What kind of happiness does technology procure then? And why do people remain both enthralled and unsatisfied by it? (Albert Borgmann, Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life)
To be a friend to many people in the complete kind of friendship is not possible (Aristotle ,Nicomachean Ethics, Book VIII)There is a nice moment in Desmond Morris’ documentary The Human Zoo where, as he ponders the means by which the human animal deals with dense urban living, he hoists his address book and declares: “This is his [the urban dweller’s] personal tribe!” No doubt if he were writing the documentary today he would make the same point by recourse to his Facebook page.
Facebook provides us a convenient mnemonic device for keeping track of family and acquaintances. More than this, of course, it offers the means to friendship itself. We can carry out a range of cordial tasks on Facebook: we can post, comment, like, poke (does this even exist anymore?), chat, re-share, or indeed, if we incline to do so, quietly monitor the lives of our friends.Assuming that the nature of friendship has not budged much since Aristotle wrote about it in the Nicomachean Ethics, this means that in order for Facebook to serve be a one-stop companionship-shop it must allow for friendships based upon use, pleasure, and finally should facilitate the mutual exchange of well-wishing between the virtuous. There is more to say about this, but at first pass this can translate into commercial acquaintanceships, mutual affinities between those who share an interest, and finally the reciprocation of mutual respect between people of fine character – besties, in other words.
One of the implications of Facebook use, according to anthropologist Robin Dunbar, is that is slows the decay-rate of friendship. Facebook allows us to collate intimates from the fragmented geographies of our contemporary lives and to sustain contact with friends from our past with whom we might otherwise only have sporadic contact. In doing so, Facebook may be, in fact, just one of a progression of technologies that allow us to keep track of our personal human networks (our “tribe”) when these extend beyond the so-called “Dunbar’s number”, that is, those 150 people predicted to be within the “natural” limit of our information-retention ability. Dunbar’s observations were based upon a supposed general relationship between the size of a primate brain’s neocortex and the size of the average social group. Dunbar’s Number seemingly finds support in analysis of social aggregations of hunter-gatherer tribes, military units, and even Christmas card networks. Lending further support is Facebook’s own assessment that the average number of friends per account is between 120 and 130. (...)
Now, this is all well and good but what accounts for the unsettling feeling that some of us share that Facebook and other social networking tools are not providing all the required vitamins of friendship. The concern is that Facebook is, in fact, just one of the innumerable fetishistic things we do to distract ourselves from the harder task of cultivating our best capabilities. In reflecting on the older social technologies, for instance spoken language, one recalls that a person can become especially adept at them: one can be a skilled orator or a notable conversationalist, but can using Facebook become a source of a unique human excellence? Perhaps excellence in Facebooking is demonstrated by using an appropriate ratio of likes to written comments? Or perhaps the appropriate comic timing of status updating? Another way of expressing the concern is to wonder if Facebook is worrisome precisely because it makes something like expertise at friendship too easy, too readily and conveniently available? That is, rather than not being good enough at replicating friendship has it, rather, become, confusingly, all too good at it?
Furthermore, has Facebook commodified friendship? The price we pay is not only in the cash-investment in the supporting technologies required to service one’s account (computer, smart phone, or even the new Facebook phone) but there is a price also paid in the sort of faith-investment entailed in going down the virtual friendship rabbit-hole: the confidence that spending time will enhance happiness.
A helpful way to frame and address the issue of Facebook’s ability to seemingly add and subtract from friendship simultaneously is by means of Albert Borgmann’s “device paradigm”. Borgmann is a German born American philosopher, who teaches at the University of Montana. In his classic critique of modern technology, Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life (1984) Borgmann investigates a “debilitating tendency” of our modern technological lives, represented in the manner in which technology makes promises and subsequently erodes the quality of life in attempting to make good on its promises. Technology, Borgmann says, promises to place nature and culture under our control and it does so by means of devices that make goods and services effortlessly available to us. The characteristic feature of devices is that they perform their tasks immediately, and without making much in the way of demand upon us in return. Emblematic devices for Borgmann include television sets, automobiles and so forth. Facebook and other social media tools seem to fit the bill (though there is some squabbling it seems in the secondary literature about what counts as a device and what does not). Expressed in Borgmannesque terms the Facebook is a device that makes our friends available to us whenever we choose. Space and time all but disappear. Thus I can conjure up my pals over my morning tea or by means of a Facebook app on phone as I commute to work. It’s easy, ubiquitous, effortless.
So, why might any of this be a problem?
by Liam Heneghan, 3 Quarks Daily | Read more:
