Here’s a conundrum: social media helps us get to know each other just well enough to dislike each other.
Many of the people we interact with on social media are more than just acquaintances. We interact with just deeply enough to be “friendish.” The fictional Emily Byrd Starr sums it up:
“Jen is a nice, sensible girl and she and I are friendish. That is a word of my own coining. Jen and I are more than mere acquaintances but not really friendly. We will always be friendish and never more than friendish. We don’t talk the same language.”
Emily Climbs by L.M. Montgomery
As Emily reminds us from the vantage point of the early twentieth century, friendish relationships are nothing new. In the quote above, Emily was speaking of her cousin. Extended family has long been a source of friendish relationships. Educational institutions, work, community organizations, and even small enough communities are others. In all of these, some number of people move beyond the level of acquaintance without making it to friendship. However, social media has increased the circle of those we are friendish with. Many people have hundred of social media relationships, a decent number of which are active enough to make it into the friendish space.
Social media has also changed the nature of those relationships. When people are bound by an organization or physical coexistence, their obligations to that context creates at least a small moderating influence. If you have to work with someone tomorrow, you will more often choose to just keep quiet when they frustrate you. Sometimes we have a moral obligation to speak up against those we disagree with. Most of the time though, speaking up against those we disagree with just entrenches their opinions.
“Friendish” doesn’t sound so bad, right? Sure, we may not be real friends with most of our social media connections (even if we once were), but our interactions with them are still mostly neutral to positive. But what happens when we have a negative interaction? When they share that one annoying (or worse) opinion? The problem with friendish is that it quickly diminishes to mere tolerance or outright dislike.
Having so many friendish relationships unmediated by consequential obligations is a dangerous place to be. During the Trump years, we saw just how little friendish relationships are worth as polarization drove us to hate and disconnect from people we once had a positive regard for. In some cases, these negative feelings spilled over into real life causing rifts in families. Contexts such as family can encourage people to become friendish, but once a relationship had been damaged, that context may not be enough to repair it.
How can we strengthen our relationships to be more resilient? We can’t all be real friends. Friendship is about more than shared context. It’s about, as Emily put it, speaking the same language. However, friendship is only one way we learn how to treat each other with dignity.
What is dignity? I’m working off of the definition in the work of Donna Hicks, in particular her work Leading with Dignity. Dignity is the inherent honor we owe to others because they exist as a feeling, conscious being. Hicks differentiates dignity from respect. Respect is earned. Dignity is inherent. Honoring dignity is a stronger call to action than respect or empathy. It doesn’t matter what someone does. It doesn’t matter how much you hate them (or their opinion). There is still some modicum of honor that they deserve.
According to Hicks, there are ten elements of dignity. Violating any of these is likely to reduce trust.
- Acceptance of identity
- Recognition
- Acknowledgment
- Inclusion
- Safety (physical and psychological)
- Fairness
- Independence
- Understanding
- Benefit of the doubt
- Accountability for your own actions when you do something that may violate the dignity of others
Nearly every relationship has the potential build a foundation of dignity. Given the right setting, most of us can learn to see each other as feeling, conscious beings and avoid the violations of dignity that easily turn friendish relationships acrimonious.
Here’s the problem: Social media, by default, does not lend itself to upholding dignity. At its rare best, social media can be a place of acceptance, recognition, acknowledgement, and inclusion. However, it can also be a place of disapproval, danger, herd following, and jumping to conclusions. For the most part, if you primarily interact with somebody through social media, your relationship will be stuck at friendish. We will know just enough about each other to be annoyed but not enough to feel empathetic.
We each handle this tension differently. Some people are intentional about building an online persona (or more than one). Others ,in what could be seen as a special case of a persona, dilute their presence to only what is uncontroversial. Rare and valuable are the individuals who can develop real friendship through the impersonal tools of social media.
However people deal with this as individuals, the broader problem is societal. We are existing at scale in what we might consider the uncanny valley of human relationships. We’re both closer to and further from others than humans have been for most of our history. Where there are analogous situations, such as the workplace or multi-year educational institutions, where we might have a lot of friendish relationships, those real life institutions are much better at helping us build a core of real friends. With social media, that core usually has to be built outside of the tool (or in its less visible side channels).
I don’t think we are going back. Broad scale social media is part of our landscape now. Individuals can choose to pull away from it. However, we have seen over recent years that the effects go beyond individuals. They are societal, and we can’t escape them. We have to go forward. I don’t know how to do that, but I suspect it will require us to learn to be both more and less in these spaces. We will need to find ways to bring more depth to our online relationships and we will need to better control our online presence.
However, we cannot do this alone. Some of the solution will be technical. Social media companies can do a better job of helping people show up as the self they want to be. The Eugene Wei article Status as a Service is a good exploration of how different ways of earning status on a social media platform shape the behavior of the individuals there. Most platforms today are optimized for volume of engagement rather than depth of engagement, and that shows.
A larger part of the solution will likely be around how our norms and values around using online spaces evolve. We can already see this in how folks who grew up with social media use it. The Status as a Service article goes into how on Instagram some people have many personas and cycle through them rapidly. They understand intuitively what I understand intellectually: That just is in real life, squishing everything into a single persona online makes you the least common denominator value of yourself rather than the most expansive union. Will the rest of us be able to learn that? Will learning how to be online together civilly require a generational turnover? And either way, can we learn how to coexist online before the real world consequences cause even more damage than they already have?