This afternoon, Nora interviewed danah boyd and William Deresiewicz about the nature of friendship online — whether social networking has changed what we mean when we say ‘friend,’ and how digital tools like Facebook and MySpace ask us to define, categorize, and list our friends.
A shorter version of this interview will air on Spark 104, but you can hear the full, uncut interview below, or download the MP3. [runs 34:04]
Play audio:
Note: The Spark community asked some great questions for danah and Bill. We intended to use some of them in our interview this afternoon, but we just plumb ran out of time in our studio booking. Thanks again for the excellent, thoughful questions.
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"One of my students said to me, 'People here are too busy for intimacy.'"
I find that almost impossible to believe.
Almost impossible to believe, and almost heartbreaking, too.
In fact, if I were an instructor and a student approached me and started whinging about her hunger for intimacy in her life, I would call my barrister and start filming the meeting on my mobile. And that would be the last meeting with that student.
I find it far more likely that someone is trying to make a point, employing some literary license. But I take the point.
Wow…that is sad…the paradox of all our tools and yet….that's why I hang out after school…I get kids talking
Well said Eric…can you come speak to my teaching colleagues who are pressing the panic button. The number of teens( and colleagues) who have been provoked to think because I was using Facebook is significant. How many doors of insight do we close by excluding specific media! It is all akin to 'burn the books'. thanks Al Smith
I love me some CBC Spark.
But can I just say, it really seems to be turning into Tech-related Moral Panic Weekly.
You know what would be an interesting story idea? Talk about that certain portion of the population that decries every new innovation (however insignificant or incremental) as a new moral hazard to be avoided or controlled, lest our children/parents/teenagers/pets be irreparably harmed.
Television, computers, and video games were all viewed as huge threats by some, and our society has yet to crumble. Texting was supposed to be the death of grammar and spelling, and Twitter was going to force the simplification of all discourse to a 140 characters. I'm sure that in their time, the advent of books, recorded music, and automobile travel were all viewed as harbingers of doom as well. But for the most part, humanity has always pulled through just fine.
You can relax. The advent of Facebook or any other website is not going to destroy our desire for personal relationships.
My opinion is that in the vast majority of cases, technology just creates a novel venue for the expression of human qualities that already exist. These qualities may be shocking to some who want others to embody their definition of what is noble and good; but to me these new expressions give us a much better mirror to who we really are as a species, an image freer of the optimism or cynicism we often apply.
Hi Eric,
Thanks for the thoughtful comment. Well, I hope we're not turning into Moral Panic Weekly, (funny!) though I admit, we did make two back-to-back episodes with some similar tones. I guess I'd like the show to walk a line: not dipping into moral panic/technological determinism, but at the same time, recognizing that technology is culture and has cultural consequences. To your point, no, books didn't turn out to be harbingers of doom, but we're certainly way different people, with a way different society, than if we were still an oral culture. I don't think it's too much of a stretch to think that the Internet may have as many cultural consequences as the culture of the book did. But yes, point taken. We'll try to avoid MPW!
As Marshall McLuhan said back in 1964, "In a culture like ours, long accustomed to splitting and dividing all things as a means of control, it is sometimes a bit of a shock to be reminded that, in operational and practical fact, the medium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium – that is, of any extension of ourselves – result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology." His thinking holds true today more than ever.
Oh, Marshall: http://www.marshallmcluhan.com/downloads/ballad_o…
Interesting. I have found Spark to be a great place to hear the arguments, and have had time to think about the issues so I have ammunition against those trying to push moral panic. I find that too much tech media doesn't invite into the conversation skeptics, or recognize that there is a large part of the world that isn't living this stuff and that have questions.
I found the interview last week with Jaron Lanier to be very informative — specifically as thoughts from someone I don't appear to agree with.
As to personal friendships — I found the conversations in this episode encouraged me to make some phone calls with some out-of-town friends I've not been great at keeping connections with. Funny how that goes…
I found this podcast interesting in a number of ways. Within the past 3 months my university aged daughter turned off her FB – she's in an intense local experience of friends and she said she didn't want to 'waste' the time – her community is in her house of schoolmates and classroom and pub nights. My gr. 9 aged son 'un-friended' my on FB – and we talked about this – because he wanted privacy 'from' adults – to explore his own social world. And I had a smaller FB group but I found myself spending time that didn't finally 'feel' good – too much a sense of creeping, not enough a sense of talk. And so I deactivated myself and only notified a few people that I had done so. And I don't miss it at all. And I also don't hear from FB 'friends' either. I can live with those losses however.
I have heard, purely anecdotally, about younger people bowing out of FB, or having 'photo free' parties so pics don't end up on social media.
Part II – I am in total agreement with William D. about what's worrisome here with adults. I also see that it takes us all some time to discover individually that technology never finally satisfies relationship – but that organizations who want our individual / consumer 'face time' market this idea incessantly and gain advertising credits in doing so. Well, I could go on, but you get the idea! Many thanks – it's a podcast I will save and share in my own classrooms also!
I'm a bit amused by the hand-wringing concern about the supposedly shallow nature of online "friends". I can't claim to understand how everyone feels about the depth of their online friendships, but these social networking programs are proving useful to me. I've reconnected (admittedly in a superficial way) with old high school classmates, former students of mine and "real" friends from where I used to live. These days, when people move often and go great distances, maintaining contact is difficult. My experience is that once you leave town, your previous friendships seem to fall by the wayside pretty quickly as time progresses. On-line social networking seems to be one way of at least keeping in touch. It may not be as deep as a life-long friendship with someone in the same town you've lived in all your life, but fewer of us have that option these days. Maybe we should just accept that systems like FB are useful tools and maybe not try to read too much into their use.