scholarly journals Keeping company: Educating for online friendship

Author(s):  
Mary Healy
Keyword(s):  
Author(s):  
Tianxin Zhang ◽  
Christina M. Frederick

Beyond the use of social media, people now often connect with people around the globe through online gaming. There are more than one billion people worldwide who play online games, and almost one-half of the population in the U.S are video gamers (Liu, Li, & Santhanam. 2013). There are still common stereotypes that gamers lack “real” friends and hide away from social activities as social isolates because the online world is not conducive to healthy social connections (Nie, 2001, Shen & Williams, 2010; Williams, 2006). However, there are also studies showing that online connections between gamers are healthy. Research with MMORPG players found that game play helped created strong online friendships, and social motives drove player participation (Griffiths et al., 2011). A German study showed that there was no significant difference between gamers and non-gamers in terms of how to socialize with other people online (Domahidi, Festl & Quandt, 2014). To gain a better understanding of gamers’ social characteristics, the present study examined friendships in online and offline domains in a gamer group and a non-gamer group. Ninety-two gamers and fifty-nine non-gamers completed the McGill Friendship Questionnaire (Mendelson & Aboud, 2014). for their closest online and offline friend, and a general measure of personal happiness using the Oxford Happiness Questionnaire (Hills and Argyle, 2002). Within group comparison found that for gamers the online friendship was of significantly higher quality than the offline friendship. For non-gamers, the opposite results were found. Of particular importance and interest in this study was the finding that the closest online friendship for the gamer group was not significantly different on any friendship dimension than the closest offline friendship for the non-gamer group, and both groups also showed no difference in general life happiness. In essence, the closest face to face friendship non-gamers enjoy looks the same as the closest online friendship reported by gamers. The results support the conclusion that gamers do have close and important friendships with other people, and that these occur online rather than face to face. The explanation could be that for gamers, their comfort in the online environment allows them to meet and grow close to others within this milieu, even though they may never meet their closest friend face to face. For further study, it will be valuable to see how this finding varies by personal qualities, such as gender, age or loneliness level.


Author(s):  
Dean Cocking

The online social revolution has seen the pursuit of friendship online become core business of the internet and part of the friendships and social lives of most of us. This chapter provides an overview of the burgeoning contemporary research concerning online friendship and of the main themes, since Aristotle, on the nature and value of friendship. It also aims to provide some substantial fresh research for future analyses. It argues that the pursuit of friendship relies heavily upon the rich, face-to-face dynamic of plural modes of self-expression and communication that we have engaged in for thousands of years. Our social media platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, flatline much of this territory, and as a result much of the moral universe that we have built upon it is lost or distorted online. The chapter concludes by suggesting that we need to better understand this social dependence of our values and valuing, both to improve the value-sensitive design of life online, and, where this social dependence cannot be well captured, to also improve our engagement in our traditional worlds and so help get us offline.


2014 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 1-21 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cesare Amatulli ◽  
Gianluigi Guido ◽  
Claudia Melissa Barbarito

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Avin Fadilla Helmi

Online friendship is an inevitable phenomenon especially for young people for which Helmi et al. developed a concept and an online friendship scale with university students as their trial subject. From a  developmental perspective, university students are in the early adulthood stage. With the Internet’s asynchronous nature and the absence of non-verbal cues, the scale was applied to high school students in this present study. The purpose of this study was to test whether or not the online friendship scale has sound psychometric properties when applied to high school students. The subjects of this study were 214 high school students. The results of the structural equation model analysis met the goodness of fit criteria for construct validity, which include TL, GFT, and RMSEA indices. Its Cronbach's alpha reliability coefficient was also satisfying. A drive to create activities with friends on social media mitigates the lack of non-verbal signs resulting from online communication. This result supports the social enhancement hypothesis. Consequently, Online Friendship Scale can be implemented in adolescence and young adult.


2020 ◽  
Vol 30 (29) ◽  
pp. 25-47
Author(s):  
Justinus Sudarminta

This article is meant to be a philosophical reflection on the meaning of friendship. As evident from its sub-titles, the article is divided into four parts. First, it deals with the notion of friendship, in which the genuine friendship, or in Aristotle’s term called the perfect form of friendship, is distinguished from the egoistic or the imperfect forms. Referring to Aristotle’s account of friendship, the perfect form of friendship is a friendship in which each friend values the other for their own particular qualities, for their own sake, for their virtuous character and not for the pleasure or utilities they can provide. The imperfect forms of friendship usually do not last long, because the tie of friendship will get loose and finally dissolved when it does not bring either pleasure or utilities each friend wants. Second, following Aristotle, I try to explain why friendship is considered important for human happiness. Third, the element of right and duty that get involved in the personal relation of friendship is being addressed. Finally, due to the increasing importance of online communication nowadays, especially during this pandemic corona virus outbreak, I would like also to address the opportunities and challenges of online friendship or the relation of friendship mediated by social media. In this regard, the opportunity to foster online friendship is bigger under the model of moral friendship according to Kant and Kierkegaard in which universal love is emphasized, and Nietzsche’s model in which the agonistic nature of friendship is highly valued, than under the Aristotle’s model.


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