In his chapter on personal virtues, Borgmann says our culture, which is focused on material things and especially technology, discourages us from the pursuit of virtues. I would like to respond to the ideas put forward by Roger Scruton, Tyler Cowan, and Borgmann about how facebook affects our pursuit of the virtue of friendship.
I do not agree with Roger Scruton’s assertion that facebook friendship has become a free substitute for real-life friendship. I look at my online interaction with my facebook friends not as a thing in itself, but in the context of my real-life interaction with the people I am facebook friends with. For example, when someone sends me a friend request, I ask myself why, and base my answer on their attitude towards me in real life. Sometimes I determine that the person wants to friend me so that they can ask me about homework assignments. Sometimes I decide that they’re just collecting names of people they know. And sometimes I decide that they genuinely want to get to know me better. I base my judgment of whether a person is truly my friend on their interaction with me in real life and on facebook; I don’t take facebook interaction by itself as a sign of friendship.
I also disagree with Scruton’s assertion that facebook has decreased the incentive to make friends in real life. For me facebook has actually increased my incentive to make real-life friends. If I friend or am friended by someone on facebook who I do not know well, and judge the friending to be pure in motive (ie not for the purpose of homework help or name collection), then I am much more likely to talk to that person and try to make friends with them in real life.
I agree with Tyler Cowan’s assertion that facebook makes real-life friendships easier to maintain, because so many people who do not regularly respond to text, phone calls, or e-mail use facebook every day. It’s also easier to keep up to date with the lives of your friends when you can see pictures of things they’ve done and see posts on their wall. Frequently when I check up on a friend in real-life, I’ll reference something I’ve seen on their facebook page and ask them about it.
The one area in which I think facebook does degrade friendship is the amount of time it takes away from real-life interaction between friends (Borgmann’s point). If I didn’t spend so much time looking through my friends’ pictures or chatting with them I would probably spend more time hanging out with them in real life. And perhaps that in itself is reason enough to decrease facebook time.
Overall I think facebook, if used in moderation and with an understanding of what online interaction is, can be a beneficial tool in friendship building and maintenance. What do you think?
No comments:
Post a Comment