The internet has made it easy to meet new people. But are online relationships really true friendships?
Read these texts:
“Why Online Friendships Are the New Norm”
“This Friendship Has Been Digitized”
“Teenagers’ Friendships Online Provide Emotional Support, Study Finds”Why Online Friendships Are the New Norm
Fawnia Soo Hoo
This article explores teenagers’ positive experiences making friends online, as well as precautions they take when making new online connections.
Looking for a new friend or two? The days when the cafeteria, freshman orientation, and extracurriculars were the go-to places to meet pals are long gone. The internet has always been a worldwide platform for forging relationships with cool people who share similar interests, and social media has only made it easier to find would-be BFFs. Hey, even Ashley Benson and Lucy Hale met on MySpace years before they were co-stars!
Connecting online is indeed the norm now, and for some, even a preferred method of friend-finding. “Being online actually gives you the chance to make a friendship happen faster than it would in real life because you have constant access to each other,” explains 16-year-old high school junior Justina. But where do you even start? The options are seemingly limitless.
Facebook’s appeal comes from the ability to do virtual background checks and ask for references via mutual friends, while Tumblr, Instagram, Twitter, message boards, and personal blogs are popular since they tend to be gathering spots for people with common passions and values. Across all platforms, however, there’s a uniform perception that there’s less risk of rejection and more objectiveness in general. All that anxiety that can come with reaching out to someone in the flesh melts away, as do those preconceived notions held by people you’ve spent the last decade of school with.
“It feels like there’s a lot less pressure,” says 19-year old Tori. “Friendships can grow quicker and deeper because they’re based on mutual interests. It’s different than slowly getting to know someone just because they happen to take the same class as you.”
But when you do go to the same school, it’s much easier to lean over and ask to borrow notes, study together, or grab lunch. Making the first be-my-friend move online requires different protocols.
“You might follow them on Instagram and comment underneath their pictures, or respond to one of their tweets, or comment on a Facebook status,” says Nakiya, a 21-year-old college junior in North Carolina. “A lot of interaction eventually leads to a friendship because of the familiarity.” She met her best friend Korla on Twitter, and they consider themselves a real-life version of Gossip Girl BFFs Serena van der Woodsen and Blair Waldorf.
Justina says that her online bestie, Emily, was way more direct. “Emily basically stalked me down through my blog and said, ‘I’m determined to be your friend.’ Lo and behold, it worked!”
Which begs the obvious question: How do you know that someone isn’t a catfish or worse? There are some easy ground rules, like people who say they’re famous probably aren’t telling the truth and be wary of those who share excessive, fake-seeming details. Of course, you have to trust your gut too—and do your homework.
“I usually make sure we have a certain number of mutual friends—50 or more,” says 14-year-old Zhao, describing her Facebook background checks on prospective online pals in her California town. “When I chat them, I make references to recent events at my school and see if they understand what I mean. My friends have posted things like, ‘Does anyone know this guy?’ on people’s walls and everyone discusses whether the person is real or fake.”
Another surefire way to make sure someone is who they say they are? Two words: video chat. If the person gets squirmy or shady about not wanting to show their face online (“my camera is broken” is a popular excuse), that’s definitely cause for concern. But if you’re feeling squirmy, it’s fine to have backup; Justina’s mom has even sat in on her Skype sessions with her friends to make sure nothing was up.
Olivia, a 17-year old high school senior from Florida, also has some top-level tricks for weeding out the fakers if video chat weirds you out. “If you don’t want to webcam with them, talking on the phone or looking through their profile or page will give you a pretty good clue,” she says. “Check out their friends and followers, as well as the content and consistency of their online activity.”
Once all that’s out of the way, strong friendships can begin to form. “Online friends seem to be more understanding,” Olivia explains. “They see things objectively and give great advice and support. You can talk about things you may not be able to talk about with your friends in-person—for me, it’s TV shows. Most of my friends don’t watch the same shows as me. I love how easy it is to find people online who are interested in the same things I am.” Or as 15-year-old Alyssa puts it: “It’s like you have an online diary that actually talks back.”
As for the downside, a common complaint about online friendships is the geographical distance they can entail. For instance, California native Justina’s two online BFFs live in England and Australia. Yes, they can Skype and Facetime, but it’s not quite the same as hitting the mall or going to a dance together. On the flip side, that does translate into having friends in cool, faraway places you can visit one day.This Friendship Has Been Digitized
Stephen T. Asma
Journalist and Professor of Philosophy Stephen T. Asma considers his teenage son’s relationships with other online gamers, and questions whether shared online experiences create the same kind of bond as shared face-to-face experiences.
“I’ll be there in a few minutes,” my 15-year-old son shouted from his room. “I’m playing Xbox with a friend.”
“Who’s your friend?” I inquired.
“A guy named Scuzzball,” he replied.
