{"id":12578,"date":"2012-10-20T18:49:28","date_gmt":"2012-10-20T22:49:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/?p=12578"},"modified":"2012-10-20T19:00:55","modified_gmt":"2012-10-20T23:00:55","slug":"social-media-and-the-devolution-of-friendship-part-i","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/2012\/10\/20\/social-media-and-the-devolution-of-friendship-part-i\/","title":{"rendered":"Social Media and the Devolution of Friendship: Part I"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cWell, you saw what I posted on Facebook, right?\u201d<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t know about you, but when I get this question from a friend, my answer is usually \u201cno.\u201d No, I don\u2019t see everything my friends post on Facebook\u2014<\/strong>not even the 25 or so people I make a regular effort to keep up with on Facebook, and not even the subset of friends I count as family. I don\u2019t see everything most of my friends tweet, either; in fact, \u201cupdate Twitter lists\u201d has been hovering in the middle of my to-do list for the better part of a year. And even after I update those lists, I probably still won\u2019t be able to keep up with everything every friend says on Twitter, either.<\/p>\n

I feel guilty when I get the \u201cYou saw what I posted, right?\u201d question. I feel like a bad friend, like I\u2019m slacking off in my care work, like I\u2019m failing to value my important human relationships. Danah boyd (<\/strong>@zephoria<\/a>) was <\/strong>talking about something similar<\/a> two nights ago at “Boom and Bust<\/a>“\u2014about how social networking sites create pressure to put time and effort into tending weak ties, and how it can be impossible to keep up with them all. Personally, I also find it difficult to keep up with my strong ties. I\u2019m a great \u201cpick up where we left off\u201d friend, as are most of the people closest to me (makes sense, right?). I\u2019m decidedly sub-awesome, however, at being in constant contact with more than a few people at a time<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Social media saturation?<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Anyway, I have a bad case of Social Media Saturation Guilt, and \u201cYou saw what I posted, right?\u201d hits that guilt square on its head. Recently, however, I\u2019ve been thinking about how the awkward collisions of online and offline conversation used to run in the opposite direction<\/strong>. Twelve years ago[i]<\/a> I was on an email list that was basically a private, 70-someodd person pre-Facebook: members shared links, asked questions, had serious conversations, sent invitations to parties, and circulated photos taken at those parties after they happened. It wasn\u2019t uncommon to talk about something someone had posted to \u201cthe list\u201d in face-to-face conversation, whether in small groups or at larger events.<\/p>\n

Then, over a period of a month or two, most of us on \u201cthe list\u201d got on Livejournal<\/a>, and most of us who had Livejournals started \u2018reading\u2019 most of the rest of us who had Livejournals. (Yeah, Livejournal. We\u2019re back in late 2000, remember?)<\/p>\n

The affordances of Livejournal being what they are, most of us posted different content to our Livejournals than we did to \u201cthe list.\u201d The intersection of Livejournal content and in-person conversation, however, wasn\u2019t as seamless as the intersection of list content and in-person conversation. A new phenomenon popped up<\/strong> that a good portion of \u201cthe list\u201d found anywhere from off-putting to downright hurtful, and it looked something like this:<\/p>\n

The Scene: <\/em><\/strong>a \u201clist\u201d party.<\/em><\/p>\n

List Member A: <\/strong>Hey, it\u2019s good to see you! What have you been up to recently?
\nList Member B:<\/strong> [Starts to tell story<\/em>]\u2014
\nList Member A:<\/strong> [Cuts off List Member B<\/em>] Yeah, I know. I read your Livejournal.<\/p>\n

These aborted conversations became common enough that they spawned a long, intense debate on \u201cthe list\u201d about what should be the proper etiquette for intersections of Livejournal and life-in-the-moment.<\/strong> Some list members felt it was rude and insensitive for friends to cut each other off; other list members felt it was rude and entitled for friends to expect each other to sit through the same story twice. The eventual compromise was to declare a sort of \u2018best practice,\u2019 which was that List Member A should signal being caught up with List Member B\u2019s Livejournal by chiming in with a detail from the story: \u201cOh yeah! But then you found your cat hiding in the wall, right?\u201d List Member B, on the other hand, should truncate the story accordingly: \u201cYeah! I have no idea how she got in there!\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Everyone remembers this…right?<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

