How Many Friends Do You Have?

One of the many confusions emanating from the contemporary digital culture is the increasing obfuscation of the difference between acquaintance and friendship, network and community. The social media is the culprit here, as it nurtures a culture that tends to lead people into mistaking their online acquaintances for friendship, and virtual networks for community.

Friendship entails more than just being familiar with a person, and community entails much more than connection. Sociologists have distinguished the kind of relationship existing among people who gather for a specific, interim purpose (such as passengers traveling on a bus) and the kind of intimate fraternalism that prevails among people who have become bonded as a community. The former may get familiar with each other and may be able to recognise each other’s faces thereafter, but then bonding as friends would usually require further interactions beyond the brief time spent together on the bus. And becoming a community would require the group remaining in contact, sharing a common objective and evolving common values.

Back to the digital culture and social media, you may have thousands of persons in your virtual networks but then you may just be lacking friends. The quickest way to verify the truth of this assertion is to ask yourself how many times you have needed help, say financial help, and you were able to rely on any of those persons your familiarity with is restricted to social media. How many of such will agree to lend you money considering that they’re more than likely to suspect your intentions given that your acquaintance with them is yet to be genuinely rooted in mutuality and trust.

Hence it’s clear that even when you use social media to ask for such help from people with whom you have genuinely bonded as friends, social media is merely a vehicle for reaching them. The friendship transcends social media. Facebook, WhatsApp etc., as tools of connection and communication, will not necessarily produce friendship even though they may facilitate and sustain it.

Proximity and connection do not necessarily translate to friendship. This is why your compound neighbours, classmates and workplace colleagues whom you stay close to everyday may not really be your friends, let alone a person you share mere social media connection with.

Significantly, social media can even undermine bonding and real friendship, that is, when it becomes an obstacle to the routine physical interaction among family and friends. This is a big problem of today where individuals can build their own world on social media and get enraptured by its excitement that it begins to disrupt their awareness of their immediate social environment. It was this danger that Pope Francis signposted in 2019 when, on the World’s Communication Day, he called for transition from “network community to human community.” He was very correct as NETWORK COMMUNITY cannot replace HUMAN COMMUNITY.

Let us build friendship and human community. Where necessary let’s use social media to facilitate this, and not try to use it to replace it. As you count the number of so-called friends you have on Facebook and Tick Tock – they may run into hundreds or thousands – also remember to ask yourself “how many friends do I really have?”

This is my meditation this midweek.

Henry Chigozie Duru, PhD, teaches journalism and mass communication at Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka, Nigeria.