Friendship in a digital age: Aristotelian and narrative perspectives

To the Ancients, Friendship seemed the happiest and most fully human of all loves; the crown of life and the school of virtue. The modern world, in comparison, ignores it. We admit of course that besides a wife and family a man needs a few 'friends'. But the very tone of the admission, and the sort of acquaintanceships which those who make it would describe as 'friendships', show clearly that what they are talking about has very little to do with that Philía which Aristotle classified among the virtues (1991: 57-58) This citation from C.S.Lewis’s ‘The Four Loves’, points at the degeneration of the classical ideal of friendship in modern times. Lewis was lamenting its passing in the mid-twentieth century context of high-rise city-living, technological and industrial progress, and frenetic, mechanised social behaviour patterns. How much weaker would the tradition appear to him now, in the digital age, when one’s ‘friendship’ can be sought or granted by an impersonal click, to sanction a relationship between two people who never met, and who may not like each other were a real meeting to take place? This study explores friendship in the digital age. It asks, firstly, whether traditional notions of friendship such as those of Aristotle have any relevance, or if they have indeed been supplanted by more modern concepts. To this end it explores online narratives of friendship in a variety of contexts; in sites dealing with problems of friendship (the Friendship Blog), in two sites run by professionals with an interest in friendship (the blogs of Mike Aruaz and Chris Pirillo), and in the religious domain, in which friendship is still upheld as an ideal (Triratna). The narratives of friendship occuring in these sites will be explored from a perspective informed by Labov (1972), and corpus study will be used to explore meanings of key terms. In diachronical terms, the relevant perspective on friendship is that of Aristotle, especially his descriptions in the Rhetoric and the Nichomachean Ethics.