
Which parts of the article are you specifically referring to in your comment?
(this response is not meant to be a defense of Facebook in particular; the essay in the OP is a critique of digital friendships in general)
What trite. It reminds me of the essays about growing up in the 50s, when everything was simple and everyone got along unless you happened to be black or gay. If the only way you connected to friends was to write a "10-page missive" then it's quite likely you conducted your personal relationships in a way that made you unable to see that not everyone made and continued friendships through 10-page letters.
There's nothing wrong with long walks on the beaches and long wistful letters, but not everyone was able to maintain friendships like that. I'm thankful to live in a world where I can make good friends from random chats, and yes, some of these low-energy-at-first, random connections were made through Facebook. It doesn't mean that these friendships don't progress into something deeper.
Not everyone gets to live the kind of life that a Yale professor (the author of the OP) gets to lead. That doesn't mean that the ways we connect now are any less valid or meaningful than the epic moments and letters he apparently shares with his close friends.
Interesting. So, in another words, how you form friendships that are meaningful to you may not be specifically valid for someone like the OP, but as they are valid for you, then the way you form those friendships is valid (if we are to assume valid means "it works" and not to compare to some standard.)
So I've actually gone ahead and built and app for Google+ to help people curate more substantive relationships on the platform - so that in principle online social networking doesn't have to be about being superficial.
The idea is that it's just a matter of better managing the relationships and expending energy in a more efficient way - on those relationships that yield the most value.
I've only just launched and have no idea if the site will fly under load - or even if it needs more work before expecting humans to use it. Wouldn't mind if some of the HN folk would be up for giving it a test run...
edit - btw - needs a webkit browser. Opera and FF latest versions will work - but performance is bad.
Assess the strength of your relationships on Google+ in terms of how often people are commenting, sharing and plussing your public posts and vice versa. See at a glance where you need to apply more energy in your G+ relationships and identify those who aren't reciprocating as much as you would like.
How does this make social networking less superficial?
I think I'd need to know what aspect of it particularly makes you say that to answer you adequately...
But the problem I have on G+ is that it's hard to remember people that are willing to engage - the ones with whom you've actually had a substantive conversation. Of course - the mere numbers doesn't capture this - and I'm not pretending that it does. I've got more features planned to build upon this basis - but it gives you a starting point and at least jogs your memory about who it is that might deserve more of your time.
The intuition behind it is similar to when you keep calling that mate of yours to go for a beer but he keeps palming you off and not returning your calls. Eventually you'll come to conclude that they aren't willing to put in much effort and you'll start expending energy elsewhere.
It's relatively easy to keep track of this economy in our offline worlds because the number of people was not very high. But it's much harder to track online - our brains just aren't designed to do it. That's why we end up frittering away our time with whatever flashes up on the screen next. An app like mine is about helping us focus our attention on the places it is most deserved.
good site idea, but the url is very hard to parse (for humans, i mean). i don't know how much that matters to your project, but the repeated doubling of letters 'tt', 'ee', 'ff' is disconcerting. good luck, though!
This is intersting for all the historical context thing that is refreshing, and so boring because he takes the facebook and other social networks messages so much at face value in it's message.
I don't think anyone needed to read 10 pages to understand that when facebook told you "you are now friend with xxx" it doesn't mean anything much as "this person is now on your feed and can be seen as so", and the real work you did to become friend happens parallely to that. And keeping friendship also has no direct relations to the medium you use (before facebook you sent post cards to your friends, not 10 page missives, and it wasn't much bounding in itself).
It's well writtten but lacks insight in what people really see in a social site.
The example in the article about Achilles and Patroclus is not what we would call a "friendship": Achilles was Patroclus' mentor, what means he was his master and had sexual privileges over him. It's not a one-to-one, both-are-equal relationship; it's more similar to a master-slave one. They were sexual partners, not friends ("friend" had different connotations in the classic world).
Yes. I read the article, becoming more sceptical as I went. In my opinion, he underplays modern relationships (relegating them all to Facebook-like) and overplays classical relationships.
It would be good to recognise that he is controversial and is an English Lit professor, not a historian or anthropologist.
I have found that good friends are hard to find. I feel that this hasn't changed much down the ages. Superficial friendship depends strongly on the culture and probably did so down the ages, too.
As some people say, we're already in a Singularity relative to ancient Grecians, inasmuch as they couldn't understand our world at all... and I think it's true in the opposite direction, too. History doesn't make any sense at all unless you learn to stop seeing it through 20th/21st century preconceptions about ethics or civilization. (And I'm not saying I've got a grasp on the older preconceptions, I've just observed that using my "default set" certainly doesn't have much explanatory power for why people do what they do in the past.)
I'd submit for your consideration the idea that what we see in ancient friendships is more like what we'd today call the "war buddy" bond, because life was a lot more like a war back then. As we move through history and more and more people are no longer engaged in war with Nature just to survive, we see that level of bond fade because we see the conditions that give rise to that level of bond fade. Personally, I would say this is cause for celebration more than sadness.