So how did the Awkward Party Comment shift from \u201cI know, I read your Livejournal\u201d to \u201cYou read what I posted on Facebook, right?\u201d<\/strong> There\u2019s a simple explanation, which is that each of us was probably consuming less friend-generated and friend-circulated digital content back then. This could be because those of us on \u201cthe list\u201d were just maintaining fewer digital connections in 2000, but there\u2019s also the mode of communication to consider: though some list members juggled multiple different list subscriptions, and Livejournal, and usenet or BBS groups, all of these revolved primarily around text-based communication, and original text takes time to create (something of which I\u2019m particularly aware at the moment, as I write this). When the rate of friend-content production was slower, it was easier to consume most if not all of what our friends produced and circulated.<\/p>\n

Yet I don\u2019t think this shift in content production alone explains the shift in social expectation. I think there\u2019s something else in play, which I\u2019m going to call the devolution of friendship<\/strong>. As I explain over the course of this two-part essay, I link the devolution of friendship to\u2014but do not \u201cblame\u201d it on\u2014the affordances of various social networking platforms, especially (but not exclusively) so-called \u201cfrictionless sharing\u201d features.<\/p>\n

What does \u201cdevolution\u201d mean? I\u2019m using the word here in the same way that people use it to talk about the devolution of health care<\/a>. One example of devolution of health care is some outpatient surgeries<\/strong>: patients are allowed to go home after their operations, but they still require a good deal of post-operative care such as changing bandages, irrigating wounds, administering medications, etc. Whereas before these patients would stay in the hospital and nurses would perform the care-labor necessary for their recoveries, patients must now find their own caregivers (usually family members or friends; sometimes themselves) to perform free<\/em> care-labor. In this context, devolution marks the shift of labor and responsibility away from the medical establishment and onto the patient<\/strong>; within the patient-medical establishment collaboration, the patient must now provide a greater portion of the necessary work. Similarly, in some ways,<\/strong> we now expect our friends to do a greater portion of the work of being friends with us<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

[Obligatory \u201cWe\u201d Check: by \u201cwe,\u201d here I mean some social media users some of the time. I\u2019m not saying that all<\/em> social media users\u2019 expectations have shifted in this way, or that any given social media user\u2019s friendship expectations are uniform across different friends, times, or contexts, or that the devolution of friendship applies only to people who use social media. Got it? Ok good.]<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
It’s easy to generate content these days.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Through social media, \u201csharing with friends\u201d is rationalized to the point of relentless efficiency<\/strong>. The current apex of such rationalization is frictionless sharing<\/a>: we no longer need to perform the labor of telling our individual friends about what we read online, or of copy-pasting links and emailing them to \u201cthe list,\u201d or of clicking a button for one-step posting of links on our Facebook walls. With frictionless sharing, all we have to do is look, or listen; what we\u2019ve read or watched or listened to is then \u201cshared\u201d or \u201cscrobbled\u201d to our Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, or whatever other online profiles. Whether we share content actively or passively, however, we feel as though we\u2019ve done our half of the friendship-labor by \u2018pushing\u2019 the information to our walls, streams, and tumblelogs<\/a>.<\/strong> It\u2019s then up to our friends to perform their halves of the friendship-labor by \u2018pulling\u2019 the information we share from those platforms.<\/p>\n

When we think about this form of \u201cbulk sharing\u201d from our perspectives as content-creators and circulators, there are ways in which it seems like a good thing. We\u2019re busy people; we like the idea of making one announcement on Facebook and being done with it<\/strong>, rather than having to repeat the same story over and over again to different friends individually. We also like not always<\/em> having to think about which friends might like which stories or songs; we like the idea of sharing with all of our friends at once, and then letting them sort out who is and isn\u2019t interested amongst themselves. Though social media can create burdensome expectations to keep up with strong ties, weak ties, and everyone in between, social media platforms can also be very efficient.<\/strong> Using the same moment of friendship-labor to tend multiple friendships at once kills more birds with fewer stones.<\/p>\n

