Friends, Friendship, and Technology: An Ominous Sign

How has technology affected the quality of friendships? By all accounts, friendship is one of the most wonderful things in life that a person can experience.  As Aristotle magnificently observed, good friends delight in one another’s company.  Among good friends, spending time together is rather like a form of spiritual nourishment.  The conversations, the reactions to one another and to what goes on around them, the pauses, and so forth: When two people are good friends, all of these things makes spending time together ever so rewarding.

Against this backdrop, we can ask—indeed we should ask—whether technology is having a positive impact upon friendship.

Now, it is manifestly obvious that technology has done wonders for friends staying in contact with one another.  We can send emails across the globe.  We can send instant text-messages via our cell phone or Twitter.  The cost of telephone communication continues to drop making it more and more and more affordable for individuals to have telephone conversations with one another although they are great distances between them.  Indeed, one can use Skype or Google Voice and pay little if anything for a telephone conversation.

Then, of course, there are social networking sites such as Facebook or MySpace.  And there are yet other sites devoted exclusively to hosting our pictures.

The foregoing considerations, then, would suggest that technology is indeed a marvelous friend of friendship—that our friendships are richer and better and deeper thanks to technology.

So let me share with you a story.  Among the graduate students with whom I have worked over the years.  There are two with whom I became very close.  One of them served as a teaching assistant for me in my Introduction to Political Theory course.  One of my most vivid memories of him is the particular attentiveness he displayed to an argument that I was presenting to the course that was being taught in the Maxwell Auditorium.

Now, to be sure, he could have written me an email in which he wrote “Great lecture, today”.  But he did not do that.  More importantly, though, if he had written me such an email, the email message would not have been a substitute for my experiencing his riveting demeanor of attentiveness on that day.

The moral of the story is this: All the technological communication in the world is no substitute for two individuals being in one another’s presence and witnessing one another’s reactions.  My telling you that I am truly happy that you got the award is not—and cannot be—a substitute for your witness my eyes light up and for your beholding my absolutely irrepressible joy over the announcement.  So it is no matter how many exclamation points or smiley-faces I add in the email or SMS message.

Two people can send the exact same message of congratulations, with the same number of exclamation points and all.  But Mary’s tears of joy and John’s tears of joy will not be identical to one another, although they are standing side-by-side, even arm-in-arm.

Telephone conversations, of course, are not at all the same as photos or text-messages.  Just so, the best conversations are between individuals who have a rich history.  The laughter or the unexpected pause the unexpected poignancy, and so forth, all make up a rich conversation between friends.  No exchange of text-messages or photos can come even close to equaling the richness of such a conversation.

As I was getting off the plane in Paris, I called my friend Laurent.  Here is a condensed version of the conversation:

Me: How is your father?
L: He is in the hospital.
Me: I will have to go and see him.
L: Be careful, my father no longer likes blacks.
Me: No problem.  I am no longer black.

Laurent and I laughed and laughed and laughed and laughed.  That simple exchange of a couple of second—an exchange which sat upon a veritable mountain of friendship—was also a most profound affirmation of our friendship.  That exchange via SMS would not have had the same impact.  For it was the give-and-take of the conversation with no spaces in between that made that conversation the majestic moment of friendship affirmation that it was.

This brings me back to the question that I posed at the outset: Is technology having a positive impact upon the quality of friendship?

With regard to friendship, there is nothing in this word that can substitute for individuals spending time together.  Accordingly, when two people have a sufficiently rich history of spending time together, then technology is indeed a friend of friendship.  For their history of time spent together will necessarily and rightly serve as the prism through which they understand one another in the present.  The past history of salubrious interaction will be the bridge of trust into the future.

With individuals without a rich history of spending time together, I fear that technology is not at all a friend of friendship.  Rather, it serves only to maintain an illusion of closeness.  Two people do not have the real experience of friendship in Aristotle’s sense of the idea merely because they text one another 20 times a day.  After all, we know that people text one another while in the midst of doing all sorts of sundry things.  Indeed, people may prefer texting precisely because it is less time consuming.  And if that is the case, then what does this say about the quality of the friendship in the first-place?

If between any two people, their texting one another is the larger part of the basis of their knowing one another, then what we have is a friendship that is shorn of those spontaneous personal moments that necessarily confirm and affirm the trust and goodwill and affection between them.  As I noted above, anyone can put a bunch of exclamation marks and smiley-faces after a sentence.  I do not have to think much of a person in order to that.  It suffices that I know that this is the sort of thing that one does.

In the midst of a very tense conversation that took place at a family meal, I looked at the patriarch of the house and blurted out: “Je t’aime”.  The argument has become irrelevant.  The words “I love you” shall never become irrelevant.  That moment was unforgettable moment of friendship.

Alas, friendship at its best is about shared moments to which no smiley-face or exclamation point could ever do justice.  Insofar as we are losing sight of this truth owing to technology, then a most disturbing reality is that technology is chipping away at our humanity.

In The Fragmented Self: Technology and the Loss of Humanity (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming), I shall develop these sorts of arguments more fully.