“FRIENDSHIP is the only cement that will ever hold the world together,” said US president Woodrow Wilson. A century on, could it be that our fast-moving, high-tech and increasingly urbanised existence is causing that cement to crumble?
Much has been made of the , which reported that between 1985 and 2004, the average US citizen’s number of close friends – the people they can turn to in a crisis – fell from three to two, and individuals with no confidants at all increased from 8 to 23 per cent. In the UK, a rise in the number of people living alone and the weakening of community ties due to people moving house more often have led to warnings of a “crisis” in friendship. Other studies have linked the internet and cellphones with social isolation. However, while new technology may have changed the traditional notion of friendship, there is also evidence that it is having a positive impact.
Facebook was founded in 2004 at Harvard University to enhance the campus life of college students and people still use it for the same reasons. “The underlying incentives have not changed – to find people who will support you emotionally, gossip with you, flirt with you, just be there for you,” says Danah Boyd, a principal researcher at Microsoft Research. We still have our core group of friends, the ones we hang out with the most, whether online or offline. “But the dynamics have changed because of the technology and because of contemporary youth culture.”
Advertisement
The most conspicuous difference is the number of people with whom we have some kind of enduring contact. Researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, found that the social network of the average college student increased from 137 in 2006 to 440 in 2009. A typical US teenager now has around 300 Facebook friends, , and 79 followers on Twitter – not all of whom would count as social ties as they may not be being followed in return (see diagram, above).
This is far more than the 150 that Robin Dunbar calculates to be the maximum number of “meaningful friends” our brains have evolved to deal with (see “Clever cronies: why brains are key to friendship“). Who are all these extra people? Known as weak ties, they include high school or college friends, work colleagues past and present, previous partners, people met travelling, casual acquaintances, friends of friends and occasionally strangers. Social networking sites allow us to maintain a relationship with these peripheral friends – via sporadic messaging, for example, or by browsing their photographs or status updates – where previously we would have let them fade away.
But the technology does more than that. New research suggests that . A study of more than 400 Facebook users by Jessica Vitak at the University of Maryland, College Park, reveals that the site is especially valuable for friends who live more than a few hours’ drive away. The further away two friends live, the more they engage on the site. For such friends, says Vitak, Facebook may make the difference between a real relationship and the memory of one.
Engaging with others online – responding to a question or wishing someone happy birthday on Facebook, for instance, endorsing someone’s skills on LinkedIn, or “liking” or commenting on a picture on Instagram – is a form of social grooming, a modern throwback to our prehistory. “These are all ways in which I am signalling that I’m paying attention to you,” says Nicole Ellison at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. “Like primates picking nits off one another, we have expectations of reciprocity – we can expect attention back from them in the future.” Ellison and Vitak have found that social grooming on Facebook is a highly effective way of maintaining weak ties, and that there are many good reasons to do so. The deep, emotional bonds that characterise our most important relationships are still mostly cultivated face to face, even if we nurture them online. But weak ties, which tend to be diverse and span different social groups, have benefits of their own. They can provide new ideas and perspectives, an incentive for innovation, job openings and the sense of being part of a wider community.
“Like primates picking nits off one another, we have expectations of reciprocity”
One of the most dramatic illustrations of how the reach of our social networks affects us day to day is the ease with which we soak up the moods and emotions of people we don’t know well. This has always been the case in the real world – you see someone smile and you smile back. But in online networks, this contagion effect is amplified many times. After analysing more than a billion status updates on Facebook, a team led by James Fowler at the University of California, San Diego, discovered that people inadvertently transmit positive and negative moods via their written comments, even to friends and acquaintances living in different cities – their weak ties (). “The online world has only recently made that possible at a massive scale,” says Fowler. “I think this means we will see more global synchrony in emotions. Now more than ever, we feel what the world feels.”
“We now feel what the world feels, through online contagion”
Human see, human do
Other behaviours, including drinking, eating and dieting habits also spread online, but almost exclusively through people’s strong ties – their close friends and family. This goes for voting too, as Fowler demonstrated in a separate study. On 2 November 2010, the day of the US congressional elections, his team posted a message in the news feeds of 61 million American Facebook users urging them to vote, and allowing them to broadcast their intention to vote to their network. Some 60,000 people who were not intending to vote changed their minds, as did 280,000 of their Facebook friends. When the researchers analysed those additional 280,000 voters, they found that the vast majority were close friends of the original recipients (). “The top 10 friends were driving the whole social effect. That confirms that if you want to spread behaviour change, you need to focus on real-world networks. This is really exciting because it opens up the possibility of using the online world to make the real world a better place,” says Fowler.
