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1 More than just friends
This chapter engages with recent practices and understandings of friendship in social and digital media, with a particular focus on young people. Prior to considering digital media, it is useful to consider what we know, and how we know this, about friendship. The first part of this chapter, therefore, considers a history of how friendship has been understood and researched, recognising the ongoing difficulties in conceptualising this elusive relationship and practice. Much recent scholarly attention to friendship has arrived through feminist and queer theory approaches to socio-political and intimate lives. Within this, friendship has been considered as a site of solidarity, shared struggle, and kinship-like relations. This work informs recent sociological approaches to friendship that I also draw upon.
Friendship remains difficult to study and this relates to its ubiquity, its variety, and its lack of recognised social norms. This poses a challenge to empirical research on friendship. As Ray Pahl states, âit is hard to get coherent information from people about something which they are barely aware existsâ (2000, p. 9). However, empirical evidence presented throughout this book suggests that many young people are aware of, and fluent in discussing, friendship.
Since the 1970s, queer and feminist scholarship has examined the significance of friendship in everyday life. In their book on same-sex intimacies, Jeffrey Weeks et al. argue that âThe most commonly told relationship story among non-heterosexuals is one of friendshipâ (2001, p. 51). Studies of queer friendship, however, have typically centred on gay men. This is likely influenced by research attention to the HIV/AIDS epidemic â where friendship played a central role in caregiving in the absence of adequate public health care. A focus on gay men is also indicative of a lack of research engagement with other queer populations, including women, until recently. As Pat OâConnor demonstrates, friendships among women were âsystematically ignored, derogated and trivialized within a very wide variety of traditionsâ until the mid-1970s (1992, p. 9). Yet, friendships have been integral to feminist struggles and womenâs affective bonds for centuries (Faderman, 1981).
In early âWestern thoughtâ, both Plato and Aristotle studied the meaning and practice of friendship. Plato discussed friendship as one of many forms of love and considered the connection between philia (meaning friendship, or brotherly love) and eros (associated with romantic love). His writings on this led to the later concept of âplatonic friendshipâ. Aristotle built on this work of his teacher, focusing on ethical practices necessary for âthe good lifeâ (1906). He proposed three types of friendship1 â friendships of utility, friendships of pleasure, and âgood friendshipsâ.2 Friendships of utility, he argued, are instrumental friendships that only last as long as their offerings are useful, and he associated these with older men or businessmen. Friendships of pleasure were more fleeting and passionate, and he associated these with younger men whose passions were intense and easily aroused. Good friendships were considered both useful and pleasurable, but further to this, they were enduring friendships, built over time to become more nourishing and significant. This, he argued, was the rarest form of friendship and typically involved friends as equals who were heavily invested in each otherâs happiness (whereas friends of pleasure or utility were more self-focused). It is this friendship that contributes most to oneâs happiness, according to Aristotle (1906).
Relying on ancient theories of friendship (practised among some men), from a time that hardly resembles the present day, is questionable. Yet this understanding is still pervasive in recent sociological accounts of friendship. Aristotle associated friendship with intimacy, choice, equality, respect, and freedom â themes still used to understand friendship, including among sociologists (Adams & Allan, 1998; Blatterer, 2015). While this bookâs discussion of friendship does not rely on these foundations, they provide useful context to consider ongoing tensions in how we know and understand friendship, as well as what we expect from it.
The title of this chapter points to a common tendency to disavow the importance of friendship when accounting for our relationship practices. The concept of âjust friendsâ privileges sexual and romantic relationships, positioning these as more definitive of who we are and how we orient ourselves â eros ahead of philia, in Platonic terms.3 There are many reasons for this, but a significant reason is the social privilege assigned to âthe familyâ. Throughout Western history, the family has emerged as a model and metaphor for âthe nationâ, underpinning our conceptualisations of gender, labour, nationalism, and more (McClintock, 1993). These understandings of âthe familyâ also centre their role in disciplining subjects, who would become productive and useful for nation building and domestic economies (Donzelot, 1997). The Western family came to be understood as the centre of oneâs domestic life â as a site of nurture, care, sustenance, and personal responsibility. Love and marriage were instrumental to (and encouraged and supported for) âthe good of the nationâ. Socio-historical narratives of social life typically assign families to the private sphere. In doing so, care and support is cordoned to the private home â yet supported by hospitals, clinics, schools, and other disciplining institutions (Rose, 1990). Less has been documented about friendship when we account for these histories, although this relationship arguably cuts through both private and public realms. Seemingly not belonging to either realm, in how they have been imagined and discussed, friendships have evaded much socio-historic analysis.
In his late interviews, Michel Foucault described friendship as a creative practice that carries the potential to generate new forms of intimacy. He argued that friendships constitute non-institutionalised relationships â that is, they are not bound to strict codes and roles found in marriage and family relations (2000a). He argued that âWe live in a relational world that institutions have considerably impoverishedâ (2000a, p. 158), and where friendships have evaded much institutional regulation and surveillance. He saw friendship as âa way of lifeâ in which we might create new intimacies and realities, suggesting that âafter studying the history of sex, we should try to understand the history of friendship, or friendshipsâ (2000b, p. 171). Unfortunately, he never wrote that book, but these interviews have greatly influenced queer theory (Love, 2007), as per their accounts of friendshipâs creative and disruptive potential to heteronormative life. As Foucault proposes, friendshipâs creativity is supported by its lack of recognised form, with its terms remaining open (Roach, 2012). While his focus was mostly on gay men, the potential to invent new socio-sexual relations through friendship carries to broader populations and is relevant to young peopleâs creative engagements with digital media. This is not to suggest that traditional hetero-familial relations are no longer practised or valued by young people, but for many young people, friendships are their primary relationships, as is visible in social media publics.
