What does friend mean now?

- The Boston Globe

6/12/11 11:02 PM

What does friend mean now?

By Joseph P. Kahn Globe Staff
/

May 5, 2011

Back in the mid-1990s, when online relationships were barely a blip on anyones computer screen, songwriter Randy Newman earned an Oscar nod for Youve Got a Friend in Me, a jaunty, sentimental hymn to childhood fellowship. On television, the NBC sitcom Friends hit the ratings jackpot with its cast of young urbanites bound together by proximity and camaraderie. These days? If not exactly a dime a dozen, friends are not what they used to be. What the term friend signifies seems harder to pin down, at any rate, having been Facebooked (ugh) into a transitive verb and overworked to the point where compliant preschoolers are encouraged to call everyone at school a friend (indeed) whether that label truly applies or not. To me, the term is constantly in flux, says Charlene DeLoach Oliver, a local blogger (CharleneChronicles.com) on health and fitness issues for young moms. A teen, for instance, will have a completely different perspective on whos a friend than my grandmother will. To her, a friend is someone she sees once a week, in person. Me? I have virtual friends Ive never even met. Her toddler-age son faces his own challenges in determining whos a friend and who isnt, according to Oliver. At his daycare center, theyll say things like, Johnny, we dont hit a friend, do we? she says. Some might say thats nice to do. But what are kids growing up to understand? It becomes a label without deeper meaning. What we mean when we talk about friends and friendships these days has many of us baffled, not just Oliver. Experts who track the changing meaning of language agree that our common reference points are becoming less fixed as the lines blur between the virtual and real, the face-to-face and Facebooked. Between what may feel good to hear or quantify, in the case of online connections and what squares with the reality of interpersonal relationships. The meanings of words derive from how we use them and clearly as the world changes, we apply words in different ways, says Lera Boroditsky, a Stanford University psychology professor and language expert. Before online interaction became a routine part of daily life, she adds, You saw friends in person or spoke to them on the phone. Today theres a real change in how we interact, and our language is struggling to keep up. MIT sociologist Sherry Turkle, who studies technology and its cultural impact, maintains that friend has become contested terrain linguistically as social media sites alter the terms very DNA. It calls into question how many friends we have and what they are, says Turkle, author of Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other. You can have 3,000 friends who look at your photos and what youve published, but only 100 who know about your heart. The challenge, she contends, is to avoid confusing virtual friendship with the real deal. Friendship is about letting something happen between two people thats surprising and new, says Turkle, whereas social networking gives the illusion of companionship without the demands of intimacy. Its friendship on demand, when I want it. Is there a limit to the number of real friends one can have? British evolutionary anthropologist Robin Dunbar suggests there is. Based on his research into primate behavior, Dunbar posits a limit to the number of stable relationships an individual is capable of maintaining, and fixes it at around 150, a quantity widely known as Dunbars Number. He further maintains that on average we each possess about 50 friends, 15 good friends, and a mere 5 that can be categorized as intimate.
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What does friend mean now? - The Boston Globe

6/12/11 11:02 PM

In a recent New York Times op-ed column, Dunbar addressed the Facebook-friending phenomenon and questioned how authentic many of these Web-based friendships really are. Put simply, he wrote, our minds are not designed to allow us to have more than a very limited number of people in our social world. The emotional and psychological investments that a close relationship requires are considerable, and the emotional capital we have available is limited. Dunbar elaborated on that theme in an e-mail from his University of Oxford office. I dont think the real nature of friendship has changed as such, he asserted. The key contrast is between friends (and relations) and acquaintances. Real friends require time and effort to get to know, he added, in contrast to less intimate relationships that by definition are less demanding to sustain and manage. Differentiating between true friendship and the more superficial kind is not merely the province of academics, to be sure. As the meaning of friend gets stretched and changed, many admit to making conscious decisions about who fits the definition and who does not, and why. To Boston-based public relations consultant Caron Le Brun, friendships get complicated by factors like age and professional contacts in real-world situations. Im of the (over-60) generation where family and friends are your most valued possessions, Le Brun says. In the business world, though, especially public relations, you end up being a friend to everyone but not really. Like Le Brun, Boston attorney Joseph Feaster formed his ideas of friendship long before Mark Zuckerberg came along. Feaster, 61, has found it useful to divide relationships into four categories: partners, meaning people he would give or do anything for; friends, or people for whom hed do just about anything (emphasis on almost); associates, meaning those hes merely acquainted with, perhaps through his office or gym; and people he knows, but thats about it. He does use social media sites like LinkedIn and Facebook, the latter a site on which he counts 200 friends. However, Feaster is selective about whom he elects to friend and doesnt look to social media sites to cultivate relationships hed put in the partner category. Its too impersonal for me, he says. I want to see, touch, feel you. Im of the generation that would rather pick up the phone than text. Boston University junior Sam Davidson has formulated categories of his own, divided between what he calls primary and secondary friends. The former, says Davidson, 22, are people Id hang out with outside class, whose phone numbers have. The latter? People I say hi to, or friend on Facebook, but thats about it. The reality is, in college if youre invited to a party, you cant bring all your friends along. So that narrows it to two or three. One expert who doesnt seem overly troubled by how friend keeps changing is linguist and language columnist Ben Zimmer Because words are endlessly flexible, Zimmer says, we shouldnt expect them to remain immutable but to be used in various ways for various purposes over time. People worry that this dilution is impacting (its meaning), says Zimmer. I see it as the inherent flexibility of language taking on new guises over time. Society often focuses on these semantic shifts, he adds, as a way to complain about larger social phenomena, such as being disconnected geographically and emotionally from ones family and childhood roots. Words become proxies for anxieties, he says, in this case anxiety about connections to people in the Facebook age. Joseph P. Kahn can be reached at jkahn@globe.com.
Copyright 2011 Globe Newspaper Company.

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