Friendship And Social Media

To address the issue concerning the formation of close friendships in mediated contexts, such as the Internet, Adam Briggle examines the positive effects of writing in his paper “Real friends: how the Internet can foster friendship”.

Firstly, in response to other authors’ claims that it is impossible to form friendships online, Briggle states that it cannot be considered impossible to have a genuine friendship in a purely online, written format, since a lot of people have experiences of having formed such relationships in wholly mediated contexts.

Briggle goes on to explain how the deliberateness implied in the writing process and the physical distance provided by mediated contexts ensure that individuals are honest and more precise when telling about themselves. These factors allow friendships to be taken to deeper levels.

Briggle proceeds to prove these points by telling the story of a soldier and a teacher who had never met, yet succeeded in forming a close friendship by exchanging written letters.

Afterwards, Briggle points out the constraints of offline relationships. The author states that in real life there are compromises people have to accept because of the existing social norms in the different environments they live in; these very constraints make offline friendships dishonest and more shallow than online friendships. This claim is supported by the example of an accountant, who doesn’t seem to have any space in his real-world life to be completely honest about himself with his acquaintances.

Lastly, Briggle quotes different philosophers, among which Nietzsche, Foucault, St. Athanasius, Aristoteles, Rousseau, Emerson, and ancient Latin literature works —Letters between Seneca and Lucilio— stressing the importance of reading and writing in improving self-awareness and creating distance in time and space between individuals. Reading and writing are slower acts than speaking, and their slower pace promotes deliberateness, moving contrary to the constant speeding up of the contemporary world —which according to Briggle prevents from forming deep relationships, promoting individuality. Therefore, the author concludes that the Internet and other mediated contexts promote friendships stronger than those formed in real-life, thanks to the distance and deliberateness implied in written communication.

Briggle wrote this article in 2008, and since then technology has advanced to the point that one might not find the two main claims of his essay valid. The distance, one of the two major positive aspects of online relationships according to Briggle, has been greatly reduced thanks to the possibility to share video, audio and images very easily, in a multitude of ways. Thinking of the most used social media in 2020, one can choose to video call a friend on the other side of the world via FaceTime, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger and get by their side in a moment, see their face, their surroundings, listen to their voice, therefore annulling any sort of distance as intended by Briggle.

Speaking of the easiness of sending pictures nowadays, it is possible to think of an almost uncountable number of choices a user has, in the event of wanting to send a picture to someone else. I made a list of the most popular ones and their different features:

A person can send a picture on Snapchat where it can be:

Send the same picture on Instagram, where it can be:

Send the very same picture on WhatsApp, where it can be:

It is clear that online communication hardly stops to writing at this time. In fact the very act of writing is something many social media platforms are limiting or getting rid of. Users write fast, use abbreviations, emojis, and prefer sending pictures or audio to explain themselves; this feature has been embraced by platforms like Instagram, Snapchat and Facebook which turned it into their strength.

Particularly, Instagram is made of pictures ONLY, with short written captions and tons of “hashtags”, brief words preceded by an “#” to improve the traceability of one’s posts. This traceability goal has slowly become the very point of using this platform: at this point, one could claim there’s hardly a couple people who use Instagram to purely tell about themselves. An increasing number of users is extremely focused on promoting their work, or even make money thanks to other users’ likes and comments.

It seems to me that this way of communicating also goes way far from that principle of deliberateness praised by Briggle. Deliberateness depends on the individuals’ attentiveness to and precision about one’s own and one’s friends' character, but modern social media seem to promote quite the opposite: fast, mostly visual and impulsive communication is the basis of how people get to know each other through modern media.

Briggle’s unspoken assumptions that 1—complete honesty is necessary for a deep friendship to develop, and 2—the fast pace of the modern World prevents from forming deep friendships, are most definitely ignored by the current online environment.

The pace of the modern online world is even faster than that of offline contexts, and social media are becoming more constrained, pushing people to assume a certain online identity depending on which platform they are using —a clear example might be the common belief among a vast part of the youth in European countries that “Facebook” is what you share with relatives and your parents are likely to see, “Instagram” is where you show off at your best and maybe get some brand ambassador partnership to make money, and “Snapchat” is where you can be silly with your close friends. This sole distinction undermines every shot at deliberateness and complete honesty: in fact, it seems these social media have reinstalled those very constraints of the offline world that Briggle condemned.

I believe Tumblr is one of the few modern platforms that could be compatible with Briggle’s criteria. This social medium allows users to share pictures, written posts, video, audio, songs, links, and almost whatever kind of digital content one can think of.The only major and significant difference with most modern media is that in the event that two users want to communicate directly with each other, they only have one way to do that on Tumblr: written chat. Tumblr is a very smart platform, as it doesn’t give users the chance to see when the recipient gets or opens a message, and it greatly limits the possibility to send pictures via chat —it is possible, but the quality and the speed of the platform when sending a picture is a huge deterrent of such practice.

I have noticed that Tumblr users tend to either connect very deeply with each other over long spans of time, or exchange a couple fast messages and then lose touch. People on Tumblr are aware of this, and they are usually not willing to move out of the platform to talk to other users; this, I believe, depends on the fact that most people consider Tumblr a safe space where they can be themselves more openly than anywhere else.

Briggle’s “distance in time and space” and “deliberateness of written communication” criteria apply in this context, and they seem to foster deeper friendships than those in the offline world and other “more technologically advanced” social media.

This essay earned me the 2nd place at Lewis College of Sciences and Letters 56th Annual Writing contest organized by the Illinois Institute of Technlogy in Spring 2021.