This week’s Food for Thought:

What’s the difference between offline friends and online “friends”?

(If you answered that online friends are ones you made online, you get 10 Smartass points. Proceed directly to the university nearest you and sign up as a philosophy major with said points.)

Sure, it’s a Web1.0 type of question, but I think in the digital world we live in, it’s become an even more pressing question. We now have so many ways to connect with people we’ve never physically met, and our connectedness gets tighter and tighter every day.

Yet many people think there’s still some qualitative difference between the types of friendships such that offline friends get the status of true friends and online ones are “friends,” with the quotation signifying something like people we’ve met online, talked to, and like - but not to be confused with friends sans quotations.

Here’s the deal, though: through blogging, I’ve met more people that I actually like than I generally do in the real world. It’s also much easier for me to get to know people online than off - you don’t have to worry with sometimes-inhibiting social factors like gender, status, and race.

But there’s also the weird feature with online “friends” that I know more about them and less about them at the same time. I can tell you how old their kids are, what their kids like, what their favorite type of music is, what they’re most scared of, and all sorts of very personal facts - yet I don’t know what they’re kids’ names are or whether the name they use is actually their real one.

It’s strange, really - we expose more of our inner selves through online relationships at the same time that we hide more of outer selves.

I find this interesting because it’s the exact opposite of what we do in offline relationships.

I was reading an offline friend’s Facebook page the other day and he mentioned some things that he liked and disliked. I’ve known this guy for thirteen years and I didn’t know some of the stuff - and it was pretty basic stuff that should’ve come up in the course of our friendship. That happens to me quite often, and I don’t spend much time crawling around on Facebook and Myspace.

Something else to consider for those with blogging “friends”: consider how much time per week we spend reading each other’s writing. Sure, a lot of the stuff can be very impersonal - my blog being no different - but in some ways those are conversations that we are a part of sometimes on a daily basis. I don’t talk to my offline friends on a daily, or sometimes weekly, basis - yet I leave comments and shoot emails to my online friends everyday.

I should note that one of the things that makes blogging “friends” so nice is that they are dealing with the same issues and you don’t have to introduce them to the blogosphere at the same time you’re talking about something you’re thinking about. They get it because they’re doing it - so you can get down to the meat of the conversation without trying to explain what RSS is so that they understand why RSS subscribers matter.

My point: many of us are spending more time and attention on our online “friends” than our offline friends. From one perspective, that would seem to make their friendship more important to us than offline friendships.

Yet, at the same time, most of us place more weight on the offline friendships, and they still remain friends sans quotations.

For many of us, this issue is not merely an academic point any more. The online world is a critical part of our reality - and part of that reality has a very social component. Our lives are enriched by people we have never, and likely will never, physically meet - yet they still get second-class status as far as the type of relationship we have with them goes.

Is it time to drop the quotations? Is it time to stop the favoring of physical friendships over the non-physical ones?

(The worry here, of course, is that the people reading this blog have a much higher likelihood of saying “Yes” because they are already on the blogosphere. But consider what the answer would be if you were answering someone who wasn’t already part of the choir.)

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Photo Credit: Rainfalls

Friends and flourishing are like cookies and milk: the addition of the one makes the other so much better. But friends and flourishing are unlike cookies and milk in that you can’t have one without the other.

“Friends,” Aristotle says, “are our second selves.” They help define who we are and improve our character. They are, he says, the highest external good.

All friendships are not created equal, though. We have this somewhat strange phrase that we apply to those friends of the highest caliber: best friends. I say it’s strange because it’s not uncommon for us to identify multiple friends as best friends.

But why it makes complete sense is because we aren’t really ranking friends like we do restaurants. What we are describing is the type of relationship we have with our best friends that’s different than the type of relationship we have with the other people we interact with.
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I’ll give you fair warning on this post: if you don’t like “the making of” pieces or introspection, you likely won’t get much out of this post.  I’m not sure how it’s all going to fit together or whether I’m going to be providing anything useful.

I’ll also admit that part of this post is to relay a more personal aspect to what’s going on with me.  The posts I enjoy most from other people are those in which they actually talk about what’s been going on with them, yet I don’t do it very much. It’s not as though I’m really scared of revealing what’s going on, but there’s always that lingering question for me: have I said or done anything that’s actually helped my readers?  I’ve already warned you that that answer is likely going to be negative for this.

I’ve been in a bit of an existential funk the last few days.  It hit me really hard Friday night and Saturday morning, but I’m doing better now.  I think the major issues are those of authenticity, sustainability, and friendship.  Not sleeping well last week probably weighs in on it, as well.
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credit: )3runo

This post is a continuation of the Practicing the Virtues Series. This week, we’ll talk about practicing friendliness.

I’ll give a brief recap of where we’re at.

• We become more virtuous through practice. For more information, see this post.
• The virtues are interconnected in a very important way. Improving one virtue tends to improve others, and you’ll see those others listed.

I’ll spend a little bit of time on the Doctrine of the Mean, as it applies to friendliness, since many people think you could never be too friendly. First, by friendliness, I do not mean being nice to people, although being nice to people is often times a good way to practice friendliness. What I mean by friendliness is the virtue of being able to connect with people in a mutually beneficial way. To be deficient in this virtue is to be quarrelsome, i.e. constantly picking fights with people or going out of your way not to connect with them, and to have the excess of this virtue is to be a flatterer, i.e. going out of your way to connect with people.

Why we shouldn’t be quarrelsome is fairly evident. This is not so with why we shouldn’t go to the other end. Simply put, if you have to many “friends,” you’re not able to connect with them in a mutually beneficial way while maintaining proper balance with the other aspects of your nature. The amount of time and energy that it takes to develop and maintain true friendships is far too great to have 452 friends. Your mileage may vary, but the main point is that trying to have too many friends is self-defeating.

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