There are also ways in which we like being on the \u201cmore labor\u201d side of devolution.<\/strong> For instance, sometimes we like the devolution of health care: if we are privileged enough to have people who can perform the necessary care-labor for us, many of us would prefer to recover from surgery in the comfort of our own homes rather than in hospitals. Theorists point out that we provide free labor when we use self-checkout machines at grocery stores and pharmacies, but to some of us that \u2018free labor\u2019 is a small price to pay for getting in and out faster, for waiting in a shorter line, and for not dealing with (\u201cdealing with\u201d) another human being at a conventional checkout counter.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
So many friends, so little time.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Similarly, sometimes we like the devolution of friendship. When we have to \u2018pull\u2019 friendship-content instead of receiving it in a \u2018push\u2019, we can pick and choose which content items to pull.<\/strong> We can ignore the baby pictures, or the pet pictures, or the sushi pictures\u2014whatever it is our friends post that we only pretend to care about (if we even bother to pretend). Whether we interact through digital media, through the telephone, or through speech in face-to-face conversations, socializing with specific individual friends requires that we mask our disinterest in [babies\/pets\/sushi\/other] by actively \u2018smiling and nodding,\u2019 in one form or another. The non-specific sharing of devolved friendship, however, lets us skip this step. We can leave it to everyone else to respond, or tell ourselves that our sushi baby pet friend isn\u2019t really talking to us in particular. Within devolved friendship interactions, it takes less effort to be polite while secretly waiting for someone to please just stop talking<\/em>.<\/strong><\/p>\n

So if we like devolved friendship from the perspective of both share-producers and share-consumers, what\u2019s the problem? While I won\u2019t go so far as to say they\u2019re definitely \u2018problems,\u2019 there are two major things about devolved friendship that I think are worth noting. The first is the non-uniform rationalization of friendship-labor, and the second is the depersonalization of friendship-labor. I’ll explore both of these in the coming week, in Part II of this essay.<\/p>\n

\n

 <\/p>\n

Someecard image from http:\/\/www.someecards.com\/birthday-cards\/it-would-be-significantly-easier-to-wish<\/a><\/em>
\nSocial media saturation image from http:\/\/contexts.org\/articles\/spring-2012\/too-many-friends\/<\/a><\/em>
\nPhoto of Antigone in wall heater by Whitney Erin Boesel. Used with permission.<\/em>
\n Social media production rates image from http:\/\/spectacularoptical.tumblr.com\/post\/33773042893<\/a><\/em>
\nToo many friends image from http:\/\/cupidscharm.blogspot.com\/2012\/06\/can-you-have-too-many-friends.html<\/a> <\/em><\/p>\n

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[i]<\/a> Oh noes, I\u2019m old. Crap. \ud83d\ude1b<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cWell, you saw what I posted on Facebook, right?\u201d I don\u2019t know about you, but when I get this question from a friend, my answer is usually \u201cno.\u201d No, I don\u2019t see everything my friends post on Facebook\u2014not even the 25 or so people I make a regular effort to keep up with on Facebook, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1875,"featured_media":12595,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_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":[9967,892],"tags":[2558,18540,18541,942,18542,12596,106,18543,18544,9183,18545,732],"class_list":["post-12578","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-commentary","category-essay","tag-danah-boyd","tag-devolution","tag-devolution-of-friendship","tag-facebook","tag-free-labor","tag-frictionless-sharing","tag-friendship","tag-friendship-labor","tag-interaction","tag-rationalization","tag-scrobbling","tag-social-media"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/files\/2012\/10\/significantly-easier-wish-birthday-ecard-someecards.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12578","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1875"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12578"}],"version-history":[{"count":23,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12578\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12606,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12578\/revisions\/12606"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12595"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12578"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12578"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12578"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}