Are Facebook friends real friends?

Last night I attended for the first time a meeting of the Brighton Salon, a forum for debating ideas, which meets every month or so in a restaurant on Brighton seafront. The discussion centred on social networking:

"The explosion of social networking sites in recent years has prompted some serious reflection on the state of modern friendship. While many suggest that friendships, like communities, are collapsing, others claim that we have never been so well and closely connected. But do both diagnoses miss the point?"



The discussion was kicked off by Helen Birtwhistle, press officer for the Institute of Ideas. She cited some interesting statistics, the sources of which I'm afraid I did not note:

• There are something like 4.5m Facebook users in the UK, a 300% increase on the year. There are another 10 million MySpace users.
• Of the 16 hours that regular internet users spend online a week, 11 hours are spent social networking (hardly seems credible - maybe I misheard!).
• The average Facebook user has 150 friends (suddenly I feel unloved).
• The average American has only two close friends, 25% have none.

The implication of all this seems to be that, while we might have a great many superficial friends, with whom we gossip and 'hang out', we have fewer 'real friends' to whom we have a strong emotional attachment and who can rely upon to help us out when times get tough. I buy this up to a point, but am not at all convinced that social networking is in any way a cause of this state of affairs, not least because the phenomenon was in evidence long before social networking came on the scene. It seems likely to me that more credible reasons for our lack of close friends - at least among adults - are (1) the diminishing amount of discretionary time that we have available for social activity and (2) our increasing mobility, which sees our childhood friends scattered around the globe. If anything, social networking can be seen as a symptom of the problem: we attempt to surround ourselves with friends online to compensate for the lack of 'quality time' that we can spend with our friends face-to-face. Looked at in this light, Facebook is alleviating what could be a much worse problem.

Another area of controversy among the group last night was the degree to which Facebook blurs the distinction between our personal and private lives: work colleagues are all bundled in with family, old school friends, the people you socialise with face-to-face, and people with whom you share a hobby, sport or interest. There was from some a degree of outrage about this situation, as if it represented an erosion of personal liberty and privacy. Sorry, but becoming a Facebook member is voluntary, the information that you disclose to others is discretionary and there are privacy settings. You do have a choice. You can even, as one man related last night, delete all your friends, close your account and commit 'Facebook suicide'.

I have another angle on this. Exposing yourself - hopefully honestly and openly - in the same way to all the 'stakeholders' in your life is a liberating experience. We all - and this very definitely includes me - adopt different roles and personas depending on who it is we are dealing with. What a relief to see these disctinctions break down, to remove some of our pretensions. And being open and honest about who and what you are is an important step along the way from superficial to close friendship - you can't be a close friend of a persona. To give a personal example, I have been blogging now for two years and have established a valuable network of professional colleagues with whom I can share and debate professional issues. Many of my blogging colleagues have now become my Facebook friends. Now - at least to the extent that they let me - I get to know about what they do at weekends, what's worrying them or making them angry, what books they read, what films they like and so on. The longer this process continues, the more I get to know my professional colleagues as people and the more they feel like real friends. If I visit the town or city in which they live, I would feel comfortable fixing up to see them, and would be delighted if they did the same when in the UK. I would seek them out at conferences and would immediately feel at ease with them. One or two of these relationships may develop further so that we work together on joint projects - who knows, maybe even become lifetime friends.

So, at least for me, social networking has a useful role to play, not only in maintaining a professional network, but in building relationships that may start off superficial but have the potential to be lasting. And that could reverse the trend and see us a little less isolated in future.

By the way, on October 5th in London, the Institute of Ideas is debating What good is e-learning? The very cheek of it! I can't be there, so if you get the chance to go along, please update me on the discussion!