The Chosen

December 7th, 2005

Our friendships have become a rare constant in a dislocated world says Stuart Jeffries

More and more is being asked of this voluntary, informal, personal relationship. It is commonplace for sociologists to note that institutions like marriage, kinship, class unions and corporations are losing their stickiness. As their power to hold society together moderates, so, they say, people are turning to friendship to support them and secure their sense of place in the world.

Is the point of view of Mark Vernon, the author of the new book The Philosophy of Friendship.

Stuart goes on in a thought provoking piece

The Los Angeles Times recently published a eulogy to the networking skills of young Californians who become friends on such internet sites as MySpace , Friendster and Facebook .
Part of the appeal is the low-risk way children meet and develop networking skills. “Kids may not be climbing career ladders, but they are already adept at making social contacts, sharing them, manipulating and using them,” wrote Carol Mithers, contending that children’s online networking skills “just appear one day, instinctively, and fully formed”, which comes as a shock to parents who aren’t computer-savvy. “There was a time,” Mithers added, “when advice on getting ahead introduced the novel notion of ‘networking’, pursuing success by building on and taking advantage of one’s personal connections. Today the thought that anyone might need such instruction seems so 20th-century.”

The piece is quite thought provoking. What I missed was the insight that we are a We Speices by Design and that our connections are driven to find those friends that resonate and mean the most to us. Technology reveals that we have a quest for connection, but it allows us to be shorn from geography, time and space.

And quite rightly the article esposes the theory that friendship is evolving.

This also appealed to me:

In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle divided friendship into three types. The first is based on brief pleasure, favoured by the young; the second on utility, typically involving commercial transaction and often temporary; the third and perfect friendship is based on goodness. It is rare and needs time and intimacy to flourish. Once it does, though, it is permanent. “It is those who desire the good of their friends for the friends’ sake that are most truly friends, because each loves the other for what he is and not for any incidental quality.”

I think the interesting thing is where does this take us as individuals, as society as businesses?

Yesterday I blogged about the Jeff Jarvis piece on the radically altering nature of the newspaper industry where there is inevitably going to be greater two way flows of information and co-creation of content between news(papers) and their audience/readership/stakeholders.

Trust is something that comes to mind that overlaps friendship and the greater epochal changes currently going on in our world.

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