“Oh, what’s Scuzzball’s real name?” I asked.
“I have no idea,” he said, slightly annoyed.
“Where’s he from?” I continued.
“Somewhere in Canada, I think … no, wait, maybe it’s France. I don’t really know. Oh, wait, it doesn’t even matter, because Scuzzball just left the game and he’s been replaced with a bot.”
“That sucks,” I tried to commiserate. “Your buddy is replaced by artificial intelligence?”
“It doesn’t matter, Dad, it happens all the time! The game continues.”
My son’s indifference about playing with a person or a bot is somewhat typical of gamers these days. They refer to one another as “friends,” but to me their bond looks very tenuous. I don’t recognize any sense in which Scuzzball and my son are real friends. And that concerns me. I wonder whether the pre-internet, face-to-face experience of friendship that I knew growing up will be lost to our post-internet children.
Each year, more and more of our lives take place in the digital space. The average teenager spends up to nine hours a day online. My freshman college students tell me they are actually on screens for around 12 hours a day, since almost all homework is also now online. According to a 2018 Pew report, nearly 90 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds regularly use social media. In 2016, the American Academy of Pediatrics released a policy statement warning, “Children who overuse online media are at risk of problematic internet use, and heavy users of video games are at risk of internet gaming disorder.” Even Silicon Valley is growing skeptical about digital utopia; 32 percent of tech professionals now believe digital life will harm our mental well-being over the coming decade.
Around 2005, people reported that the average number of their strong friendships had dropped from three to two. At the end of a 2006 study, close to 25 percent of respondents said they didn’t have anyone they could truly trust. More recent research suggests that these trends are persisting, as intimacy among teenagers is replaced by efficiency.
The loss of intimacy, however, does not seem to be a concern among the young people actually growing up online; they report feeling socially supported by large networks of online “friends” whom they rarely or never see face-to-face. Getting “likes” and other forms of digital grooming from larger audiences validates their repeated self-disclosures.
But do these young people even know what they are missing? And does it matter?
Social isolation has certainly increased in Japan, where half a million young people live as “hikikomori” — recluses who don’t leave their homes. And loneliness in Britain has increased enough that the government has created a “minister for loneliness.” According to a new survey, 86 percent of American and British citizens believe that “increased use of technology” is contributing to social isolation.
Some of the earliest philosophical work on friendship comes from Aristotle, who pointed out in his “Nicomachean Ethics” that friendships of pleasure and utility are easily formed but also easily abandoned because such bonds are flimsy. Deep friendship, by contrast, is when you care for your friend for her sake, not for any benefit you can accrue from the relation. This is selfless friendship. You can have only a couple of these friends because they require a lot of time, work and effort, and a general blending or intertwining of two lives. You have to clock time with these people, and you must make sacrifices for each other.
Classmates and workmates can become friends, as can fellow members of sports teams and musical groups, spouses, religious or military colleagues, and so on. These examples suggest that friendship needs three criteria for full realization: shared experience, loyalty and shared intentionality, or mental connection.
What about in the digital sphere? Our online “friends” — whether it’s Scuzzball or the Facebook friend you’ve never met — satisfy the intentionality criterion, because we communicate extensively with language and report to each other long-term goals, disappointments, beliefs and other facets of mental life.
We can share experiences with a person online, but the experiences seem thin when compared with face-to-face experiences. Online adventures (social networking, gaming) can certainly strengthen friendship bonds that were forged in more embodied interactions, but can they create those bonds?
Teenagers playing “Call of Duty” with online teams, for example, are having collective emotional experiences, as in the case when my son’s squad must work to capture the enemy’s munitions. And these shared adventures strongly trigger the dopamine pleasure system, so it seems like there should be bonding. However, the online “friends” may be little more than dopamine-dosing tools and easily replaced without much dissonance. Indeed, one doesn’t even know who Scuzball is, or where he lives, or if he’s a he, or if he is a person or a bot.
The kind of presence required for deep friendship does not seem cultivated in many online interactions. Presence in friendship requires “being with” and “doing for” (sacrifice). The forms of “being with” and “doing for” on social networking sites (or even in interactive gaming) seem trivial because the stakes are very low.
More important, the “shared space” of digital life is disembodied space. We cannot really touch one another, smell one another, detect facial expressions or moods, and so on. Real bonding is more biological than psychological and requires physical contact. The emotional entanglement of real friendship produces oxytocin and endorphins in the brains and bodies of friends — cementing them together in ways that are more profound than other relationships.
It is possible that virtual reality and augmented reality technology will soon be able to generate such friendship-forming experiences. Having embodied adventures with another person — even in a VR suit — is more likely to trigger the deeper oxytocin-based bonding. Current social networking, however, seems to privilege the shallow triggers of the brain’s reward system (dopamine squirts in the ventral tegumental area).
