I’m now in an SXSW “salon”, their formal term for an informal, more interactive conversation about a topic. This one is titled “Friendship is Dead”, and here’s what’s so cool about SXSW: there are 200 people sitting in a circle discussing whether social networks and the internet have changed the way we define our friends and relationships.
The obvious answer is “of course”: people have hundreds of friends on Facebook, hundreds of followers on Twitter, and therefore share information with a much larger pool of people.
But it’s more complicated than that. We think about Facebook “friends” differently than, say, our “best friends”. Or do we?
A woman suggested that perhaps our goal is to consider whether intimacy is being redefined. Certainly we divulge more personal information to a greater number of people.
In response, a guy in a hoodie with a beard and an iPhone (which could be about 75 percent of the people here) said that meaningful friendships are defined through some form of real commitment, and then noted that many of us have different online social behaviour online than in the real world.
There probably won’t be a definitive conclusion at this session, I’m guessing.
Have social networks changed you?
Update: Minutes after I suggested there wouldn’t be a definitive conclusion, a woman said something to the effect of “We need to understand that relationships are complex and that the internet creates opportunities for an even richer, more complex set of relationships with people”. Which actually seems conclusive and definitive. I met the woman after — she’s Christina Wodtke, who wrote the information architecture book Blueprints for the Web and writes for Boxes and Arrows.
