{"id":886,"date":"2007-09-25T22:28:17","date_gmt":"2007-09-26T04:28:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/wp\/?p=886"},"modified":"2007-09-25T22:28:17","modified_gmt":"2007-09-26T04:28:17","slug":"reengineering_f","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=886","title":{"rendered":"Transacting friendship"},"content":{"rendered":"

In Virtual Friendship and the New Narcissism<\/a>, an article in the latest issue of The New Atlantis, Christine Rosen provides a wide-ranging and well-balanced survey of the social networking phenomenon. What I found most interesting was her perceptive reading of the subtle but disturbing “bureaucratization” of friendship promoted by Facebook, MySpace, and other such sites:<\/p>\n

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In its traditional sense, friendship is a relationship which, broadly speaking, involves the sharing of mutual interests, reciprocity, trust, and the revelation of intimate details over time and within specific social (and cultural) contexts. Because friendship depends on mutual revelations that are concealed from the rest of the world, it can only flourish within the boundaries of privacy; the idea of public friendship is an oxymoron.<\/p>\n

The hypertext link called \u201cfriendship\u201d on social networking sites is very different: public, fluid, and promiscuous, yet oddly bureaucratized. Friendship on these sites focuses a great deal on collecting, managing, and ranking the people you know … The structure of social networking sites also encourages the bureaucratization of friendship. Each site has its own terminology, but among the words that users employ most often is \u201cmanaging. [A Pew survey] found that \u201cteens say social networking sites help them manage their friendships.\u201d There is something Orwellian about the management-speak on social networking sites: \u201cChange My Top Friends,\u201d \u201cView All of My Friends\u201d and, for those times when our inner Stalins sense the need for a virtual purge, \u201cEdit Friends.\u201d With a few mouse clicks one can elevate or downgrade (or entirely eliminate) a relationship.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This strikes me as another example of how business’s automation ethic is moving<\/a> into the more intimate sphere of our social lives as more of our relations become mediated by software. As Rosen goes on to point out, “it would be foolish to suggest that people are incapable of making distinctions between social networking ‘friends’ and friends they see in the flesh.” Still, when you read the words<\/a> of one young woman quoted by Rosen – \u201cI consistently trade actual human contact for the more reliable high of smiles on MySpace, winks on Match.com, and pokes on Facebook” – you have to wonder where we’re headed. What can’t be reduced to a series of transactions, an exercise in process management?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Virtual Friendship and the New Narcissism, an article in the latest issue of The New Atlantis, Christine Rosen provides a wide-ranging and well-balanced survey of the social networking phenomenon. What I found most interesting was her perceptive reading of the subtle but disturbing “bureaucratization” of friendship promoted by Facebook, MySpace, and other such sites: […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-886","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/886","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=886"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/886\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=886"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=886"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=886"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}