DESCRIPCIÓN DEL PROBLEMA

The claim that friendships are a vital component of well-being has a long history taking us at least back to Aristotle, who calls friendship the “greatest of external goods . . . without whom no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods” (Aristotle, 2009, pp. 114, 92). Friendship, according to Aristotle, “creates a context or arena for the expression of virtue, and ultimately for happiness” (Sherman, 1989, pp. 127–128). Kaliarnta (2016, pp. 2-3) summarizes Aristotle’s account of friendship by describing the three forms Aristotle distinguished:

1. friendships of utility, based on certain advantages that one can attain from one’s friend

2. friendships of pleasure where the main motivation for continuing the friendship is the pleasure we get from our friend’s company, and finally

3. virtue friendship, which is based on mutual admiration of your friend’s character and the sharing of values

with virtue friendship being the highest form that can be reached, where critics such as Cocking and Matthews claim that this latter form is unattain- able in CM friendships (Kaliarnta, 2016, p. 2).

There is ample research showing different aspects of being social, having friends, or belonging to community and its positive effect on subjective well-being. Diener and Seligman (2002, p. 81) for example call friendships a near-necessary component of well-being. Demır and Weitekamp (2006) show a strong correlation between best-friendship quality and happiness. Fowler and Christakis (2008) shows a dependency relationship between your happiness and the happiness of others with whom you are connected. Adams, Santo, and Bukowski (2011) talks about a reversed, but equally important phenomenon, that having a best friend could negate the effects of negative life experiences, or even of protecting against physical decline at older age (Avlund, Lund, Holstein, & Due, 2004); Helliwell and Putnam claim a “robust relationship between ties to friends and happiness/life satisfaction” (Helliwell & Putnam, 2004, p. 1435). This robustness does not translate into universality of course; Li and Kanazawa for example finds a negative correlation for high-IQ persons between frequency of contact with friends and life satisfaction (Li & Kanazawa, 2016, pp. 13-14). But most of the population seems to benefit from contact with friends.

Given that friendship is so vital to well-being, it is not surprising that objections such as those of Cocking and Matthews (2000) are raised when it appears that the concept could be harmed by something like technological mediation. This section will outline some of the research on the importance of friendship for well-being, and canvas the common criticisms on the harmful effects of mediated relationships.

The claim underlying many of these objections is that the Aristotelian ideal of friendship is claimed to be incompatible with technological me- diation of online friendships, usually related to the worry about cues filtered out (CFO) discussed in section 1.2.1. If Kagan and Nozick are correct, it would not matter whether such friendships could offer the same phenomenological “feel” on the relevant aspects of friendships. The computer-mediation would filter out so many cues, that it would always be a meagre simile of having friendships. This is what Cocking and Matthews (2000) argue. On-line friendships are said to be “likely more limited than friendships supported by physical proximity . . . Because on-line friends are not embedded in the same day-to-day environment, they will be less likely to understand the context . . . rendering support less applicable. . . . The interpersonal communication applications currently prevalent on the Internet are either neutral toward strong ties or tend to undercut rather than promote them” (R. Kraut et al., 1998, p. 1030). Rheingold speaks of the “ontological untrustworthiness of cyberspace . . . the lack of body language and facial expression” (Rheingold, 2000, p. 177) where the enrichment of communication through “a raised eyebrow or a playful tone of voice” (Rheingold, 2000, p. 177) is simply missing from the on- line vocabulary. Dreyfus (2009, p. 69) argues we can only trust what we can experience fully, and that mediated experience should perhaps not be trusted, as the mediation makes it too easy to keep commitments fleeting as there is little risk of confrontation when one of the “friends” chooses to withdraw (temporarily or permanently) into anonymity when interest wanes or conflict potentially arises (Dreyfus, 2009, p. 87). McFall (2012, p. 224) argues that mediated experience is structurally meager even when both friends try, as a mediated conversation is more like a description of events than a picture of events, and too much interpretation goes into the description to ever offer a true picture of the other; this extra layer of interpretation-filtering means your friend never experiences you fully, only your description of yourself. And Mesch and Talmud find that “friendships originated in the Internet are perceived as less close and supportive because . . . online friends are involved in less joint activities and less topics of discussion” (Mesch & Talmud, 2006, p. 147).

More needs to be said on the positive possibilities of CM interaction, to which I will return in chapter 4. In the interim, the above concerns do indicate CM friendship warrants scrutiny. To give this scrutiny the conceptual backing it needs, the next chapter will dig deeper into the theory of well-being that was the subject of the critiques from section 1.1: hedonism.

3

(Confidence Adjusted)

Intrinsic Attitudinal

Hedonism And The Viability

Of Hedonism

Contents