Knowing friendship
Aristotle famously said: âA friend to all is a friend to noneâ â a statement that has resurfaced in contemporary discussions of digital practices like âFacebook friendingâ and common arguments that digital friendship practices are less real, enduring, or significant than traditional friendships (Bakardjieva, 2014). This criticism hinges on Aristotleâs argument that a good friend prioritises quality over quantity of friends, and that good friendships are rare and long-lasting. But are young people actually interested in âfriend collectingâ on social media (boyd, 2006), or are social media connections more complicated than the pleasure of accumulation? Much literature reminds us that young people are predominantly not using social media to find new friends, but to further engage with friends from their everyday lives (Baym, 2015; Ellison et al., 2007).
Beyond Plato and Aristotle (yet heavily leaning into their work), are the frequently cited friendship texts of Ralph Waldo Emerson (1987) and C.S. Lewis (1960). As per many works by esteemed White male thinkers of the 19th and 20th century, they assert confident claims, seemingly based on their own experiences, yet presenting these as universal. They focus on friendships between men of common interests, and of their own calibre. In the context of an enduring White male intellectualism, these texts held friendship away from âthe everyday personâ by their focus on how âgreat menâ nourish and further each otherâs intellectual greatness. Their suggested neutrality demands critique,4 yet along with the accounts of other esteemed male thinkers, these âtheoriesâ of friendship are still cited and pored over today. As with all scholarship that hinges on the viewpoint of past intellectuals, these understandings haunt how we continue to conceptualise and understand friendship. From this canon, we still focus on notions of ârealâ, âtrueâ, or âproperâ friendship â often associated with non-digital life (Cocking & Matthews, 2000; Kaliarnta, 2016).
Pat OâConnorâs (1992) work on womenâs friendship offers a useful place to challenge how friendship has either been imagined through straight menâs homosociality or disregarded entirely. She highlights an academic tendency to view friendship as âa rather trivial exercise ⌠[that] can be seen as reflecting a concern with the emotional, the tangentialâ (1992, p. 1). This is evidenced by a lack of consistent academic attention to friendship. Despite contemplations among philosophers, friendship has rarely been centred within social research. As OâConnor argues, it did not matter to scholars because it is ânot concerned with the realities of sex or moneyâ (1992, p. 1). Other sociologists similarly noted that friendship was overlooked because it was understood as having only personal, and not social, significance (Adams & Allan, 1998). Prior to recent sociological discussion, friendship was more commonly considered in psychology and the study of âinterpersonal relationshipsâ (Allan, 1998). These accounts tend to overlook the social, economic, and political dimensions of friendship, only focusing on how certain individuals experience dyadic friend relationships (Allan, 1998; Chasin & Radtke, 2013).
Decades ago, Paul Wright described friendship as âa relationship with extremely broad and ambiguous boundariesâ (1978, p. 199). Comparing friendship to other social and kinship relations, including couple-based unions, he states: âfriendship does not begin with a definite decision or statement of intention. Nor is an announcement or declaration necessary to bring a friendship to a closeâ (1978, p. 199). This matches Foucaultâs claims about the lack of institutional logic, concern, and regulation of friendship (2000c). Two decades later, Ray Pahl echoes that âthe precise definition of a friend â as opposed to other forms of social connectedness â remains elusiveâ (2000, p. 8). This elusiveness of friendship seems to be a recurring problem for friendship researchers (Chasin & Radtke, 2013; Nardi, 1999). Attending to this, Pahl and Spencer (2004) found increasing suffusion between friend and family-based relationships, which led to their concept of âpersonal communitiesâ that comprise friends and family.
In their attempts to position friendship and its social value, sociologists traditionally compare it to kinship (Allan, 1979; Pahl & Spencer, 2004; Willmott, 1987). For Graham Allan, the main difference is that friendships involve the ongoing evaluation of the relationship, whereas kinship is more fixed (1979, p. 30). This distinction reflects common understandings of friendship as voluntary, agentic, non-hierarchical, unregulated, and without expected roles. It is typical of sociological accounts to highlight the voluntary and reciprocal aspects of friendship, arguing that there is nothing beyond the relationship itself that makes it necessary (Allan, 1998). In other words, there is no need for friendship, but it is valuable nonetheless, as argued by C.S. Lewis (and echoed by many friendship scholars):
I have no duty to be anyoneâs Friend, and no man in the world has a duty to be mine. No claims, no shadow of necessity. Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art, like the universe itself... It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.
(1960, 103)
As noted, Pahl and Spencer argue that âpersonal communitiesâ â involving a mix of friends and family members â is a more useful concept for understanding contemporary relational intimacies (2004). They observe that relationships between family members are sometimes described as friend-like (e.g. if very close to a parent you might say you are âlike best friendsâ), just as friends are increasingly described as oneâs family (2004). This suggests an erosion of traditional distinctions, which can also be seen in how friendships are performed and practised through social and digital media, where friends and family members are more horizontally arranged. Wh...
