Friendship Online

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.

Online Social Integration and Depressive Symptoms in Adolescents

Social integration is known to be beneficial for mental health. However, it is not clear whether this applies to online as well as offline relationships. In this paper, we explore the association between online friendship and symptoms of depression among adolescents. We combine data from the popular social networking site with survey data on high school students (N = 144) and find that integration into the online network is a protective factor against depression. We also find that not all online connections are equally important: friendship ties with students from the same schools are stronger associated with depression than outside ties. In addition to friendship ties, we explore the effect of online interaction (“likes”). Overall, our results suggest that online relationships are associated with depression as well as offline friendship. However, the effect of more distant online connections is limited, while immediate social environment and peer relationships at school are more important.

“Someone wants to connect with you”: Predicting Uruguayan kids’ replies to online friendship requests

Childhood and adolescence are critical periods for human development, involving an inherent tension between children’s development and autonomy and their safety and well-being. The digital mediation of children’s increasingly autonomous participation in the social world has been one of the most heated issues for parents and policy maker, generally guided more by intuitions and moral panics than actual evidence on children’s online behavior. Based on a representative sample of all Uruguayan kids between 9 and 17 years old (Kids Online Uruguay, N = 948), this article contributes to the understanding of contact-related online behavior by studying how children react to online friendship requests. Ordinal logistic models were fitted to study the factors predicting different responses to friendship requests based on the strength of the ties between the child and the friendship requester. Our model integrates predictors deriving from three sets of literatures. We found that differences in responses to friendship requests are significantly impacted by predictors deriving from computer mediated communications, self-efficacy and digital inequalities studies. Contrary to popular beliefs, most Uruguayan children report only accepting requests if they previously know the requester. Nonetheless, older and more digitally skilled children have particularly higher chances to accept requests from individuals with weaker or non-preexistent ties; but also, boys, children having preexistent episodes of offline risky behaviors and problems related to an excessive use of the Internet. Policy implications are discussed based on simulations of the chances of different types of responses, focusing on the need to contemplate both the risk and benefits involved in different types of digital social interactions according to children’s diverse developmental stages.

Makna Persahabatan Sebuah Tinjauan Dari Perspektif Filsafat

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.

Is the Online Friendship Scale Fit for High School Students?

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.

University students' preference regarding social media content, internet usage and online friendship patterns

PurposeThis study aimed to find out the web content accessed by university students and to compare the level of interaction with real-life friends and online friends.Design/methodology/approachIn this study, the quantitative research design used, and the researcher collected data through the survey method. The population comprises all undergraduate students at the University of the Punjab, Lahore. The sample of 320 students, age ranges from 18 to 22 years from eight selected departments, collected through a simple random sampling technique and after extraction 284 questionnaires evaluated by using Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS).FindingsThe findings of the study showed that students preferred activities on the Internet is to access social networking sites. Additionally, the mobile phone is the most commonly used device among university students to access the Internet. Furthermore, students mostly used Facebook to keep in touch with their old friends and talk on different topics more easily with their online friends as compared to real-life friends. The study also shows that the results of both the hypothesis are significant; therefore, no difference exists regarding time spent on the Internet in real-life friendship patterns and online friendship patterns.Originality/valueThe research was used to find out the difference between the online friendship and real-life friendship patterns of the two groups who use the Internet for less time and who spend more time on the Internet among the university students.

Busting the Myth of the Non-Social Gamer: Comparing Friendship Quality Between Gamers and Non-Gamers

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.