Ed Mitchell: Platform neutral

What do we mean: Friends?

The Guardian recently published an item provocatively titled ‘You can’t make friends online‘. It’s a deliberately inflammatory title to the early findings of some Pyschology research into social networks, which seem to indicate that in spite of our growing national obssession with ’social networking’, the friends that you make online are not as serious as those you make in the physical world. It seems to reflect the previous findings found by Dunbar.

This has raised a few mild hackles and some good discussion in the emint group as many of us can instantly list friends we have made over the internet, or friends who have met on the internet and subsequently married, but I’m not going into the research (although I have asked the very friendly researcher, Will Reader, to keep us informed as and when it comes out formally).

It all boils down to the word friend, and how it is used. The word is the currency of social networks at the moment; this will evolve.

Friendship is the most important thing to us after our genes. We can be very protective of the concept in different ways, and rabidly mis-use it in others. Different cultures have totally different ways of communicating friendship. Did you know that Dutch people have two different words or friend? Vriend: friend, and Kennis: an acquaintance (literal translation: knowledge of). There is no social stigma around this. This strikes me as very sensible.

In this new era of social networks and all things networking, we are going to need to understand more about our relationships with people and how that is handled by the technology choices we make.

Simply having a contact or a friend won’t be enough; they will be one of many types of relationship. We have moved from having a private little black book to having a sprawling openly available friends list in the internet. It’s related to an understanding of our identity simply referred to by David Snowden with his Rugby allegory, or his more heavy stuff about social atomism. So having opened up this can of worms, how will it pan out?

Technology makes the quantitative data representing our friendships very explicit - to the point of counting friendships like apples, associating our importance to this number, re-assuring others with data about our network, and other stuff related to the over-arching assumption that having more ‘friends’ is better. It’s a new power law, when you think about it.

But how do you decide whether someone is a friend in facebook or any other socially oriented technical platform? Especially if you feel quite uncomfortable with the concept already. What are your criteria? Especially when we can see eachother’s status updates and hence the barriers of personal/professional are incrasingly broken down. I stick to quite rigid ones myself but detect some bristling when someone I have never met asks to be my friend and I say no. Charlie Brooker’s article about this is a masterpiece.

OK so Facebook is just the latest platform, but it is a clear and loud indicator of the future and the ongoing movement toward increasing granularity and transparency encouraged by ICT.

At the moment, Facebook, Flickr etc. (and the out-of-the-box community platforms) only enable ‘friends’ to cover the full panoply of relationships and related emotional assessments, but we will increasinly see others like Muliply break this out into multiple relationship types (neighbour, colleague etc.).