The landscape of friendship has certainly been transformed in the past decade, but whether this has been for the better is still hotly debated. Some studies indicate that interacting with people online is just as valuable psychologically as interacting in person, . Moira Burke, who researches computer science and social psychology at Facebook, found that – although it is not clear whether Facebook use reduces loneliness or whether people who are already socially connected use it more.
However, there are risks to maintaining friendships online. “Because of the nature of digital communication, the nuances of interactions can be lost,” says Rachel Grieve, a psychologist at the University of Tasmania, Australia. “What was once a relatively meaningless comment to a friend over coffee, somewhat misconstrued and then clarified in a matter of moments, can now be an enduring statement, seen and misinterpreted by many.”
Other risks are subtler, as Boyd points out in her book It’s Complicated. The ability to hold on to every acquaintance makes it difficult for teenagers to build new meaningful relationships when they arrive at college. “They’re dealing with the discomfort of their first semester, and they end up relying heavily on their peers from the past,” she says.
Narcissism or necessity?
The most serious charge against modern-day social networking is that it fosters narcissism and individualism. “Emotional disclosure has gone public, ” says Patricia Greenfield, a developmental psychologist at the University of California, Los Angeles. She points to research by Jean Twenge at San Diego State University, which shows that since the early 1990s, US college students have scored progressively higher on measures for narcissistic traits. Other studies show that narcissistic people tend to be highly active users of Facebook and Twitter, which particularly lends itself to exhibitionism.
But some are more sceptical. New research shows that among today’s college students, who are often accused of being the most self-orientated demographic of all, there is no association between narcissism and the use of Facebook (). Boyd argues that avid use of social media is driven not by individualism or gadgetry but by the need for friendship. “Over and over when I interview teenagers, they tell me they would much rather get together in person, get on their bikes and just be left alone. But we’ve created such a level of fear-mongering that we’ve made it extraordinarily difficult for them to get together in any space that is not online.”
Given the urgency of our need to connect with others, and the difficulty of doing so in today’s urbanised milieu, how long before we start to reach out beyond our species into the world of artificial intelligence? And how sophisticated would a robot have to be to satisfy the essentials of human friendship, such as reciprocity and personality?
Already there are sociable technologies that press our “Darwinian buttons”, as Sherry Turkle puts it in her book Alone Together – robots that make eye contact, track motions and gestures and give the impression there is “somebody home”. For example, Takayuki Kanda at ATR Intelligent Robotics and Communication Laboratories in Kyoto, Japan, has developed a humanoid robot called Robovie, whose basic interactive capabilities are sophisticated enough to convince 15-year-olds that it is a social being with feelings. Kanda says one of the most important challenges is to develop robots that can be with people all the time, not just inside the house. The more time someone spends with a robot, he reasons, the more likely they are to establish a “real relationship” with them.
The key to developing sociable robots is to make them fallible, says John Murray at the University of Lincoln, UK. Murray and his team are introducing human cognitive biases into their robots, such as a memory glitch that causes them to misattribute certain things they are told. “We are trying to develop the imperfect robot, to see if they will be more accepted by humans.” The challenge, he adds, is to avoid the “uncanny valley” – a human-looking machine that interacts in a spookily not-quite-human way.
Is this the future of friendship? Turkle, who is director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self, hopes not. “People seem more than ever fixed on creating a robot best friend or teacher for children or a robot companion for the elderly,” she says. “But the elderly deserve to be able to talk about the end of their lives, what they have lost and what they have loved, with people who understand what love and loss is. A robot can never offer this.”
In the 21st century, as at any time, where friendship is concerned what matters is quality not quantity. “A large social network provides you with plenty of opportunities to make contacts or gather information,” says Grieve. “But when it comes to feeling a sense of warmth and belongingness, having a few close friends is what matters.” In other words, as everyone who grew up with the internet knows, true friendship is when you walk into someone’s house and your smartphone’s Wi-Fi connects automatically.
Read more: “Friendship: The chemistry of our social glue”
This article appeared in print under the headline “Friends in high-tech places”
