Friendship Online

The online social revolution has seen the pursuit of friendship online become core business of the internet and part of the friendships and social lives of most of us. This chapter provides an overview of the burgeoning contemporary research concerning online friendship and of the main themes, since Aristotle, on the nature and value of friendship. It also aims to provide some substantial fresh research for future analyses. It argues that the pursuit of friendship relies heavily upon the rich, face-to-face dynamic of plural modes of self-expression and communication that we have engaged in for thousands of years. Our social media platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, flatline much of this territory, and as a result much of the moral universe that we have built upon it is lost or distorted online. The chapter concludes by suggesting that we need to better understand this social dependence of our values and valuing, both to improve the value-sensitive design of life online, and, where this social dependence cannot be well captured, to also improve our engagement in our traditional worlds and so help get us offline.