What is the first thing you do when you go online? Check your email, take a peek at Twitter, check your contacts updates on Instagram or Facebook? There are several studies proving that interacting with other people, especially with friends, is what we do most on the internet. Only Facebook already has more than 2.3 billion users, who together spend 3 trillion minutes per month connected to the site – which even surpassed Google in number of daily accesses.
The internet is the most powerful tool ever invented when it comes to friendship. And it is transforming our relationships: it has made it much easier to keep in touch with friends and meet new people. But do not online friendships make people end up isolating themselves and have fewer, ‘real’ offline friends? This thesis, generally cited in the debates on the subject, was created in 1995 by the American sociologist Robert Putnam.
And you’re probably wrong. A survey by the University of Toronto found that the internet makes you have more friends – off the network. Over the past decade, the period of rise and rise of social networking sites, the average number of people’s friendships has grown. And the so-called heavy users, who spend more time on the internet, were the ones who won more friends in the real world – 38% more. Those who did not use the internet increased their friendships by only 4.6%.
So people start to add on Facebook and in the end everyone becomes friend? Not really. The internet rarely creates friendships from nothing – in most cases, it works as a potentiator of relationships that have already suggest at in real life. A study by the University of Michigan found that the 20 largest use of Facebook, after interacting with friends, is to look at the profiles of people of people we have just met. If you like the profile, add that person, and a link is formed.
Social networks have the power to transform latent links (people who are in the same social environment as you, but not your friends) into weak links – a superficial form of friendship. As much as there are exceptions to any rule, all studies point out that friendships generated with the help of the internet are weaker, rather than those that are born and grow outside of it.
This is not entirely bad. Your best friends are usually similar to you: they belong to the same world and like the same things. The internet rarely create relationships start from zero. They travel through different groups of yours, so they can introduce you to new things and people and broaden your horizons – generating a renewal of ideas that works well for all relationships, including old friendships.
Social sites like Facebook make it easy to make, maintain, and manage friends. But they also influence the development of relationships – because the possibilities of interacting with others are limited by the tools that the sites offer. ‘You go into social networks and do what they want you to do: write a message, send a link, poke,says network physicist and expert Augusto de Franco, who has written more than 20 books on the subject. The problem, so to speak, is that most networks on the
internet are symmetrical: if you want to have access to a person’s information or even talk privately with them, you have to ask for their friendship, which you have to accept. How kind of rude to say ‘no’ to someone you know, even if just by sight, everyone would end up adding everyone. And this leads to the banalization of the concept of friendship. ‘The people you’re connected to are not necessarily your real friends,’ says Harvard University sociologist Nicholas Christakis. It is true. But with the arrival of sites such as Twitter, things got different.
On Twitter, I can follow you without you having to authorize this, or follow me back. It is a completely asymmetric social network. And that makes the networks of ‘following’ and ‘followers’ of someone can communicate in a much more quickly way. By studying, with a team of researchers, his own Twitter network, Christakis realized that his group of friends had begun to communicate with each other regardless of his mediation. People whose only common point was Christakis himself became friends with each other. ‘Social networks are getting bigger and more diverse,’ says sociologist and networking researcher Barry Wellman of the University of Toronto.
The following is. I can be interested in what you have to say and start following you. We do not know each other. But you will know when I reattribute it or mention your name on the site, and you can talk to me. My followers can also get interested in your tweets and start following you. Your followers may be curious about me and get into the conversation we are having. In short: we will continue to not get to know each other, but the people around us establish various levels of interaction – and may even become friends with each other.
But most scientists still think that even if they are in contact with anyone more easily and at all times, the distance will continue to hamper their friendships. ‘The internet makes you slow down the process, but it does not save relationships,’ says anthropologist Robin Dunbar. ‘At the end of the day, we still need to be close to people once in a while.’ That’s true. Most human relationship experts believe that physical closeness is essential to feel the beneficial effects of deep friendships. Only the brain may be starting to change its mind.
That means the brain may have developed a new way of interpreting conversations on Twitter. ‘The brain understands the electronic connection as if it were a face-to-face contact,’ says Paul Zak. This would be an evolutionary adaptation to the use of the internet. ‘The oxytocin system is always adjusting to the environment in which you are,’ he says.
‘It may be that from so much interacting on social networks, people are becoming more attuned to friendship. And then they end up making more friends, even in person. ‘That is: in addition to changing the friendships, the internet can also end up modifying the human brain itself. But it is too early to say whether we will end up becoming hyper-social beings with brains capable of accommodating more friends.
It is believed that it is not possible to disregard the importance of physical contact – one of the most important stimulants of oxytocin release in the body. At best, we will have more chances of maintaining intimate relationships at a distance longer. Others, such as Robin Dunbar, think technology may still surprise us, and break the last barrier of online friendship: Skype and other services of the type are not good enough because they do not allow us to touch each other in virtual reality. Yet!
