Twitter and the nature of friendship and community
In my previous post, I gave the TV show Cheers as a metaphor for Twitter. Like any analogy, it has some utility in describing something but also limitations. By comparing an thing, phenomenon or process to something it is not, I’m limiting how you might experience it. Libel by label, as McLuhan said. My analogy was a bar, someplace to relax with friends outside of the context of our “real” lives. I received – and truly appreciated – some responses to the post, but Jen’s comment prompted some reflection on the limits of my analogy:
Would your RL friends stop what they’re doing at the drop of a hat just to say hi to your students? Would your RL friends give you full access to their work projects? Do you real friends tell you how smart you are every day? Do your RL friends know exactly when you need a boost and send you some affection instantly? I don’t think it’s like a bar, because it’s not outside of work. It’s during work. And home. And running errands. And attending concerts and sporting events. Your network permeates your life however and whenever you choose. We’re not going to ask you to help us move and we’re not going to show up on your doorstep when you’re in the middle of family time. We won’t talk your ear off on the phone or make you feel guilty when you miss social time to spend time with your family. We won’t ask to borrow money and we won’t borrow your tools and DVD’s and never return them. Your network is whatever you want it to be!
Wow, that’s a heck of a group of friends I have on Twitter. It sounds almost like the Borg but in a good way. I suppose I was suggesting that my friends on Twitter are not only of a different quality but of a lesser one as well. That’s what I was thinking at the time, but some of the responses are making me reconsider. So here a some big questions about friendship. What makes a friend? How are online friends and real life friends different? Do we make friends differently online than in real life? In order to become friends, two people have to be in proximity to each other, either physically or virtually. My real life friends are people I went to school with, work(ed) with, neighbours (past and present), family – all of them are people I had to meet in some way. Actually meeting someone is a prerequisite to them becoming a friend. That’s a bit of a no brainer, but sometimes it’s good to state the obvious when trying to analyze something.
I was thinking originally that similarity is necessary, but I don’t think that’s absolutely true. I would say that mutual affinity is necessary. Similarity can help with mutual affinity. I might not have anything – temperament, interests, past experiences – with anyone yet still become a friend. I have several friends that, before we became friends, I just thought were intriguing people and so I wanted to know more about them. Whatever the basis for it, mutual affinity has always been part of a friendship.
A friend is also someone you know. By this I mean that you know about someone – their personality, life story, strange quirks and neuroses – as opposed to being familiar with them. The difference can be confusing because we use the same word to describe both things in English, In French these would be expressed as je connais (I know of) and je sais (I know that).
The biggie is trust. I can’t think of a friend that I trust, at least in some aspect. Some friends I trust to return my DVDs after they have finished watching them. If someone is a closer friend, I might trust them to watch my house and take in my mail while I’m on holidays. The very closest of friends I would trust to look after my children if I wasn’t able to due to illness or death. (Obviously, my wife is without a doubt my very best friend.)
The interesting to me about the trust is that sometimes we form friendships that are initially based more on trust by proxy than directly. This is the “friend of a friend” phenomenon. I can accept someone as being a friend if they are a friend of one of my friends or somebody else I already know and trust. The more people that we share in our social network, the more proxy trust a person acquires. As I become learn more about someone, the “friend of a friend” proxy trust is replaced by direct trust.
So there’s my short list of the characteristics that, to me, define a friendship – proximity, mutual affinity, knowledge about that person (someone please come up with a word to describe what I mean) and trust. How do those characteristics apply to people we know online? We may not have real proximity, but we might have a type of virtual proximity by following each other in twitter, for example. I will see someone’s tweets and they will see mine. We aren’t in physical proximity, but we are aware of each other’s existence. Mutual affinity is an easy one online – reading what people write is a great way to find out a bit about them and decide if you are interested in knowing more about them. I think this is also true when it comes to knowing someone. It seems to me that reading someone’s thoughts is an even better way to know them than meeting in person since you don’t have any preconceptions based on looks.
What about trust? Initially there is a lot of trust by proxy going on, at least in my Twitter experience. Of all my twitter colleagues, I know about half a dozen in my real life, but I have created a two way relationship (follow them and am followed by them) with many more. When I get a new follower, one of the first things I do is take a look at who they follow. If they follow some of the people I trust, then I’ll trust them. If I see one of my trusted twitterers messaging to someone, I’ll grant them a level of trust. As I learn more about the people, I may learn to trust them more as well. They might even become my friends. At the core of it, the springboard that launches someone from being an acquaintance to a friend is trust.
Here’s something else Jen said to me, in a message on twitter, regarding my previous post:
Cute post. We’re real friends. I think that debate is over. Something’s changed in the last few months.
I e-mailed Jen about that because I was curious what she meant about something changing in the last few months. Her response was that we’ve reached a “critical conference mass” (nice term), by which she means that there are enough real life personal connections within the group that we’ve reached a kind of tipping point within the network that means we are turning into a community (I’m going to avoid trying to delineate the community – maybe it’s all the overlapping networks of the people I twitter with). A community has many attributes but one of the most important is trust, just as with a friendship. I think that “what has changed” is that there are so many direct connections and so much direct trust that we are generating proportionately large amounts of proxy trust that approximates the amount of trust within some real world communities. There is a kind of resonance within the group. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that friendships are being formed in this sort of milieu. I’m enjoying being part of the process, and I feel like I am making some real friends.
Postscript – As I was writing this over the past two days (kept getting distracted by tweets – oh the irony), Rick wrote a post that describes his wife’s take on the whole twitter friendship and community thing. I think she has some good points, and I think the limitation to 140 characters has a lot to do with it. Quick – go read Rick’s post: Karin’s view of Twitter. It connects very nicely with this post.
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