Good Fences Make Good Neighbors
Boundaries are the first necessary characteristic of democratic spaces. Boundaries facilitate the democratic affordance of recognition; they help communities to form. This chapter outlines the role of boundaries in constituting democratic communities by drawing on Aristotle’s concept of “political friendship.” In clearly bounded spaces, citizens are more likely to recognize their common interests and interlocutors—the things they share and the people they share them with. Boundaries thus help generate ties of political friendship. With this function of boundaries in mind, the chapter turns to the example of Facebook to explain how boundaries can operate in digital environments. It shows how design choices made by Facebook—notably, the dissolution of the boundaries imposed by the early .edu requirement and the more recent turn to reimpose boundaries with Facebook Groups—have clear consequences for the likelihood that Facebook users can develop political friendships with one another, thereby forming communities on the platform.