rfmcdonald | [LINK] "Facebook and the solitary practice of friendship" (Reply)

Liam Heneghan's 3 Quarks Daily essay on the impact of Facebook on friendships provides a thoughtful and original critique. By making it easier to maintain relationships and reducing the surprise factor, does Facebook preclude especially intimate friendships?

A helpful way to frame and address the issue of Facebook’s ability to seemingly add and subtract from friendship simultaneously is by means of Albert Borgmann’s “device paradigm”. Borgmann is a German born American philosopher, who teaches at the University of Montana. In his classic critique of modern technology, Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life (1984) Borgmann investigates a “debilitating tendency” of our modern technological lives, represented in the manner in which technology makes promises and subsequently erodes the quality of life in attempting to make good on its promises. Technology, Borgmann says, promises to place nature and culture under our control and it does so by means of devices that make goods and services effortlessly available to us. The characteristic feature of devices is that they perform their tasks immediately, and without making much in the way of demand upon us in return. Emblematic devices for Borgmann include television sets, automobiles and so forth. Facebook and other social media tools seem to fit the bill (though there is some squabbling it seems in the secondary literature about what counts as a device and what does not). Expressed in Borgmannesque terms the Facebook is a device that makes our friends available to us whenever we choose. Space and time all but disappear. Thus I can conjure up my pals over my morning tea or by means of a Facebook app on phone as I commute to work. It’s easy, ubiquitous, effortless.

So, why might any of this be a problem?

The problem is that the device, in general, supplants a richer engagement with things. To use one of Borgmann’s own examples when a wood-burning stove is replaced by heat supplied by a coal-fired central plant and piped into our homes a rich involvement with the world of the thing is lost. The stove is more than a mere appliance – it provides a focus for the home, a hearth. To select and chop the wood and to learn the knack of lighting and maintaining the stove requires a social engagement than one does not get by flipping a switch. The family gathers around it. In terms of this model, Facebook in its capacity to make friends appear by glancing at our screens, and in its reduction of social civilities to the mere deploying of “like” buttons and so on, unburdens us of many of the responsibilities of friendship. It is fair to say that, over the years, I have traveled less to Ireland to see my parents and siblings than I might have, because they remain available to me on Facebook and Skype. But instant availability comes at the cost of a flattening. A poke from friend or family on Facebook has never been, I suspect, as gratifying as an embrace in the flesh. Gone also is the satisfaction of arriving at the journey’s end – the door opening, the smell of rashers of bacon on the pan in the kitchen within, being prepared for the prodigal son’s return.

Now most people maintain a mixed strategy: inter-mingling the virtual and the physical aspects of their friendships. I have coined the term “phriendship” to refer to those intimate relationships that call primarily for real-world physical encounters. Clearly we need to maintain both phriendships and friendships. However, perhaps even the best of phriendships becomes a little deracinated by our virtual commitments. When one finally get together, the process of catching is now a little diluted. That trimmed beard no longer a surprise, nor are the graying temples, the chronicles of births, deaths. Entertainments and misfortunes have already been shared. There is simply less work to do – when we next meet up the routine tasks of friendship have been attended to in tiny byte-sized pieces.