Perhaps the most defining feature of deep friendship is “doing for,” as when my friend has my back in a combat situation or, more prosaically, brings me soup or medicine when I’m sick. Only strong bonds, built through embodied mutual activities, have the power to motivate real sacrifices. But it is unclear why online “friends” would bother to do the hard work of friendship. When the going gets tough, wouldn’t my disembodied online friend just retreat to frictionless virtual friends who have few needs and make few demands? When I asked my undergraduate students whether they had people in their lives who would bring them soup when they’re sick, they laughed at my Stone Age query and said they’d just order soup from GrubHub or UberEats.
In the end there are three possibilities regarding friendship and digital life. First, digital life replicates all of the essential criteria of friendship, so there’s nothing to worry about. I sincerely doubt that. Alternatively, digital life fills and absorbs waking life time so that people do not engage in paradigm cases of friendship (like sports, collective arts, free-range childhoods, etc.). In this way, digital life contributes to certain kinds of social isolation. Or last, digital life produces false friendships (because they are relatively disembodied). In other words, young people do not know that they lack real friends.
Maybe our fears about technology are exaggerated. My son reminds me that the average American kid still gets an enormous amount of face-to-face social time in school every day.
“We hang out!” he told me, when I asked what he does with his friends. “During lunch and free time we play multiplayer games on our phones,” he elaborated, “and we talk about the girls and teachers. We help each other with homework. We insult each other and laugh at memes, and maybe pull some pranks.”
When I asked what makes a good friend, he said, “Friends should have common interests, and I like it if the person is funny. I guess they should also be nice and loyal … but be able to give and take a good put-down too!”
These modest criteria are pretty close to my own. In my own friendships, I’m willing to accept that flawed attachments are better than none, so I guess I should extend the same realism to my son’s generation.
Teenagers’ Friendships Online Provide Emotional Support, Study Finds
Sarah Schwartz
This article shares the results of a study showing that online friendships provide similar types of support as offline relationships.
From doing homework to reading the news to hanging out with friends, teenagers’ lives increasingly take place online.
Friendships that form face-to-face carry over onto Snapchat, Instagram, and other digital platforms. And for the most part, talking with friends online provides the same kind of support and validation for teenagers as seeing friends offline, according to a new review study of teenagers’ virtual social interactions.
“People have these concerns that somehow, technology and social media are supplanting relationships or minimizing the emotional intimacy,” said Stephanie Reich, co-author of the study and an associate professor of education at the University of California, Irvine, in an interview. But that’s not the case, she said.
“The key pieces of friendships, whether you see them in a schoolyard or at the mall, are happening on social media as well.”
Lead researcher Joanna Yau and Reich looked at six characteristics that are consistently used to define friendship in research: self-disclosure, validation, companionship, instrumental support, conflict, and conflict resolution.
They identified 36 peer-reviewed articles, book chapters, reports, and presentations about teens’ and young adults’ interactions on social media platforms that gave examples of these six characteristics. For each of the characteristics, the researchers analyzed the similarities and differences between face-to-face and online interaction.
The studies they examined demonstrated that friendships fulfill the same emotional needs online that they do in person. For example, teenagers used Snapchat and instant message platforms to both share mundane daily moments and reach out during times of stress. These exchanges build intimacy and trust, just like self-disclosure between friends that happens face-to-face.
Online communication can change the shape of some interactions, said Reich. “A lot of social media platforms don’t give you a lot of text or space in which you could really articulate what your point is,” she said, often leaving a lot of room for misinterpretation. And conflict on more public platforms—like Facebook—often plays out in front of an audience, which can quickly escalate the stakes.
But even as social media can spark conflict, it can also help diffuse it, she said. In some of Reich’s previous research, included in the review paper synthesis, she found that teenagers feel social media provides an avenue for conflict resolution.
“It’s emotionally intense to face somebody in person and apologize and hash through stuff,” she said. “But if you could text it back and forth, or if you could comment it back and forth, then it’s a little bit safer-feeling.”
This study doesn’t negate other research that links heavy social media use with depression, said Reich. Instead, she said, social media is the site of a variety of interactions and emotional experiences—some that are positive, like friendships, but also some that are negative, like cyberbullying and jealousy.
Because technology creates a social space, researchers need to change the way they think about screen time—time spent interacting with devices, she said.
This shift has already started to take place, she said. Last year, the American Academy of Pediatrics lifted its recommendation banning any screen time for children younger than 18 months, allowing video chatting.
“Technology now being mobile, it weaves within your day. It’s not like television, where you sit down and watch TV and you’re kind of removed from other things,” said Reich. “You’re in and out of it, all day long, so to think about screen time as some kind of isolated, quantifiable amount is problematic, or challenging at the least.”
As you read, consider: Are online friendships as valuable as face-to-face friendships? Write an essay arguing your position, using evidence from each text. Wrire arguments and counter arguments. make sure your writing is clear and concise.